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Web Site Is Home For Stories

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By KAREN HAYMON LONG

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 6, 2008

Tim Walsh of Sarasota thinks everyone has a story to tell. His new Web site, iScribed (www .iscribed.com), invites people to do just that and offers a "community" of other writers for critiques.

Sometimes, authors ask for help in ending a story or fleshing out a character. Their fellow writers usually happily oblige.

Submissions can be fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photographs, even video stories. Writers get e-mail when someone reads their stories.

Some of the stories will be compiled into books to be sold on the site, Walsh says. He figures about 50 stories of about 1,200 words each will be featured in each book. The community will decide which stories to publish and will likely have a hand in naming the books and designing the covers, he says.

He vows to pay the costs of publishing the books and to award the writers of the top five stories and designs $100 each.

Access to the site is free. Walsh says he hopes to make money through advertising and book sales. The books will be printed by a publish-on-demand company.

He and other writers will winnow the 50 stories from hundreds of submissions by a system of ratings and comments. He figures they will look at 300 stories every few months.

So far, the site has 42 members who seem to like reading one another's stories and making suggestions for improvement, Walsh says. He came up with the idea for the site while trying to get a book published. He learned how difficult it is to interest major publishers in new work. Many vanity presses and print-on-demand publishers will take writers' money, knowing that the books probably won't sell and that bookstores likely will never order them, he says.

He spent "a small fortune" in 2004 to self-publish "The Playmakers," which won a book of the year award from Foreword magazine. It was later republished by Andrews McMeel-Universal, which renamed it "Timeless Toys."

His second book, "Wham-O Super Book," about the toy company that gave the world Frisbees and Hula Hoops, will be published by Chronicle Books in October.

The stories people have written for iScribed have been diverse, he says, and some have been quite good.

"What we're shooting for is the everyday writer who has a story to tell," he says of the site. "That's not to say that some people haven't written some pretty amazing stuff."

Karen Haymon Long is the Tribune's book editor. Keyword: Bibliophile, for Kevin Walker's read on books.

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