Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: Poetry and short-stories
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: Penguin Publishers
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: I am a vintage soul. So my favorite writers are Jane Austen, Wilfred Owen, Emily Brontee, John Keats, Rabindranath Tagore, and of course the father of literature, William Shakespeare.
In modern authors, I would say I truly admire the work of Nicholas Sparks, Mitch Albom, Kristin Cast, and Arundhati Roy.
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: We envisioned a community where writers and artists would be invited to publish solely based on the merit of their writing and creative skills. The Wingless Dreamer community connects all essences of writing, illustrating, editing, marketing, and promoting on a single platform so that authors and illustrators don’t have to go through the hardships of the publishing processes and focus on their work. The Community members become part of the family and are guided, supported, and encouraged on every step they make towards their writing or art career. Wingless Dreamer Publisher provides free critiques, reviews, marketing, and in some cases funding for our community member's work.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Creative writing is the most important element of our life as it helps us understand and appreciate the world around us. We strongly recommend to our submitters, 'Don't rush your writing in order to meet the deadlines'. Give all your time in the world to your writing and learn how to be patient. Eventually, you will discover your work will not only get selected by publishers but also will be appreciated by the readers. This is also one of the most effective ways of producing great content.
Additionally, we expect our submitters to have a complete understanding of the theme of our contests. That's it. Write. Feel. Publish. Before submitting your work to us, we further ask you to take out your time to read our contest guidelines. This helps publishers like us to ease the judging process and further announce the winner and release the book at the earliest.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: An ideal submission must have an in-depth understanding of our contest guidelines and most importantly the theme of our contest. It must not be published anywhere else both in print or online since it sometimes leads to copyrights violations among publishers. We want your writing to be the king of the submission. So please try to avoid unnecessary decorations or details other than your literary work in the pdf or doc, docx file that you've submitted to us. Keep the fonts readable.
Furthermore, we always look for submissions that depict originality, creativity, clarity of imagery and language, and cohesive form and structure. We hate plagiarism and strongly recommend our submitters to stay true to themselves.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: Firstly, the most common mistake our submitters make is to skip the guidelines and submit their works to us. They expect us to sort, read, and select any one of the poems among 20-30 pages of their work. This is not how we operate. So please try to avoid it.
Secondly, we do not publish and will never publish previously published works.
Lastly, we strongly ask our submitters to go through one or two rounds of their own editing process before making the submissions.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: Mainly, in the cover letter, we don't have any particular guidelines because we personally feel cover letters are there to convey a message from the submitter to the publisher. Submitters can feel free to pour their hearts out about their submissions or about themselves. As a team full of writers and artists we do understand our submitter's feelings and therefore we do take out our time to read their cover letters with the utmost respect.
Moreover, we request our submitters to do send us their bio max. 150 words in the third person. Please feel free to list all your previous publications as well. Once again, keep in mind that we cannot exceed the word limit of 150 words for biographical statements. So we suggest only mentioning your most prestigious works.
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: There's no doubt that we do read all the submissions to the end. We believe that the most righteous way to judge our submitter's work is to completely read their work and make efforts into understanding the submitter's perception. That's the reason why sometimes we take a longer time to finish the judging process because we want to give equal opportunities to all our submitters. We expect our submitters to understand our position and respect our decisions.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: There are numerous points that our judges keep in their minds before accepting the submissions. The most important ones especially for poems are like analyzing the poetic devices and techniques, poet's vocabulary, poetic symbols, overall meaning and purpose of the poem, voice tonality of the poem, storylines, rhyming schemes, and relevancy to the theme of the contest among others. We always seek submissions that stand out from the crowd and yield uniqueness on their own.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: It's hectic but I love my job anyway. My day starts with sipping Indian tea followed by 4-5 coffee errands to the kitchen. As editor-in-chief, I set up a catch-up meeting with the Wingless Dreamer team that consists of editors, and artists to assign them their tasks, discuss the progress, or the next theme of the contests. We also discuss improving our ways to support amateur writers in the best way possible. We talk about the ideas on how to help creative people to harness their creative skills and additional publishing issues among others. Then we all go back to our respective works and stay connected through our online system.
Once the shortlist is finalized we all sit together and discuss each submission one by one. Finally, by the end of our judging process, we chose our winner and start working on the publishing process of the book and its promotions. Alongside, we never stop helping aspiring writers with their work and try to give the best assistance we can. We review their work and help them by giving feedback so that they can improve, learn, and feel confident about their literary work. All this for free of cost.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: It is quite crucial to maintain a harmonic balance between the adaption of the new technology emerging in the literary world and keeping the aesthetic of the writing work. With the advancement in technology, writers can now easily reach a wider range of audiences, avail reading numerous books on different genres, learn new forms of writing, proofread their work and opt for any assistance required through online services. Being a writer it is quintessential to make the most use of available sources and make one's work up to the mark without disturbing its authenticity. Eventually, a true writer can lead to the glorious path of success and fulfill his/her dreams.
Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?
A: It entirely depends on the type of submission we receive. Sometimes, it's flawless and fit for publishing in our anthology but other times it requires substantive editing and minor changes. Submissions with major changes are often discarded since we cannot afford the time to do the edits.
Once we're done with our editing process, we wait for the author to approve the final edits before including them in our anthologies.
Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?
A: Not yet. But we are looking forward to including it in the near future
Ruchi Acharya -Founder, Wingless Dreamer Publisher