The second half of 2024 got off to a flying start for the Elwood Writers blog yesterday with a fascinating new post from Helen, all about the power of the spoken word.

And the momentum continues today with this update on the Elwood Writers anthology Every Second Tuesday. We recently decided, for administrative reasons, to close our account with IngramSpark, the printers and distributors of the anthology. It takes 45 days for the closure to fully take effect, so the title is slowly being withdrawn, bit by bit, and by the end of July Every Second Tuesday will no longer be available from the usual channels. For now, it can still be purchased print-on-demand or as an e-book from some platforms (click here to view an example), but this is unlikely to be the case for much longer. The situation might even have changed by the time you finish reading this post!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might be familiar with the voyage of Every Second Tuesday. Having discussed it for many months, Elwood Writers started to put an anthology together in early 2019, working on structural edits of the pieces in the second half of that year. In early 2020, Barry copy-edited the manuscript – when finished, he declared that no one would ever find a single typographical error in the entire anthology! So far, no one has challenged his bold claim. We’re forever grateful to David Grigg at Rightword Enterprises for his tireless and patient collaboration on designing and publishing the book, and creating a beautiful finished product. Lee Kofman launched the anthology in a glittering online Q&A event hosted by Melbourne bookseller Readings in December 2020. In the same month, the ever-supportive Tim McQueen of Vision Australia Radio generously dedicated an entire episode of Cover to Cover to the anthology. Other radio appearances included an interview on 3CR’s Published…Or Not, and readings on 94.9 MAINfm’s The Quiet Carriage. There have been many other events along the way, too many to list in this brief post, as well as wonderful reviews, a panoply of supportive readers and booksellers, and plenty of warm glows. And one of the best things is that we distributed or sold our entire print run, which means we’ve never had to remainder or pulp a single copy.

None of this means that Every Second Tuesday is disappearing. Far from it. The anthology will continue to grace the shelves of many public libraries in Australia (and maybe even beyond), as well as the shelves of any bookstores that might still be holding stock – although most of the bookstores we supplied sold out very quickly.

The upshot of this quick (ish) update is that if you’re late to the party or you’ve been here forever and still don’t have a copy of Every Second Tuesday, then you’ll need to act quickly if you’d like to get your hands on it because opportunities to buy the book are dwindling. We hear it’s a very good book, so you won’t regret it. The clock is ticking …

Happy reading,

EW

P.S. If you miss the boat, or you end up kicking yourself at the end of July because you didn’t get hold of a copy, then there is a small chance that all may not be completely lost – but more on that later.