Australian subscriber Jackie Tritt’s crime novel, The Burning, was published by Virtual Tales last summer.

Now Jackie, who emigrated from Britain to Beaconsfield, Victoria in the 1960s, has had her collection of short stories, Unfettered Feet, published by Canberra-based Ginninderra Press (website: www.ginninderrapress.com.au).

‘It’s one of the few publishers in Australia which actively promotes the short story,’ says Jackie. ‘I didn’t write any stories specifically for the collection, but I sifted through stories which had done well in competitions and anthologies and realised that I had an underlying theme of breaking free – through migration, (a common story in Australia, of course), through changes in relationships and through personal growth.’

‘Publishing in Australia, as elsewhere, is difficult to break into,’ she adds.

‘The usual statistic publishers broadcast is that the annual take-up from the slush pile is about one in 2,000, and it seems to me that the take-up of writers by agents would be about the same, though that’s guesswork. Like the discussion in Writing Magazine recently, it’s the “personalities” and sports stars who are readily published, because the publicity is previously well established.’

And what of her e-book The Burning? It has since been released as a complete e-book with sites like Mobipocket, CyberRead and FictionWise and will soon be available on Amazon as a paperback. ‘Virtual Tales is a dynamic company, expanding and taking on new authors and markets all the time.’

Jackie is currently working on a novel about women of different ages and backgrounds who create an informal group to lose weight. ‘As yet I don’t have any plans to turn it into a crime novel and hopefully all the characters will survive until the end of the book.’

As well as picking up several units of the Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing, on novel, short story, young adult, popular fiction and children’s writing over the years, Jackie belongs to the Lazy Rivers Writers.

‘We grew out of a short series of workshops on ‘writing for short story competitions’, deciding we’d keep going after the series ended. We’re a cohesive group of women who, as a group, have produced anthologies, put on performance works and run an annual workshop with a guest speaker, financially supported by the Victorian Writers’ Centre.