It was not a snap decision that made the Inkerman Writers create a website to showcase their work. Indeed, it took a lot of thought.
However, now that they gone online things are starting to happen for the 30-strong group, including higher awareness of their work and a booking for a public recital.
Inkerman Writers is the generic name for writers who attend Tuesday and Wednesday night courses run by Darlington Borough Council at Darlington Arts Centre, in the south Durham town, and taken by tutor John Dean.
Covering all adult age groups, the courses concentrate primarily on prose, particularly short stories, although they do sometimes embrace poetry and scriptwriting.
Inkerman Writers as a concept developed four years ago because the writers built up a strong sense of community and started entering anthology competitions as a group.
Although the group did not win, some members have since enjoyed individual success, winning or being shortlisted in competitions and earning writing commissions for magazines and websites.
The group, who come from Darlington and surrounding areas, also reached the final regional stages of the amateur filmmaking competition run in conjunction with Bafta earlier this year, narrowly missing out on the national finals.
Members’ growing confidence led them to set up the website inkermanwriters.co.uk, part-funded by the borough council and site creators Certys Limited, of Darlington.
Containing short stories, novel extracts and poems, it is designed to showcase the group’s work and attract agents and publishers.
Group member Bill Akers said: “Being a relative newcomer to the writing group, I was impressed by the quality of the members‘ writing, which in many cases was not seeing the light of day. The idea of the website was fermented in the pub during a discussion about the difficulties of getting our work seen.
“Having stories posted on the web has provided an extra outlet for our work other than competitions or sending it to publishers, and is a means for every member to showcase their writing without fear of rejection.
“Seeing our published work provides an extra fillip to our writing, knowing other may read it and take some pleasure in doing so.”
Fellow member Masha Woollard said: “Every writer, however modest, secretly hopes to be discovered. We can’t all be JK Rowling, but the Inkerman website provides a shop window which we hope will attract the attention of the great and the good. At the very least, we get an opportunity to read the work of our colleagues and to share our own.”
Mike Watson, another group member, said: “The website is an important showcase for aspiring writers. Storytellers need an audience. If there’s no audience, there’s not a “telling” and therefore no story. If just one person reads beyond the opening paragraph, reaches the conclusion and perhaps says “hmm…I enjoyed that!” then that’s got to be worth all the perspiration put into creating the story.
“If just one person just sticks with the story to the end, then to a writer it’s an achievement.”
To ensure that people do read the work, the group embarked on a public relations campaign, sending press releases to publishers, agents, writing magazines, author’s websites, writing groups and the local media.
Bill Akers said: “Simply posting our work on the web is no guarantee it will be seen by others. Links with other sites and organisations need to be forged, the need for metatags considered and publishers and others in the business need to be approached, inviting them to view our site. This is well under way and already we have had positive results.”
One London publisher said it was impressed with the quality of writing and invited group members to submit any finished novels for consideration and a literary agent has agreed to monitor the site for new talent.
Staff at Darlington Library were also impressed and invited the group to read its work at its branch in Cockerton, a suburb of the town, on Thursday November 1.
Tutor John Dean, a published crime novelist, said: “I was delighted when the group came up with the idea of a website. I had been saying for some time that the quality of their work was of a high standard but I think the idea needed to come from them. They had to feel confident about letting other people read what they wrote.
“There is work on the site which is well worthy of being published. It‘s just a case of getting it in front of the right people.”
The concept is developing in other ways. Group member Richard McElheran advised on ways of making the site accessible to partially-sighted people, taking account of guidance from the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).
He said: “We are committed to working with RNIB and other disability organisations to ensure that the Inkerman site is accessible to people with a visual impairment. We have tested the site with the various high contrast settings available in Windows XP and it works well.
“Web publishing opens up the possibility of making the written word accessible to people who might have difficulty in reading large amounts of text in book form. Programmes like Jaws and Zoomtext can turn text on a computer disk into audio books. We are committed to making what we post on the Inkerman site compatible with these programmes.”
As group member Jenny Teale says: “The site is a work in progress at the moment and will probably change over time as we experiment with what works and what doesn’t but hopefully it will stay interesting and exciting, not only for members of the group but for those visiting it.
“Inkerman Writers is a chance to show our writing to the wider world.”
So what makes a good website?
Website designer Mark Etherington, of Certys, said: “The key thing with the site was to make it attractive, so that people visiting it would be encouraged to explore it. There had to be a sense that this was material worth reading.
“Because the people we are targeting, such as publishers and agents, lead busy lives and have little time, the site also needs to be simple to use. Hopefully, we achieved that in the design.”
He and the writing group say that a successful website should:
* be attractive
* be simple to use
* give people a chance to send in their own information and contact the people behind the site
* be vibrant – bringing in new material on a regular basis
* contain key words which make it easier to find on the web
* be promoted heavily.
