IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m sorry to have to tell you that Philip and I stopped producing Personal Bests after Issue 5. The format worked for a while, people sent us what they considered their lifetime best story, bought copies of the Journal when it came out, and received an equal share of the royalties when they came through. But we couldn’t allow the same people to keep sending in alleged “lifetime bests” for every issue, and so we limited it to two per person and then we wouldn’t publish that particular author’s work again. We imagined an ever-expanding market, where new authors would hear about what we were doing, get something published, buy copies and tell their friends who would do the same. But what we actually found was that most authors wouldn’t buy more than one copy of a book they were in, and wouldn’t buy a copy at all if they weren’t in it. Also very few contributors really made much of an effort to involve others or publicise what we were trying to do. Both sales and submissions diminished issue by issue and the shares of royalties dipped below £10 each, at which point we decided the venture simply didn’t justify the time and effort we were putting into it. It became a bit of a pyramid sales scheme in reverse.

At present there is no point in sending in submissions as neither of us is currently involved in book or magazine production, thought we may go back to it in time. I am currently working on a third collection of my own stories and will see how I feel after that is done.

David.

Cover image by Slavko Mali

Personal Bests Journal Issue 1

The first issue of the new journal was published in August 2020 and is still available to buy on Amazon. What is different about this series? Almost everything.

To create Personal Bests Journal David Gardiner, writer and for 16 years Prose Editor of Gold Dust Magazine, asked all the short story authors he had encountered over the years and anybody else who wanted to take part to send in what they considered their lifetime best short story, whether previously published or not, and (within reason) regardless of length.

From an eventual 167 submissions David chose 31 stories for the first edition of the journal, ranging in length from 712 to 12,252 words. What did the 31 have in common? That is best described by Rob Robson, author of Caught in the Drift, in the review he wrote on Amazon:

Cover image by Robert Currie

Cover image by Ursula O'Reilly

Cover image by Mitsu Nakayama

List of Contributing Authors for Issue 1