Karen Byrom – Commissioning Fiction Editor - My Weekly

We are delighted to welcome Karen Byrom to the RNA Blog’s monthly series where we speak to book bloggers and reviewers and get an insight into their world. This month we take a small detour to speak to a fiction editor who commissions short stories and is well know to the RNA. Thank you to Ellie Holmes for this most interesting interview.

Welcome Karen, tell us a little bit about yourself and your work at My Weekly

Hello, my name’s Karen Byrom and I am the commissioning fiction editor at My Weekly. I’ve

worked in magazines for over thirty years, having begun my career with D C Thomson straight after graduating from St Andrews with a degree in Ancient History and Latin – which at least ensures I can spell!I live and work in my hometown of Dundee, a city beautifully situated on the firth of Tay, in the most beautiful scenic surroundings. I’m married with one daughter, who married two years ago, and lives nearby.

How long have you been at My Weekly?

I started my journalistic career at D C Thomson back in 1982, on the fiction desk of My Weekly. The fiction editor at the time was Liz Smith, and I remember thinking, “I want her job.” I had to wait 32 years! After eight years on My Weekly, I moved around the different magazines, working on features and fiction on Annabel and People’s Friend before returning to My Weekly for good in 2010, where my main responsibility was the health pages. When Liz announced her retirement in 2015, I seized my chance!

Tell us a little bit about a day in the life of a Commissioning Fiction Editor

As each day is so varied, it’s probably easier to describe my week. I check emails for submissions coming in and news about new books. I read and choose stories for up-coming issues – we don’t hold stock any more, so every story I buy must have an issue date. I send back stories that aren’t right for us, with feedback. I aim to have a six-week turnaround, but that doesn’t always work out, sadly.

I go to work on the bought stories, finding or commissioning artwork – I work closely with the designers on this, and often send artwork out to be enhanced so that it matches the story. Then I sub them lightly before sending them off to our production team. I don’t see them again until the page stage, when I give them a final check over.

Every week I choose archived stories for the website, and publish them myself – that’s quite a lot of work. I do the same for book reviews, author Q&As and giveaways. Then the tweeting begins – I think it’s a great way to build up relationships with writers and publishers and get My Weekly’s name out there.

Every four weeks, we have book reviews in the magazine so I’m constantly skimming books to decide what our readers will enjoy. I try to get to London three or four times a year to meet authors and publishers, and this year I’m off to Devon to take part in a literary festival, which is exciting.

I attend lots of meetings, contributing content ideas for the magazine as a whole, and I write occasional features, particularly travel and royal features. I also attend brainstorming meetings for new publications. At D C Thomson, we really are one big team.

I write fiction, too, for the Specials and The Annual, but tend to do that in my own time.

You must be inundated with books and stories, how do you choose which books and stories to read?

I receive and read around 90 submissions a month. It would be more, but I have a rule that you must have been published before in My Weekly before I’ll consider your story. It seems harsh – and I wish it could be different - but it’s the only way I can cope with the workflow, as I am the fiction desk! I’m constantly streamlining, though, and hope that someday I’ll be able to welcome submissions from everyone.

I wish I could read every book that comes in but I get around six a day! I skim them, then choose the ones I think will interest readers – a mix of romance, historical and detective thrillers. Even then I can’t read them all, but fortunately lots of my colleagues are voracious readers, too, and willing to give me reviews.

Do you have a submission policy for authors to follow?

I do. Short story and serial writers must have been published by My Weekly before, and I have a pool of around 100 such writers. I send out guidelines to them every two months, explaining the length and type of stories I need for upcoming issues.

I also consider approaches from publishers whose authors are keen to write a story for My Weekly. I’ve got some top names that way – Veronica Henry, Victoria Fox, and C.L. Taylor, to name just a few. Liz already had Milly Johnson and Sue Moorcroft on board - they continue to contribute charming stories and serials.

My Weekly is known for its lovely short stories and serials and its specials packed with lots more stories – your wonderfully titled Sunshine Celebration Special is on sale now – how far ahead do you plan what will feature in each edition?

Thank you for the lovely compliment. For the weekly, I have an eight week rolling programme, choosing stories to fill issues up to eight weeks’ ahead. That’s flexible of course – a story may come in that I just have to have, or a publisher may approach me with a fantastic story from a big name author. Or I’ll suddenly realise two stories in the same issue have the same theme! So it can be a juggling act. But once a story is bought, it will be used, even if I have to move it to a 2018 issue…

Specials’ stories are chosen around eight weeks in advance. I choose them to reflect the theme of the Special, and work closely with Specials’ editor Maggie Swinburne to ensure they complement content. She sees to the artwork for these, thank goodness.

If you could give one piece of advice to authors what would it be?

Read, read, read the magazine. In the last 10 years, My Weekly has evolved considerably, to reflect modern trends and attitudes and that’s reflected in the fiction content. While there’s always a place for what we Scots call “couthy” stories, involving old aunts, country cottages and cats, our readers also demand up-to-date stories with empathetic characters and convincing plots.

What are your interests away from work? Do you ever read just to relax?

I love to read – on a Sunday afternoon you’ll find me lying back in the conservatory reading a book

for review. I read on the bus to and from work, at lunchtime, at home in the evenings, with one eye on the TV. The only time I don’t read books is during working hours – I don’t have time!

I have always particularly enjoyed literary and historical fiction, but being fiction editor has forced me to expand my taste, and I find I really enjoy a well-written romance or detective story.

Hilary Mantel, R J Ellory, Neil Gaiman, Anna McPartlin and Joanna Courtney are all high on my list of favourite writers.

Other than that I love yoga and attend three to four classes a week. I also play tennis.

Family is important, too. I spend time with my elderly father – Mum died just 18 months ago – and love to go to yoga classes and shopping with my daughter, or walking with my husband.

We often ask agents and publishers what they consider to be the next 'big thing' - what do you hope to see next?

I hope to be surprised! I’m not too keen on the next “big thing” – too often it leads to a raft of copycat themes, never quite as good as the original. The “unreliable narrator” is a case in point. When it’s done well it works – I’m thinking about Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty and Jane Corry’s My Husband’s Wife – but it is now in danger of becoming a cliché.

I don’t like to invest a lot of emotional energy into a character, only to find she’s been lying to me, if only by omission. Never mind the plot, for me, characters are what make a good book – and, of course, a good short story.

Thank you Karen for such a wonderful insight into your world and a fascinating behind the scenes peak at My Weekly.

Links:

Twitter: @FictionEdKaren

@My_Weekly

My Weekly Facebook

About Ellie:

Ellie Holmes writes commercial women’s fiction with her heart in the town and her soul in the country. Ellie’s debut release was The Flower Seller. A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Alliance of Independent Authors, Ellie’s latest book, White Lies is out now.

http://Author.to/EllieHolmes   

Chatting with Joanna Courtney

We are pleased to welcome Joanna Courtney to the blog today. We are sure that many of the answers to our questions will resonate with readers of the blog.

Welcome, Joanna, can you tell us how long you've been writing?

All my life. I was an avid reader from an early age and wrote Enid Blyton style boarding-school

books from 10. I kept long teenage diaries and wrote plays and stories for school events. I studied English Literature at university and once I was working I wrote fiction in the evenings. I’ve always wanted to be a writer so seeing my novel on the shelves is a dream come true.

What about your path to publication?

It’s been a long, hard road and my poor husband has had to deal with many a tearful ‘that’s it, I’m getting a proper job’ tantrum! I started out writing short stories for the women’s magazines when I had young children. I was first published by The People’s Friend in 1999 and over the years I’ve been published by all the major magazines, with serials as well as stories. One of these, ‘Running Against the Tide’ was published as a novel by Robert Hale in 2012 and I’d also been working on a contemporary romance for which I secured my agent, Kate Shaw, back in 2009. We didn’t manage to find a publisher for that but Kate was supportive of my desire to move to historical fiction. The first novel I wrote in the Saxon period was also turned down by publishers, though with enough nice comments to persuade me to write a second, and that one – The Chosen Queen – was finally taken up by Pan Macmillan who have been absolutely brilliant with it.

Do you find it confusing to move between your author name and ‘real’ name?

Courtney is my middle name and also my grandma’s name, so it already feels like part of me and I rather like having a pen name. It makes it easier to find the confidence to do events as I go in almost as an actor – as ‘Joanna Courtney, author’, rather than just as little old me!

Marketing and promotion is a big part of an author’s life. How do you cope with this?

I enjoy a lot of it and I find it easy when I’m editing or researching but when I’m deep in writing a novel it’s much harder to pull myself away from my imaginary world to do all the ‘real’ stuff. That said, though, connecting with readers is wonderful and nothing makes your day like a tweet from someone you don’t know saying how much they’ve loved your book so I could never complain about that.

How do fit your writing around your day to day life?

I have children so on the whole I write during the school day. Up until recently that stopped painfully early at 3.15 but now they are both at secondary school I thankfully have much longer days. I also, however, have to fit in my work as an Open University Creative Writing tutor and have two dogs who need walking – though that’s fantastic thinking time.

What is the next big thing in your writing life?

I’m in the middle of writing the third book of the trilogy. Book 2, The Constant Queen, is finished and edited and due out next May, so I’m now writing the Norman side of the 1066 story for Book 3, The Conqueror’s Queen. It’s proving really interesting as until now they’ve been the ‘baddies’ so it’s lovely getting under their skin and seeing it all from another point of view.

Author Bio:

Ever since Joanna sat up in her cot with a book, she’s wanted to be a writer. She’s had many stories and serials published in women’s magazines and The Chosen Queen is the first novel in her historical trilogy, The Queens of the Conquest, about the women of 1066.

Links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chosen-Queen-Queens-Conquest/dp/144728190X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429540417&sr=8-1&keywords=joanna+courtney

Facebook: joannacourtneyauthor

Twitter: @joannacourtney1

My website: www.joannacourtney.com

My blog: www.joannacourtney.com/blog/

Thank you so much for visiting the blog today, Joanna. We eagerly await publication day for The Constant Queen.

The RNA blog is brought to you by,

Elaine Everest & Natalie Kleinman

If you would like to write for the blog please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com

Joanna Courtney: The Chosen Queen

We are delighted to welcome Joanna to the blog today to talk about her fascination with history.

What fascinates me about history is the gaps between the dates – what the people, including the kings and queens, did on the non-headline days. In researching the rich and exciting Anglo-Saxon period I have often found far more gaps than dates and whilst for the earnest historian in me that is a frustration, for the cheeky novelist it is a joy to fill those gaps with my own imaginings.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our core primary source for this period, can happily cover a whole year of events in a single paragraph. In between the monks’ carefully and sometimes rather randomly selected events, however, were hundreds of men, women and children, getting up every single day – feeling warm or cold, eating, drinking, going to the loo, arguing with each other, falling in love, and getting every bit as shy, embarrassed, excited and nervous as we do today. In the evolution of mankind a thousand years is a tiny length of time and although social customs and day-to-day experiences were certainly different back in 1055, I refuse to believe that core feelings have changed much and it is that connection to the people of the past – to their minute-by-minute existences – that I wish to capture in my novels.

In every instance I have tried my best to stay within the boundaries of the known facts but it is not my intention here to create a history as much as an interpretation. I am certainly not saying that this version of Edyth’s life did happen, but I hope I have researched deeply and carefully enough to able to assert that it could have happened. There are several points in my story, however that people might wonder about, so here are a few more details on some of the key historical customs, moments, people and places.

About Joanna:

Joanna has wanted to be a writer ever since she could read. As a child she was rarely to be seen without her head in a book and she was also quick to pick up a pen. After spending endless hours entertaining her siblings with made up stories, it was no surprise when Joanna pursued her passion for books during her time at Cambridge University - where she combined her love of English and History by specialising in Medieval Literature.

Joanna continued to write through her first years of work and then, married and living in Derbyshire, in the sparse hours available between raising four children. She has written over 200 stories and serials published in women's magazines, some of which have been broadcast on BBC radio. Joanna has also won several fiction prizes and written and directed an award-winning play. She teaches creative writing across the country and for the Open University.

Joanna is fascinated by defining moments in history, of which the Battle of Hastings is certainly one. The outcome of that momentous day is one of the big 'what-ifs?' of England's past and she has loved being able to immerse herself in the world of the Anglo-Saxons, Normans and Vikings whilst writing The Queen's of the Conquest trilogy.

The Chosen Queen:

He looked like a king that day, Harold. Even in a simple bridegroom's tunic of darkest green he looked like royalty as he stepped up to take the Lady Svana's hand. There was no gold in sight, just flowers; no parade of bishops, just a smiling monk in a sack-robe and bare feet. There was no betrothal contract, no formal prayers, no exchange of lands or elaborate gifts, just the linking of hands joining two people for a year and a day.

Edyth had said nothing but it had seemed to her then that Harold glowed when he was with his handfast wife and it was that glow, more than any gold or land or title that drew people to him. 'Love prefers to be free,' Svana had said and Edyth had carried that with her ever since. It had been her ideal, lit up by firelight and scented with meadow grass, and now, on the brink of womanhood, she craved such a passion for herself.

As a young woman in England's royal court, Edyth, granddaughter of Lady Godiva, dreams of marrying for love. But political matches are rife while King Edward is still without an heir and the future of England is uncertain. When Edyth's family are exiled to the wild Welsh court, she falls in love with the charismatic King of Wales - but their romance comes at a price and she is catapulted onto the opposing side of a bitter feud with England. Edyth's only allies are Earl Harold Godwinson and his handfasted wife, Lady Svana.

As the years pass, Edyth finds herself elevated to a position beyond even her greatest expectations. She enjoys both power and wealth but as her star rises the lines of love and duty become more blurred than she could ever have imagined. As 1066 dawns, Edyth is asked to make an impossible choice. Her decision is one that has the power to change the future of England forever . . .

The Chosen Queen is the perfect blend of history, fast-paced plot and sweeping romance with a cast of strong female characters - an unforgettable read.

Links:

Blog

Website

Amazon

Thank you, Joanna. We look forward to reading, The Chosen Queen.

The RNA blog is brought to you by:

Elaine Everest & Natalie Kleinman

If you would like to write something for the blog please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com