You may have noticed that all the anthologies on my Books page have ‘Phoenix Prime’ written on there somewhere, and even the books in my Daemonicon series have the logo on the cover. So, what is Phoenix Prime? This is the official blurb:

“Phoenix Prime is a Ph.D. level workshop that spans approximately four months. It uses applied industrial psychology to address components of writing, marketing, branding, business and contract issues, productivity, etc. that combine Creative Writing and business perspectives. The participants will create a portfolio to showcase their work alongside students in doctoral programs in several major universities. The objective, in addition to expanding the professional growth of all the participants, is to study the impact of the independent author-publisher on the commercial fiction industry.”

So, it’s a writing program. And a business program. And there was a competition in there as well.

Competition

The competition was all about pitting a group of indie writers (that’s us – Phoenix Prime) against three other groups of writers, all of whom had been traditionally trained. They were PhD students studying creative writing.

The idea was that we would all have multiple stories (like, a couple of dozen) of various lengths judged by industry professionals, including bestselling novelists, publishers and agents, and I think there was an academic in there as well. The judging criteria included everything from grammar/punctuation through to general appeal, as well as sales.

None of the judges knew who wrote what, but the expectation was that the traditionally trained writers would win over us poor, uneducated indies, and by a considerable margin.

The opposite is what happened. We indie writers won every single round. When the final scores were tallied, not a single one of the traditionally trained writers had beaten any of us.

We’re just that good.

And the overall winner? That was me. 🙂

After the competition

Phoenix Prime just keeps getting better. We’ve now got a store for our merchandise (you know, t-shirts, coffee mugs etc), and there are a few secret things that I’m not allowed to talk about.  And, of course, we’re still writing!

Look out for our logo. If you see it on a cover, you know it’ll be good!