Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Meet the gang behind Romaniac Shorts!


Today we welcome The Romaniacs who will introduce themselves and tell us all about their fabulous charity anthology.





We are honoured to be on the blog today to tell you about our anthology, Romaniac Shorts.
We each have our individual strong points which has been amazingly productive in getting the book to this stage. Here’s how we did it …

Promo Chick – Lucie
I love promotion so took the reins, sourcing blogs and sites to visit, including the RNA, and writing the launch posts. I may consider ordering a sandwich board…

Cover Girl – Vanessa
 We all brainstormed the kind of look we wanted for the cover before I started work – style, colour scheme etc– and I took everyone’s input and designed a bright, bold, illustrative cover. The different colours and styles of the shorts represent not only the eight Romaniac’s but also our eight differing writing styles – an eclectic mix that blends together beautifully!

Strapline Sweetie – Laura

I tend to throw every idea in my head into the Romaniac pot, which the ladies miraculously manage to sort, and that's how the strap line came to be. In true Romaniac form, we voted, and 'Fashionably Brief' won.
As a lover of concision, I enjoyed the challenge of putting together the Amazon description.

Grammatical Goddess – Jan
 With very little experience at writing short stories or flash fiction, I felt nervously excited by the challenge and found the whole process from budding concept to blossoming creation to full bloom Romaniac anthology, hugely gratifying. I've also a good eye for detail so thoroughly enjoyed helping to wheedle out those grammatical gremlins and pesky typos.

Yummy Mummy – Catherine 
I've been in charge of the baby board meetings. They like to give the okay on everything. Here they are signing off the final proof.

 Magnificent Multitasker - Celia 
I have never had any confidence in writing short stories until meeting The Romaniacs, but in the last few months I have read their excellent work, picked up tips and had lots of advice. With the launch of our first book I'm proud to be part of this excellent collection.  With the amazing support from the others, even with lots going on in my very busy day job, I have managed to not only contribute to the anthology but, hopefully, give a lot of advice and encouragement back.

Dame Discussion – Debbie
There’s nothing better to get creative juices flowing than to have a discussion about things. And there’s nothing I’m better at than adding my two-penneth (which I did several times whilst compiling our anthology stories!) When deciding which charities to support, it was me who suggested Dyslexia Action as I felt it was a more general cause that everyone could relate to.

Tech Queen – Sue
As Geek Girl, it was my job to format and load 'Romaniac Shorts' onto Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing. Loading it was relatively straightforward but the formatting took extra work. It wasn't until I had everyone's stories that all the little differences in presentation were apparent. Things like font, margins, indents, speech marks, spacing, etc, all these had to be adjusted for continuity purposes. I also had to make sure I had an up to date copy of the anthology as it circulated the group for proofing and editing. From a technical point of view, I think we've all learned a great deal from the process - it's been a lot of work but it's also been great fun and extremely rewarding.

 


Romaniac Shorts is a diverse collection of short stories and flash fiction and is available to download now on Amazon. All proceeds shall be donated to Dyslexia Action and the RNA. 


Thank you, ladies!

Brought to you by the blogging team of Elaine Everest, Natalie Kleinman and Liv Thomas.

Please contact us at elaineeverest@aol.com if you wish to be featured on our blog.

4 comments:

Laura E. James said...

Thank you so much for having us here today. I hope we weren't too rowdy :-) Laura x

Natalie Kleinman said...

You call that rowdy! Anyway, the excitement is good for us. Great piece, ladies, and good luck with Romaniac Shorts - love the cover

Natalie

Laura S Reading said...

You sound like a great team.

Sue Fortin said...


Thank you, Natalie - we all love the cover too. We're very lucky to have the multi-talented Vanessa on the team.

Thank you, too, DogsMom. We wouldn't be without each other.

Sue