Morning Friends!
There are multiple avenues to explore when enter the publishing world. If your path is self publishing, an author must undertake everything from editing to marketing, cover design and formatting. Traditional publishing encompasses a slightly different route, including manuscript critiques, beta reads, and querying packages. Utilizing a professional to assist with any one of these tasks can elevate an author’s work, and allow them to gain knowledge and connections that could assist with their publishing career. That is where WriteHive’s Sponsored Artist Award can help.
The goal of the Sponsored Artist Award is to offer financial assistance to break down the paywall that exists within the publishing industry. While you must have a completed manuscript, the work doesn’t have to be previously edited. It can certainly be a draft that hasn’t seen the red pen of a professional editor. We are not looking for perfection. We are looking for someone who is serious about pursuing publication—whether it be via a traditional, indie, or self-publishing route. Our ideal candidate should also demonstrate a need for aid.
Every year, WriteHive gives away one or two grant awards to an up-and-coming author in need. During the 2021 Annual WriteHive Conference in April, we announced this year’s Sponsored Artists. Their spirit and tenacity were what drew us to their applications and their stories. We recently got the chance to interview them, and talk about their unpublished works, and how the Sponsored Artist Award will help them in their publication journey.
Rebekah Webb is an author who has written some delightful literary horror, where dreamers dreamt all the time, free to go anywhere, to be anything, to see worlds outside themselves, inside themselves and beyond themselves. Her work, Burrows of Blood and Shadow, follows a Dream Surfer who has no form or memory and lives in a void filled with temporary exits to other’s heads. The only way he can experience life is through the minds of other people. He travels through the stories of others with no regard to time and space, exploring cruelty intersecting through various lives, occasionally indulging in humorous tales tinged with a darkness of their own.
Check out our interview with Rebekah here
Antonia Hughes is the author of Soul Witch, an LGBTQIA urban fantasy about Maisie, a strong, independent witch with her hands full running a magical plant nursery. Maisie’s dream is to breed a plant that reveals the hidden elements of the magical world. But the day Maisie’s dream comes true, a witch from her book club goes missing, and it hits her harder than it should. Strange attacks begin in the neighborhood, and despite her best efforts, Maisie can’t figure out the connection by herself—nor will the other witches let her.
Check out our interview with Antonia here
Congratulations to our two Sponsored Artist winners, Rebekah Webb and Antonia Hughes! Please help us cheer them along as they enter the next phase of their publishing journey.