The Spring Anthology (any genre) will open for submissions on February 15th. The closing date is March 31st but this anthology can be a little more flexible on the deadline than the others. It’s not tied to a particular event, it’s just the Spring one.

Edit: The deadline will be extended to the end of May. It’ll be later than usual for this anthology but the longer deadline will help with clearing the backlog of other work. This also gives authors more time to come up with stories.

Leg Iron Books has had limited internet access the past few months. This is because the storm that hit Scotland last November took down many, many trees and quite a lot of power and phone lines. Including ours. The telephone engineers could not immediately reconnect the cable because of the continuing foul weather and because there were so many fallen trees in the way. They did manage a Heath Robinson style temporary fix after a couple of weeks but a subsequent storm took that out too. Hopefully we will be reconnected properly on Monday 14th, weather permitting, now that the fallen trees have been cleared. Otherwise, we are using a 4G phone that does not have the greatest reception, but is mostly serviceable. We hope to be back to full connection in a few days.

With this in mind, please note that responses might be a little slower than usual. We do have quite a backlog now.

There is some good news, especially for novel and single-author anthology authors. We currently publish on Amazon in print and Kindle, and through Smashwords in all eBook formats to other outlets – but those are eBook only. The only way to get a print copy is currently through Amazon.

Smashwords is being acquired by Draft2Digital. Reading the press releases, it seems little, if anything, will change from the former Smashwords although there will be one major difference. Draft2Digital have developed a print book service, so once this merger is complete, there will be a second source of print versions of the books, outside Amazon. It is not yet clear whether these print books will be available through retailers or just direct from Draft2Digital but having a wider distribution of the print books can only be a good thing.

Hopefully after Monday we will have decent internet access once more and can get back to the job of reducing that ever increasing backlog! There may be a few sleepless nights ahead…