Tom

On behalf of the Admin team, Season’s Greetings to you fellow scribes and students of items literary. If the online calculators at Facebook are to be believed we now have 338 members, which is heart-warming.

As another year reaches its end, while mere mortals are wrapping gifts, we of the written word will be wrapping up projects or setting out our stalls for next year. With these things in mind it seemed appropriate to bring up a couple of important topics.

Welcome to all who have joined us since the last update in September. If you are among those authors you will have arrived at a point when certain projects were being put on hold, and a few of our members were dealing with issues thrown at them by life. In order to hit the ground running in 2017 it would be best for our membership to be reminded of our ongoing projects.

IASD Anthologies

The group has produced two anthologies: ‘Holes: An Indie Author Anthology’ which was masterminded by Eric Lahti, and contains stories by fourteen of our members.

‘You’re Not Alone’ by Ian D Moore and friends’ was our first charity anthology. The book was the brainchild and labour of love of Ian D Moore. All authors involved were delighted to produce a book which would create ongoing funds for Macmillan Cancer Support.

1.  Following the success of ‘You’re Not Alone’, our man Ian will be taking the helm to assemble short stories for more of the same. In consideration of our numbers we may well have sufficient material for two more volumes.

The theme for the next charity collection is ‘Freedom’. Ian will bring us up to speed in the early part of next year with regard to whether it will be one or two books. We have a number of stories already submitted to the appropriate Dropbox.

2.  It was proposed in 2016 to produce a Horror Anthology of short stories, but due to a variety of reasons the project was postponed. Our liaison is RL Andrew (Robyn), and if she is content to go ahead next year she will give us a heads-up. I’m sure any back-up would be appreciated, so if you’d like to give Robyn a hand – let her know.

3.  Another ongoing anthology is the Children’s Anthology being organised by Sylva Fae. In this case we are including artwork as well as text – keeping in mind how much children enjoy illustration with a story.

For anthologies to prove successful, please bear in mind:

   a) Criteria will be reiterated to give members an idea of requirements.

   b) Any assistance with beta reading / editing is appreciated.

   c) We don’t rush these things, but this mention will prompt members to consider a short story on the aforementioned themes. It will also hopefully encourage a couple of folk to lend their services to making our future anthologies successful.

It would be a wonderful accomplishment to see all of our ongoing anthologies produced in 2017. For those who’ve never considered being a part of a multi-author collection – an anthology is a good platform for any author.

We have close to 2,900 followers of our IASD blog/website which is a positive reflection on our members and our work. Whether you are a relatively new member or a long-standing member it matters not – please take a look around our site.

Featured Author

During 2016 we featured individual authors each month. The authors were chosen at random and the exercise highlighted their efforts on our Facebook page. We will continue with a similar idea in the coming year. For January 2017, I will be producing something different to get us underway.

As always, I thank you for being a member of our wonderful group of authors, and on behalf of our Admin team – may you and yours have a peaceful, happy end to this year, and may you have a successful year ahead in 2017.

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