Leaping into 2024 with my original publisher Chicken House!
2024 is a leap year, which means we all get an extra day in February to write our next masterpiece. This extra leap day, which was proposed by Julius Caesar more than 2000 years ago to keep our calendar in sync with the seasons, is traditionally added at the end of the month on February 29th. But I am mentioning it now because there is a rare open submission event happening on that day at Chicken House, the original publisher of my debut novel Song Quest . For 24 hours only, debut authors of fiction for young readers are invited to enter their (finished or unfinished) first novel into Chicken House's Open Coop. Open Coop 29th February 2024 Although there wasn't an official Open Coop back when I submitted Song Quest (Chicken House itself was still an idea in an egg at the time), I followed a similar route to publication by sending in the early chapters of my book myself. In those early days I had no agent and knew nobody in the business, so I simply worked my ...