Thursday, July 21, 2011

Monthly mini eBooks – Call for Submissions

I received the following note on a writting list I belong to. It's from an editor in the U.K., and I thought people could use this if you're looking to publish short stories.

Monthly mini eBooks – Call for Submissions
Editor: Barbara Cardy
barbara.cardy@yahoo.co.uk

I am putting together 3 mini eBooks every month for publisher Constable & Robinson. Each mini eBook will comprise four short erotic stories of around 2,500 words or one longer story of 5,000 words and two shorter ones of 2,500.

The three categories are:

Gay
Lesbian
Straight


The story should preferably be written in the 3rd person and should grab the reader's attention in the first few sentences and hit the ground running with a jolly good plot! I would prefer unpublished stories for the time being. Twosomes, threesomes, groups, spanking, BDSM etc are all welcome subjects.

I know what follows sounds a bit pernickety, but it really does help my time management if you could stick to it as closely as possible:

Please send me a maximum of two stories per genre – i.e. 2 Heterosexual, 2 Lesbian and 2 Gay would be fine, and each story must be in a separate email so I can divide them between email folders. In the email subject box please put either Hetero, Lesbian or Gay and attach your story as a Word document in an email. The title of the word document should be the title of your story.

Use a plain text such as Arial, Calibri or Times and no text boxes or special formatting etc. as it's a bugger to get rid of! Please start at the top of the page – no need to start half way down. Put your name, address and email address, plus word count. The title of your story should appear next along with your pseudonym (if you use one) underneath that, then start the story on this first page. I will put © 2011 against the story unless you specify otherwise. You don't need to worry about double-spacing between lines as I will only have to put it back into single spacing before I print it out. All speech needs to be in double quotation marks. I don't need your bio for these eBooks.

There are no deadlines as it is an on-going project, so submit stories when you are ready.

It would be really helpful as well if you could give me a two or three sentence teaser of what the story is about. This will be used to encourage a reader to download an eBook. If you could put this just under your pseudonym that would be a good place. Put a bit of humour in it. I have pasted here a couple that I wrote to give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm after, but I'm sure you could do much better!

THE MORNING AFTER by Jude Mason
Silly Nathan Steele thought it would be a good idea to masturbate over Ms Harden's desk. Not only that, he had the audacity to employ the use of her vibrator. Oblivious to the CCTV camera recording his every perverted desire, he is called to her office. Confronted with the evidence he is presented with two options: the police or being on the receiving end of a good whipping...

PARTY FAVOURS by Lynn Lake
Flower child, Saffron Miller, decides to organise a surprise party to celebrate her parents' 30th wedding anniversary. Calling in on her parent's various hippy friends, she finds them a very friendly bunch indeed! Seduced firstly by a husband and wife team, then by a two of her father's old football mates, will there will be red faces at the party...?


The fee is £25 for each 2,500 word story and £50 for a 5,000 word story. We are asking for non-exclusive world all-language rights so contributors are free to place their stories elsewhere. All successful contributors will be paid by either cheque or PayPal if in the UK or Paypal only for overseas writers. The Publisher will also need to have the option of releasing each story as an individual eBook, making each story available in audio form, both individually and as part of an anthology, and finally to include the story in a larger print anthology. It is not certain at this stage that any of these options will be taken, but by emailing a story to me you are consenting to any or all of these possibilities. It is far from clear at this stage if it will be possible to make much if any money from any of the options outlined above, but should we succeed, it ought to be possible to increase the fee for future stories.

I very much look forward to receiving your stories. Please email them to me at barbara.cardy @ yahoo.co.uk (remove spaces either side of the `@')

Many thanks again,

Barbara

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