It's been a while since I published anything on this blog, but I haven't been idle. Some of you may recall I mentioned a (long) while back that I write for the UK satirical website NewsBiscuit. NewsBiscuit was founded over fourteen years ago by British TV comedic scriptwriter and author John O'Farrell, who was one of the main scriptwriters on the original Spitting Image TV series a lifetime ago.
Time indeed passes and I now not only contribute to the website with satirical and comedic offerings but also spend a week every eight or so weeks as duty editor, selecting and preparing articles for publication on NewsBiscuit. As the website provides new material every day, 365 days of the year, this is sometimes a challenging but rewarding task.
Anyway, back in the start of lockdown one of the senior editors suggested that it might be worth looking at producing an anthology of some of the best articles published over the lifetime of NewsBiscuit. As one contributor noted recently, internet years are like dog years so to still be around publishing original material for nearly fifteen years is an achievement. Anyway I threw my hat in the ring and shortly afterwards four other editors came on board.
Over the duration of NewsBiscuit it has published literally tens of thousands of submissions especially when you consider the site publishes one-line tickers as well. So we had the unenviable task of wading through those, but not before we'd requested permission to use material from contributors. Unlike other websites of a similar ilk, one of NewsBiscuit's unique selling points is that the writer retains full rights to their material - in essence they loan it to us - so we couldn't use anything that belonged to anyone who didn't reply to our request.
Once we had a list of agreed writers to cull stories and tickers from a bit of crude data mining with our database revealed how many submissions each writer had had published over the years - it wasn't perfect but it gave us a starting point. Writers were allocated to editors for selecting articles and we worked on a percentage value that differentiated between the prolific big hitters and the infrequent writers, with the prolific group getting a smaller percentage allocation to avoid swamping the book with prolific authors.
Once editors had selected and trimmed articles they allocated them to genres such as World News, UK News, Science and Technology, Faith and quite a few more. We sorted and arranged the submissions into what we felt was a logical order, continuing to edit and tidy them up and then the sections were rotated again for sense checking. More tidying up and the book started to take shape and, because I have previous in this area, I undertook the formatting for the eBook and paperback versions.
Meanwhile a couple of the editors started looking for suitable charities to receive any royalties from the sales. From the outset we agreed to make this a charity affair and all of the eventual contributors, all 80+ of them, agreed up front to waive any fees despite the fact we hadn't identified a charity at that point. We approached national and international charities and at best received an out of office message. Most didn't respond at all despite we were offering to donate all royalties without deductions. However we did find two very deserving charities that did return our calls - the award-winning mentoring charity and support network Arts Emergency (arts-emergency.org) and English Pen (englishpen.org), one of the world's oldest human rights organisations that champions the freedom to write and read around the world.
One of the editors is a professional proof-reader so we had him working flat out correcting misspellings and grammatical howlers while the wife of one of the other editors also proof-read the first draft and provided valuable feedback. I formatted the paperback, ordered proof copies and distributed. There were still issues that the six of us trapped including my choice of margins and the book was altered. On December the first it was released.
With over 500 short comedic stories and several hundred one-line gags we have produced a very professional and fun to read anthology. With the Christmas period looming this might just be the stocking filler you need, or the book you want to buy for yourself. The book is titled 15 Years of Typos and is currently only available on Amazon (UK link provided - I'm sure Amazon will direct you to the best local version of their website).
Save yourself a headache - order copies for friends and family.
