Riverside Writers' Anthology

There is a last-minute alteration to be made to the front cover, which has been professionally re-designed by Ken, who’s not even a member of the group but a work colleague of Andy Siddle’s. We thought we’d done a good (joint-effort) job of the cover until we saw Ken’s version, complete with trim marks and an altogether more polished layout, so we’re really appreciative of his contribution.

The cover sports the group’s new badge logo, which has RW in an oval. The design concept for this came from Peter Caton, then I tweaked it on computer. It is simple but functional, which complies with the standard rule-of-thumb for successful brand design.

Carol Falaki contributed the lovely seagull image for the front cover, which invokes West Kirby’s seaside atmosphere. The anthology meetings were held in Peter Hurd’s lovely Mexican-themed apartment, which has enormous windows overlooking the mouth of the River Dee. And Riverside Writers meet in West Kirby - hence the seaside theme of the front cover.

Andy Siddle has done a huge amount of work on the layout, taking the various submissions and adapting them from Word onto a PDF file, and then altering all the typos etc., which several volunteers had spotted while proofreading. Now everything is printer-ready - apart from the slight change to the cover which we’d like.

The anthology was created by volunteers from the group, and it was very much a group project. Anyone could have joined in if they’d wished to. Details of how to submit work and how to take part were repeatedly supplied verbally at meetings, by printed handouts, by email and also on the group’s MySpace website.

Maybe next time we compile an anthology - and we already intend that there will be another - a different set of volunteers could oversee the project.

The printers say they’ll need about two weeks to complete the job. After that, the anthology will be available for the public to buy at Riverside Writers’ events and several local outlets (TBC.)