It has been announced today that entries for the first Luke Bitmead bursary to support fledgling novel writers will open on 1st January, and the bursary will be awarded in May 2008. It will include a cash award of £2,500 for the winner from the Luke Bitmead Memorial Fund and a publishing contract from Legend Press.

We are delighted to be working with Luke's family to ensure that Luke's name and memory lives on - not only through his work, but through this wonderful memorial bursary too.  For those of you lucky enough to have met Luke you will know that he was hugely compassionate and would love the idea of another struggling talented writer being supported on the arduous road to securing their first publishing deal.

We've created a page in the sidebar of our website - www.legendpress.co.uk - with more details and guidelines for entry and you can also access the same information at www.lukebitmead.com, plus see a bit more about Luke and his family there too.

I hope there are lots of you out there who will be making an application for this unique bursary, we look forward to being part of the judging panel!

Don't forget the rest of our blog is now at www.legendpress.co.uk. See you there!

In the meantime, have an absolutely wonderful Christmas,

Warm wishes from Emma, Tom and everyone involved at Legend Press!

 

We'd love to see you over on our new blog-led website.

Just click here and you'll be there in a flash!

There's a wealth of information about our books, our views on publishing and everything else that's keeping us so busy and there are also lots of opportunities for you to add your comments and views and get discussions going with lots of like-minded readers and writers.

See you there!

Emma and Tom

The Small Press Review has reviewed Rebecca Strong's brilliant Here or There in its November/December issue. Here are some of the things that the reviewer, Susan Woollard, says about the book:

'To employ so many characters while ensuring that each has a prominent position within the whole is quite a feat for a debut novelist. Each character must have its own unique personality and backstory: too little would offer mere shadows of people; too much would feel cluttered. I admit to expecting the author to falter somewhere along the line, yet she never does. Each character emerges as full formed and vital to the plot.'

'The last chapter worked like a satisfied sigh for me.'

'I would very much like to see Rebecca Strong follow up this strong and successful debut with another novel sooner, rather than later.'

You can read a pdf version of the full review on our website - www.legendpress.co.uk. Come and have a look now and read the rest of our blog which we've been updating daily. It would be great to have lots of our MySpace friends commenting on our new site and getting discussions going!

We've also got a great Christmas Sale running on there with loads of brilliant gift set offers.

Happy reading, and have a lovely weekend!

Emma

There's an article in The Guardian about World Book Day's 'Spread the Word' list of 100 'hidden gems', of which the stunning Salt & Honey is one.

Read the article here and, if you haven't done so already, vote for Salt & Honey here.

It's brilliant in itself that Salt & Honey has made this list of 100 but if enough people vote for it then it will make the top ten shortlist and might even win the World Book Day 2008 prize. Even better! We think it more than deserves this accolade, and are sure everyone who's read it agrees, so it would be wonderful if you could help out by voting now...

HOW TO VOTE:

It seems to work best if you register on the site first with a username and password and then click on the 'vote for this book' option straight after you've logged in. Once you've voted you will then be able to read more about the book and also leave a comment of your own. Some of the comments aren't viewable yet but please do leave one anyway as I'm sure they'll be displayed at some point soon and it will be great to get lots of word of mouth buzz going about this amazing novel.

Many thanks to you all in advance for your support, it's massively appreciated both by us and by Candi.

Emma

PS -

One of the latest comments from a voter on the page is as follows:

 

Ever since we've been blogging everyday on MySpace we've realised more and more what a valuable communications tool our blog is for us, and how lost we'd be without it. We kept finding that actually other things we uploaded as company news etc on our old website were pretty much obsolete because everything had already been covered by the blog! So this is what finally led us to decide to do away completely with a more traditional-style website and have a blog as our main site. Live as of NOW!!!! So thank you MySpace and more importantly thank you to you our MySpace and SYP blog readers because you have helped us feel brave enough to make this move and rely purely on our blogging skills.

As I say, the new blog site is now live -- yey! -- and it's already got quite a lot of back-dated material on it so that it provides a good overview for all of our titles. But this is only the start, there'll be loads and loads more to come. We're in the process of transferring our legendpress.co.uk domain name over to the new site but for now you can go straight to it at www.legendpress.typepad.com

Come and see us and be the first to get the comments rolling, we want it to be as interactive as possible just like a mini social networking site all of its own!

We're still going to keep our MySpace page as we really enjoy being on here and keeping in touch with you all, but we're going to transfer our daily musings to the new site so that we're not duplicating everything. You can subscribe to the blog's RSS feed so you'll always know when we've posted something new and we'll also keep sending you reminders on here about new additions too. There'll be no excuse not to keep up to date with everything Legendary!!

See you there shortly,

Emma

 

New website tomorrow, new website tomorrow, new website tomorrow!!!

Sorry, that's all I've got. See you tomorrow and tell everyone you know to have a look - will include a special Christmas sale so you can buy all your presents early at great prices...

Tom

I used some of my time in lieu yesterday for a day off after watching the Foo Fighters in concert on Monday night up in Sheffield. The gig was absolutely awesome but we showed how essentially non-rock-and-roll we normally are by spending yesterday having a nice walk in the Peak District before coming home! It was lovely though as my 'time in lieu' often stays theoretical rather than actual and so it was good to use some of it for once and make the most of it. My roots are in the Peak District on my Mum's side (a lovely little town called Hathersage) so it was nice being able to show my husband Jules the places I used to visit as a kid. 

I'm now back at my desk and frantically trying to make sure the new website will be ready(ish) for Friday. Tom isn't helping much as he keeps on bigging up the site to anyone who'll listen saying how great it's going to be, no pressure there then seeing as I'm the one who's doing it! Eek. Seriously though, I am excited about it, purely because it's going to tie our blog in with everything we do and also be much easier for us to properly showcase all the fantastic books. It might not be quite what you're expecting, especially as I've done it myself and we haven't used a designer, but hopefully you'll all like it.

We've had a couple more pieces of good news this morning, one is that Bill Coles is going to have a 2000 word article about his book and god knows what else in the Mail on Sunday, and the other is that Queer Fish in God's Waiting Room (the comedy by Lee Henshaw which we're publishing in February) is going to be featured in Waterstone's 3for2 at the time of its launch. Brilliant news for two brilliant books!

Emma

Following Emma's mention yesterday of our amusement at Amazon's 'perfect pairing' of William Coles' brilliantly-selling The Well-Tempered Clavier with, of all books, Daisy Dooley Does Divorce by, yes, Bill's ex-wife Anna Pasternak (would never have been scripted – see here), The Daily Mail of all papers have picked up on the story.

Richard Kay has mentioned it in his column - view here. My favourite line is '"They were not meant to be together in life, but it looks as if on a literary level they are soul-mates," a friend tells me.' Principles very briefly aside for once, it added great amusement to the start of my morning. Is a great story.

Will get on with morning's work though was kindly invited to the Enterprising Young Brits lunch and awards today which I'm looking forward to. Don't know completely what to expect but hopefully it wil be very interesting, inspiring and I'll get to meet some very interesting people. Will let you know.

And finally, we have a second stall next week at The Prince's Trust Christmas Fayre. Fancy dress was suggested for the last one at the Mayor's Festival, but myself and Emma resisted, just. Any suggestions for this one? Will give the best some serious consideration...

Tom

Things are still rushing along at breakneck speed here and there's so much happening it's enough to make your head spin. I find myself keeping having to write 'to-do' lists in numbers of threes so that I don't get too daunted (never mind that there are actually over 30 such lists of 'just 3 things!'). So, I thought you'd also maybe appreciate a list of three things. Three websites to keep your eye on...

1) Have a look at the World Book Day/Spread the Word website over the next few days as you might just see a familiar book appearing on there. And when you do...get voting! I'll tell you more about exactly what I mean as soon as the World Book Day team give me the go ahead and the info is all live on their site! Very exciting...

2) Not really one exactly to keep an eye on, just something that we're still finding quite amusing and strange. Amazon are still listing the perfect 'partner' for The Well-Tempered Clavier as Daisy Dooley Does Divorce...this might not immediately strike you as particularly strange but wait until I tell you that Anna Pasternak is actually Bill Coles' ex-wife. Not such perfect partners after all, think Amazon has got it wrong this time!

And last but not least 3) our own website! Not long to go now until it takes on a new look (4 days and counting!) and once it does we will be adding more and more features over the next few weeks and months to continually improve it and bring as much additional content to all our readers as possible. Once the new site is live we will also be giving an update to all those people who entered a submission for the Short Story Reinvented collection too, sorry to you all for the wait but we had more entries than ever this year and they've all been of such high standard it's really difficult to pick the right ones for the collection! We don't want to announce it too soon and then change our mind either so please bear with us just a bit longer.

Have a good Monday, see you on the new site soon (fingers crossed!)

Emma

We're heading for the new website and still we stand tall
Cause maybe many have seen us but we want to welcome them all
With so many light years to go and things to be achieved
I'm sure that we'll all be raring to click on and go…

(cue) It's the new website countdown…

Sorry to twist lyrics for The Final Countdown but we're very excited - as many will know, while proud of our current web offering, we're keen to go one step further and have been working on a brand new Legend Press website. Reflecting all that we've been whaffling on about for ages - need for publishers to be more interactive, direct, open, accessible, much more under 'one roof' etc etc - we want to develop the best web offering in publishing to reflect these changing times (don't worry, won't go into any more lyrics there).

Still lots of work going on to get it all ready, but the best bit - we plan to have our new website up next Friday. Yes, next Friday, seven days away. So make sure you visit it and get all your friends to visit it and their friends and so on. Of course it will include our usual brand of 'humour' (well, it won't actually if that gets more people to visit). Anyway, seven days and the countdown can begin.

(cue) song chorus again...

Tom