Welcome to The Vanner Press

We promise now and always:

No AI, no 'Celebs', no ghostwriters.

The name on the cover is the name of the true author

By popular and persistent request, The End of the Sky is now also available via Amazon Kindle at...

https://amzn.eu/d/fNIcR54

BZ Rogers' Author's Page can be reached at...

www.amazon.com/author/bzrogers

We write for one of two reasons.

1.    Because we want to - to please ourselves, to tell ourselves and those we choose to share it with, a story, whether in prose or verse, essay or a poem or a full-length novel. The French call this La Rage D’Ecrire - the irresistible urge to write. We love doing it, it’s a part of us that we want to share.

2.    Or, we are writing to please Jocasta Intern and Timothy Yarbury-Dilke! Who are they? Jocasta and Timothy are – as their name suggests – rather well-connected young people whose parents thought it might be fun if they were to spend their gap years in Uncle Tarquin’s publishing company reading through the slush pile of the dozens and dozens of manuscripts which arrive every week in the hope of unearthing something profitable.

They are not looking for great literature or even good writing, they are looking for a commercial package to sell - and while a well written, rewritten and edited manuscript might get you over the first hurdle, it will not in itself get you over the line.

What’s a commercial package? Which of the following would Jocasta and Timothy - and Uncle Tarquin - sign up and which would they reject?

1.    A beautifully and professionally written and edited page turner of a novel by Millie Gorton with a catchy and memorable title.

2.    A clumsily told inane and predictable story by a nationally famous and popular TV personality, 30,000 words too short and littered with spelling and grammatical errors.

3.    A superbly crafted novel telling an original and moving story written by Gary Glitter with a foreword by Rolf Harris.

It’s number Two every time. There is a rule of thumb which is by no means foolproof and there will be exceptions - but… it goes roughly like this. If the author of the book is better known for something else, it’s awful. Would you let a plumber remove your appendix?

     Nobody has heard of Millie Gorton, so she is really going to need a very good USP - unique selling proposition. Perhaps she was forced to spend her childhood standing on the roof of her house in all weathers holding a TV aerial so her cruel parents could watch TV. Or she spent ten years alone on a remote Hebridean island and now speaks fluent puffin. But unless a publisher can find some idiosyncrasy to hang a story on, she wouldn’t get much of a look in. She’s just another stream trickling into a vast ocean. Unknown writers do get published, but it’s a hard, hard sell in which the quality of the writing will not be the deciding factor.

    Number three of course would be utterly unmarketable.

    But they’ll take Number Two, and a team of ghost writers and editors will rewrite it give it a coat of paint and a quirky cover pic, stick the celeb’s name on the front in big letters and voila. He or she will be on This Morning and The One Show in a few days saying how much fun it was to write it - and real writers up and down the country will be cursing the TV before changing channels only to see the same personality doing whatever it is they are famous for.