Joffe Books is an independent publisher based out of London. They were founded in 2013. The originally focused on publishing new e-books and making classic books and short stories available electronically.

They started out publishing almost any genre, although over the last year they really focused in on crime and mystery fiction. In fact they bill themselves as “one of the UK’s leading independent publishers of best-selling crime and mystery fiction.”

They prefer manuscript submissions in the following genres: Mysteries, Crime Fiction, Psychological Thrillers, Detective, Thrillers, and Suspense. They do imply that they are open to some fiction outside of that focused area.

This is actually a good sign. Usually when a press goes from publishing a broad range of work to something more focused and specific it is because they figured that genre out and are better at selling that genre of book than others.

Another good sign is that many of their books now have print versions available as well. The publisher seems to be doing well.

Originally they were run entirely by the founder, Jasper Joffe, but in the last year or two they seem to have expanded significantly to include other editors.

It is also good that in their submission sections they talk explicitly about promotion, royalties (although they don’t say exactly what the rate is), and other information that is relevant to a potential author. Also, the website seems to be focused on selling books and not just recruiting authors.

The only issue is that Jasper Joffe also ran another company called Not so Noble Books, which no longer exists, but near the end of their existence had issues with author non-payment. According to Joffe he was not involved at that time.

It is very easy to submit to Joffe Books. All you have to do is submit your full-length book as a PDF or a Word document, a synopsis that is no more than three paragraphs long, and 100 words about yourself. You submit all of these things via email.

To learn more, visit their website.

For this writing prompt I want you to take a dream you have had, and turn it into a story. A real story with real characters. No one wakes up. If there are surreal aspects of the dream, then there can be surreal aspects of the story. You don’t have to explain them away, they can just be there.

If you don’t remember your dreams, take a common trope that exists in dreams like being dead or showing up to school in your underwear, and turn that into a short story.

Just remember that you are taking a dream and turning it into a story, and in that story it is reality, there is no “reveal” at the end.

Happy Writing!

Because Edge is published by Tahoe Writers Works and is not an academic publication, its work is more eclectic, and the range reflected in each journal is very interesting. Edge has been around for nine years now, and takes its name from the following Hunter S. Thompson quote “The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

Edge publishes short stories, essays, and poems. Submit up to 6 poems at a time or 6,000 words worth of prose. They are open to novel excerpts as long as they are self contained.

If your work is accepted by them they cannot offer payment but they can offer you a contributor copy. They accept only a small percentage of the work submitted to them every year. Less than 5%. It takes them up to four months to respond to submissions.

It is easy to submit to them. You just use the submission manager Submittable.

To learn more about Edge visit their website here: http://tahoewritersworks.com/index.html .

But first, a bit about our contest series. Every week we are going to have a contest on our Facebook Page. The contests will change from week to week, but the winners will always be published in the magazine. The contest winner and the runner up are chosen by a voting system, and then the editors of Authors Publish will select several additional entries from the rest to be the Editor’s Choice winners.

Below are all the winners of this week’s contest. This week the challenge was to write a short story using only six words. There was a tie this week. Both winners received 68 likes.

The next contest starts at 9 am PST on Saturday. After next week there will be no contests for three weeks. So keep that in mind when entering next week’s contest.

Winners:

Runner Up:

Editor’s Choice:

Now, many years and at least a thousand submissions later, I have learned so much, and have become an efficient submitter of my work. More of my work is published each year. The first year I submitted I had three publications, this year I have had well over 20 publications.

1. What a journal says they are looking for and what they are actually looking for, are not the same thing.

Most journals have a statement on their submission page about what they are looking for and what you should submit to the journal. Some of these things are clear and true. If they say they are looking for poetry and flash fiction under 1,000 words in length, they most certainly mean it. Do not submit a 2,000 word story. Also if they say they are looking only for works of science fiction or some other genre, only submit works from that genre to them.

However many journals say things that are not actually helpful and can be misleading and waste your time if you focus on them too much. For example, a lot of journals say they are looking for experimental work. However few define what they mean by that. By reading these same journals I have concluded that experimental work appears to cover everything from a traditional haiku to a list of unrelated words. I spent a lot of time when I first submitting trying to match a journals style with my submission.

I know now that this was a waste of time, as what they said they wanted and what they actually wanted were two different things.

Another example is that most journals ask for you to only submit your best work. I have no clue what they mean by that. As far as I can tell, it usually means the journal is new and unestablished or the editors have not yet figured out what they are looking for at all. I as a general rule do not submit my ‘best work’ to these journals.

Focus on what the journal is looking for in terms of concrete statements about length and genre, ignore the other information for the most part.

2. Every Journal Wants You To Buy a Copy Before Submitting

Many literary journals need to sell copies to survive. Almost every single print journal I know and a lot of electronic journals try to encourage submitters to buy a copy of their journal before submitting. This is time consuming and expensive. It is not feasible and it is not advisable.

If you really like the look of a journal and it is really up your alley, you should subscribe because you want to. Not just to get a good feeling for the journal, but because you are interested in the work they are publishing and you want to support them.

If you want to get a feeling for the work they have published, many do have a few poems and short stories published online and it is worth spending a couple minutes to read one or two of these.

3. Don’t Take Rejection Seriously

This is the biggest lesson everyone should take away from this article, do not take rejection seriously. Your work can be rejected for any number of arbitrary or legitimate reasons. If you take each rejection seriously, that will take a lot of mental energy.

Instead, focus on submitting a lot. There are so many good journals out there. Take the opportunity of the numbers. Also, it is good to keep in mind that just because a journal rejects a piece of yours once, that does not mean they are not open to later submissions. Often pieces of mine have been accepted by a journal that previously rejected an earlier piece.