Chippewa Publishing / Lady Aibell Press

As far as I know, they are a small, legitimate e-publisher of novellas. They only take books under 50,000 words.

Just to say welcome aboard, Trenner.

Triceratops

E-book vendors

Chippewa has titles listed with Fictionwise, Amazon.com (and presumably Powells.com, and other vendors through Lightning Source), and one title is available through Ebookad.com. There are other vendors (Cyberread and Mobipocket.com) that I didn't check but the first two are a very good sign for an e-publisher. It means that their titles are being listed where readers can find them.

Trenner, Chippewa is a legit e-publisher. They have published various works by Emy Naso, a respected british author who died in april. Their guidelines are very precise because they are only interested in serious authors. Hope this helps!

According to their site, they're planning to expand into print novels sometime in 2006, or at least to start offering some of their current list as print novels.

Formatting requiremenrs have been relaxed considerably--but note unusually specific house style including no contractions and no passive voice.

I believe your line was 'Contractions aren't allowed by them!?'

No contractions

Maryn said:

They don't allow contractions??? That's ridiculous.

Er, I mean, they do not allow contractions??? That is ridiculous. And this is stiff and unnatural.

Maryn, contractionally obligated

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tell that to the pregnant lady in the corner.

Allen

*wonders why she was relegated to the corner*

My husband would no doubt argue I am far from passive. *grin* Can't argue with the pregnant lady part, though.

Well I hope it wasn't a contraction! [looks worried]

Is anybody currently dealing with Chippewa? I signed a contract with them a few weeks ago, and since then I haven't been able to log into their forums and I haven't gotten any response from them, despite three emails letting them know I couldn't get into the forum. I tried again today and the forum page is blank. Anybody have any info?

AprilBoo said:

Is anybody currently dealing with Chippewa? I signed a contract with them a few weeks ago, and since then I haven't been able to log into their forums and I haven't gotten any response from them, despite three emails letting them know I couldn't get into the forum. I tried again today and the forum page is blank. Anybody have any info?

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I haven't been to their forums, but browsed the site a bit, and everything comes up all right.

Are you using AOL? I've heard of people having problems with sites using AOL. If you have another email address, I'd try sending from that one to see what happens.

Or try a free email address like Yahoo or Google if you've only one email address.

Hope you get this straightened out.

~Nancy

Their regular site does appear to be working fine. They give you an address and logon ID for a secure forum where you are supposed to communicate with the editors, etc., once you sign up with them and that's the one I'm having trouble with.

Hi there

I am on the secure forums. Do you have your username and password? I (and a few others I know of) had some initial trouble getting this to work. The first thing is that sometimes you have to re-enter it 2, or even 3, times after getting rejected and then it will work. If that doesn't work PM me the name you are writing under (the one the know you by) and your email. I will go into the secure forum's tech help area and post a notification of the problem--this general gets a very rapid response. look forward to seeing you in there.

Em.

I love it when my ears are burning



Our forums can be difficult to access. Logins to the forums will not happen overnight so hang in there. We will get you started soon.

Contractions are fine in dialog because they express the way a person speaks or behaves. We do not remove all of the contractions in narrative, but we do remove a lot of the overused ones. It really depends on the story and the attitude within the story.

Rebecca

chippewapublishing said:

Our forums can be difficult to access. Logins to the forums will not happen overnight so hang in there. We will get you started soon.

Contractions are fine in dialog because they express the way a person speaks or behaves. We do not remove all of the contractions in narrative, but we do remove a lot of the overused ones. It really depends on the story and the attitude within the story.

Rebecca

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I submitted my novel to a publisher (Moose Enterprises) who (like Chippewa) told me to remove the contractions from the narrative. I wanted to please them, so I spent a lot of time changing every "wasn't" to "was not" and "didn't" to "did not". In the end, it didn't work out with them. Further submissions to other agents and publishers had one common complaint: the narrative was too formal and stodgy. They suggested I use more contractions. I spent a lot more time putting them back in.

Since then I have been leery of blanket admonitions against contractions in narrative. Seems to me the decision whether to use contractions or not depends on the narrative voice.

I believe you and Rebecca are saying the same thing, Roger, as far as not wanting the characters to come across stilted and formal. They only remove overused contractions within dialog (not all of them), thus maintaining the character's personality but avoiding awkward structure.

I do sympathize with your Moose experience. It's like having to reformat the entire manuscript for each potential agent/publisher with either italics or underlining or both for subvocalizations (my ms includes a lot of telepathic dialog); or, reformatting to put your name on the top left or right with page numbers on the top/bottom and the first page of each chapter at half-page, etc. ad nauseum. We may not like it but if we want to be considered, we do it, huh? ;-)

Roger J Carlson said:

I spent a lot more time putting them back in.

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Personally, I wouldn't re-write a book until after the checkbook was open.

If the editor says "I will buy this book if...." then I'd do it.

In all fairness, I don't see any statement like that on Chippewa's website, but the publisher of Moose said: "I don't like contractions in the narrative."

The thing is, a book is either publishable or it isn't. I can't see how an unpublishable book could be made publishable by removing all the contractions from the narrative. Nor can I see how a publishable novel will be made more publishable by removing them.

The author chooses the voice for his narrator whether 1st or 3rd person. Using contractions or not is part of that choice. A blanket statement to not have contractions in the narrative is too mechanical and simplistic.