Collyer's creative writing pulls in authors for event

Many of the adult education creative writing students have been on the course for the entire academic year and had asked if a publisher might come in and speak to them about the process.

After a lot of investigation, I managed to book three different published authors, of different genres, and local hybrid publisher RedDoor.

The authors were generous with their time and happy to speak about any aspect of publishing enabled us to build an evening around their different areas of expertise – with no overlaps!

The evening began with a presentation from Anna Burtt (reddoorpublishing.com/), from RedDoor Publishing about the different routes into publishing and how to pitch your story.

Local writer Mathew Bridle (www.theonesaga.co.uk) enlightened us on the different methods of self-publishing.

He spoke authoritatively about writing software, using knowledge from his thirty years of self-publishing for his own benefit, in addition to guiding other’s careers.

Sam Leeves, (samleevesauthor.wordpress.com/) who is an ex-student of Collyer’s, was able to offer advice about how to complete a story and the seemingly impossible hurdle of knowing when you have reached the point of a final edit.

Our final speaker was Andrew Crofts, (andrewcrofts.com/), a published author of non-fiction; ghost writer and more recently fiction whose 80 plus books have been published by the ‘big five’, garnering him more than a dozen places for the Times number one best seller lists.

More recently, Andrew has chosen to publish through RedDoor and the beautiful cover work on his books is testament to their investment in their authors.

Andrew regaled us with hilarious tales of agent auctions and the importance of self-promotion for any author.

The evening was lively and engaging and our question and answer panel over-ran, as everyone was so keen to learn more about their individual field of writing!

There has been a huge learning curve in planning this first event, but its enormous success has meant that it will definitely be something we will be considering as an annual event.

I am happy for anyone interested in future author events, to email me at [email protected] Be sure to include the subject: Published Author Event.