Reading Community

Colin Theakston replied in Getting an Agent/Publisher

Hi Bryony You are probably quite right about the ‘clan’ culture’ on the site. You can get some idiotic reviews and some reviewers tend to mark you down to maintain their own position on the Top Ten chart. I have discussed this and various other points with the site manager. Recently a new system of discarding a review every five reviews (instead of the previous figure of eight)has been instituted. The Arts council occassionally put a little money in. I understand that they have donated some recently and as a result the publishing fee has been reduced for the new set of publishing offers , soon to start. I found the reviews helpful because they gave me a great deal of help with the presentation etc. I recently removed my novel from the Top Ten. rewrote a small section and I have now placed it back for review. The ratings (so far) give me a higher average than my previous batch. Maybe thats the way to do it. I think the site does not suit all people, but I have personally got a lot out of it. I will certainly publish through it when the offers shortly become available. Nice to hear from you. My novel (sample)’ A Time for Living’, should be on site 1st March, drop in and have a read. Nice to hear from you and the best of luck with your writing. Remember it’s never too late to be what you might have been.

Mark Kilner replied in Publishing Credits

Could someone explain how the CN credit system works, in particular the following questions:

If I use up all my credits, does that mean I can’t upload any more work?
If I remove a story, do I get a credit back?
How much does each credit cost?
Is the length of the work taken into consideration? (If not, it seems a bit unfair on writers of short stories and “serialised” novels.)

I can appreciate why you’d want to implement such a system (to generate some income and stop the site from getting flooded with, for want of a better word, rubbish), but I can also see it pushing people away from CN and onto other sites which don’t charge for uploading.