News
Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2021. What are we upto this year? Things are drifting along slowly that's what, and we're still here (just about). Looking forward to once again getting a few books out into the world!
Sunnier days in Manchester (it does happen sometimes).
We were going to say 'Hello from a slightly sunnier but still necessarily empty Manchester!' and pretend the image above was from today but it's snowing now so that little fiction is out of the window.
Speaking of fiction (and poetry), 2020 wasn't an entire washout for us publishing wise and we enjoyed getting the few books out that we did get out (not to mention working with some amazing writers and editors) but it's also true to say that there were (still are) many books that didn't make it last year which are due out this year and next. Things are just moving slowly that's all.
As we've stated previously, we were always planning to publish fewer titles per year from last year onwards but it's true that we didn't expect to grind to as much of a halt as we did towards the end of last year and the beginning of this one. At some points during 2020, time wise, we mostly found ourselves down to having either no time or the odd hour per week to run the press.
This year we've worked out it is likely to be a similarly slow pace but not quite so bad and, for the foreseeable future, thanks to a variety of commitments, paid work, day jobs and projects that pile up in our lives outside of Dostoyevsky Wannabe, we'll have only around four-five hours per week to work on the press. Given that we'll have to use that short amount of time exclusively to lay out books and covers etc (in the past we could easily use that much time up, and more, dealing with emails, social-media and various other aspects that go into running this thing), we're afraid to say that we will have to put the small amount of time that we have per week into putting the books together to get them out into the world so do look out for more from us as the books crawl out slowly into the world.
Thanks for the continued patience from the few people who have single-authored books due to come out. As you can tell from the message above, we are finally getting back to spending at least a few hours per week on your books but things are likely to proceed very slowly.
In terms of the release order of books, we are going to work on each as and when we get to them depending on how complex the layout is so we'll work that through and we will just be in touch with each of you as we get to work on each. We can't really be any more specific about release dates than that though sadly and the more time we spend in email conversations, the less we have to work on them so we will prioritise working on the books themselves.
We occasionally have older DW Cities books that were due to arrive with us some time ago but which are only now starting to arrive. We will do our best with these but they will likely stretch to 2021 or 2022 depending on how fast we can get to them (clue: it won't be fast at all we're afraid). If any editors don't feel able to wait and want to re-purpose the publication of that book with another publisher (we're more than happy to continue with the projects though, it's just we can't commit to any useful timeframe given our current lack of capacity).
We're afraid that we still won't be opening submissions for the foreseeable future but we'll let everyone know when we do.
Other than that, we hope you are all well! And we'll look forward to shouting about some new Dostoyevsky Wannabe books soon.