Editor Interview: Bridge House Annual Anthology

Thoughtfully themed work

We love publications where worlds have been very carefully built.

Joann Harris, Maeve Binchy, Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Monika Feth, Zola,

We go for stories with a strong voice and a solid story. We quite like open endings.

Read some of our books to get an idea of what we publish. Don't be disheartened if we 'decline; - more often that not this is just because we only have so much time and space. Try, try and try again.

The ideal submission has a strong voice and a balanced story. It may be a little open-ended. It will be between 1,000 and 5,000 words. The text will be double-spaced, paragraphs will be indented using a proper formatting tool. Pages will be numbered. There will be very few, if any, typos.

On this call the main problem is not meeting the theme or interpreting it in an obvious way.

We ask for a short bio. This should include other publications, a little bit of personal information and if they wish up to three links. One quirky fact is always welcome.

On this call we tend to read the whole script. We're looking for the best twenty-four scripts submitted.

Two judges score each script out of ten for appropriateness to the theme, story structure and for quality of the writing, A further five points is given for professionalism: formatting, lack of typos, punctuation, grammar and spelling errors. We accept then all of the scripts where the two judges have both put them in the top twenty-four and thereafter the next best ranks from each judge until we have twenty-four. For example last year we agreed on eighteen so then took the next best three from each judge.

Reading submissions is only a small part of what we do. I spend about an hour a day on this. As do our other editors.

All pieces go through a thorough copy-edit and proof read, followed by an author proof-read of the camera-ready text and a further in-house proof-read. For this call we do not do a structural edit. We have already accepted the story as is and only accepted it because the structure is fine.

We constantly look out for awards both national and international, where we can submit our books for awards. We also welcome suggestions by our authors. Favourites are: Rubery Awards, Gothem, Kindle Storyteller.