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#310 Indie-credible with BookTrib

This week, we’re running a takeover in collaboration with our friends over at BookTrib. BookTrib.com is a news source for people who want to stay on top of what’s happening in the book world and discover new and emerging writers. It’s also a marketing engine for authors and publishers seeking to reach new readers. The winner of this week’s contest will receive the usual $250 prize, plus personal feedback from the good folks at BookTrib. (Your story may even be featured on their website!) Here’s the team:

BookTrib is honored to partner with Reedsy to present this week’s Prompts contest! At BookTrib, we love indie everything: indie bookstores, indie presses, indie authors, indie readers. So what better way to celebrate what we in the U.S. mark as Independence Day than with writing prompts that are all about the indie spirit?

In creating the prompts below, we aimed to capture concepts such as freedom of expression, do-it-yourself gumption, and bootstrap success — without being too thematically restrictive. We asked ourselves: What’s special about the indie publishing world? What sort of people are a part of it? And most importantly: How can we translate the indie spirit into great storytelling?

We hope you have fun exploring these prompts in your writing. Submissions can be in any genre, so feel free to adapt them to fit the time and place of the story you want to tell.

Special Update: The Results 🏆

BookTrib's top pick for their takeover was "Letters from Lucknow, 1886" by Lisa Guth. Here's what they had to say about it: "This story took the top spot due to its beautifully written prose, expertly conveyed emotions, and satisfying ending. In it, a new member of a reading group receives a mysterious book chronicling a star-crossed romance in Colonial India. Little does she know that fact and fiction, reader and writer, past and present are about to collide in an unexpected way. Perfect for fans of time-slip historical romances such as The Time Traveler's Wife and the Outlander series."

🥇 Winner

Letters from Lucknow, 1886

Lisa Guth

Winner of Contest #310 🏆

“Intercultural Book Club. Join us! Every Sunday 6pm.”The poster hung alone on a blank wall in my dorm building. As someone who had just moved in and loved novels it seemed like an easy way to meet people. So that Sunday evening, I grabbed my current read and headed to the common room.A small group had already gathered, steaming cups of tea in hand despite the lingering summer heat.“Hi, I’m Louise. Is this the book club?”“Yes! Come in. Tea?”A girl with dark curls and round glasses smiled warmly. Without waiting for my answer, she handed me a ...

63 likes

⭐️ Shortlisted

Signal Through the Noise

Shortlisted for Contest #310 ⭐️

Once again, Signal had dropped another massive content creation bomb – a new novel and its accompanying videos. Marcus stared at the notification on his screen and immediately wrote off his weekend. This time she'd branched out into historical fantasy, and people were rushing to write reviews, opinion columns, spinoffs, fanfics. Then, very likely the studios would get the rights and adapt the story to the screen. He completely understood why. For one thing, he always loved her characters. For instance, there was lonely Maintenance Unit 8, wo...

21 likes

The Writing Club

Emma Russell

Shortlisted for Contest #310 ⭐️

I couldn’t tell if the words I was typing were from me or borrowed from someone else. That’s how unoriginal I was; a mosaic of authors, pieces extracted from my favourite novels and forcefully injected into my own work. Never truly my own, simply a puzzle made from fragments of books I’d picked up here and there –a sentence I’d seen in a magazine, a quote from a non-fiction book I’d forced myself to read. At thirty-two, most successful authors had already been established, and those who didn’t make it had dropped into mundane nine-to-fives a...

20 likes

This week's prompts

Write about someone who makes a deal for viral fame — but their rising popularity comes with unexpected (or dangerous) side effects.

Dramatic – 49 stories

An indie bookshop owner realizes that a customer has stolen a book connected to an unsolved local mystery. What happens next?

Short Story – 37 stories

Your protagonist joins a mysterious group of readers and/or writers, and nothing is what it seems.

Dramatic – 44 stories

Write about someone who self-publishes a story that was never meant to be read.

Short Story – 49 stories

Center your story around a struggling author who discovers they can control reality through their writing — but there’s a catch.

Dramatic – 68 stories

Stories

Letters from Lucknow, 1886

Lisa Guth

Winner of Contest #310 🏆

“Intercultural Book Club. Join us! Every Sunday 6pm.”The poster hung alone on a blank wall in my dorm building. As someone who had just moved in and loved novels it seemed like an easy way to meet people. So that Sunday evening, I grabbed my current read and headed to the common room.A small group had already gathered, steaming cups of tea in hand despite the lingering summer heat.“Hi, I’m Louise. Is this the book club?”“Yes! Come in. Tea?”A girl with dark curls and round glasses smiled warmly. Without waiting for my answer, she handed me a ...

63 likes

Pens of the Prompters

Submitted to Contest #310

If I can get my hands on one of the Prompters' pens, I can save Anne Servago. No one knows how the murderous pens work; I suspect the Devil himself endowed them with his power, but any story written with their black ink comes true. I wrote a story where Anne Servago dies, but I didn't realize the power of the pen until Cliff Strafford. Cliff Strafford died yesterday. That's when the truth became clear. The Prompters gave me two prompts with specific character names, instructing me to end my stories with the character's death, which I did des...

36 likes

The Inherited Sentence

Anna Soldenhoff

Submitted to Contest #310

The midday sun scorched the ancient stones of Dubrovnik's Old Town as Eva Perković dragged her suitcase down a narrow alleyway off Stradun. Her sandals slapped against uneven flagstones, her shoulder ached from her laptop bag, and sweat rolled freely down her back."This is it," she muttered to herself, stopping in front of a modest stone building with wooden shutters painted sea blue.It had taken her years — and the complete meltdown of her life — to get here.Once a rising star in the Croatian literary world, Eva had published a debut novel ...

35 likes

Clickbait

Submitted to Contest #310

Astronomers cannot always predict where a meteor might strike or when the sun will next hiccup a solar flare. An omniscient narrator, however, sees all things. It is simply a matter of focus. And so when a young woman is thrown into the path of C-list fame, we do not need any particular skills to guess where exactly things might land. Bella Noone was an ordinary child by most metrics. She was pretty, and her parents and brother loved and protected her. She went to ballet classes, (with no particular distinction), and that didn’t matter. Her ...

35 likes

A spark in the wires

Penelope Stansfield

Submitted to Contest #310

Even at the age of nine, I knew there was something inexplicably different about Eugene Westcote. To all intents and purposes, he was a typical boy of our generation. Grubby knees, snotty nose, with a particular fondness for semolina pudding and lead-painted soldiers. But all that aside, a peculiar air would sometimes sweep over the boy, seemingly out of nowhere. His nature would take on a disturbing sort of other-worldliness. He would become ridiculously perpendicular, gaining inches in height, or it would appear so at least, and he would a...

29 likes

It is Written

Submitted to Contest #310

“Write it,” Casey said. “Deadline’s midnight.”“But boss, once I write it, it goes to print. And then, there’s no going back,” I said.“What’s the problem, Gordy?”“It’s just the finality of it all. This man’s going to wake up. His wife will hear. His colleagues. There’s no walking that back,” I said. “He isn’t even the big bad.”“He’ll still have a choice. That’s how this works.”“I don’t know if he does, boss. They mean to kill him.”“Peter’s living large in an Upper East Side tower, paid for with stolen retirements. No minimizing it. He’s fundi...

29 likes

The Fold Between Pages

Nate Blevins

Submitted to Contest #310

I printed ninety-nine copies. Not because of some deep symbolism or numerology, my printer jammed on the hundredth, and I didn’t have the energy to argue with it. It was a dumb little zine. Saddle-stitched. Off-white paper that smelled like an old hymnal. Stories. All fiction, technically. Which is to say: everything I couldn’t say out loud. People asked why I didn’t publish it online. Why I dropped them off in coffee shops, bus stops, laundromats. Why I wouldn’t put my name on it. I told them I was going for “mysterious author energy,” but...

28 likes

The Echo Deal

Laura Specht

Submitted to Contest #310

Tamsin uploaded her video at 2:14 AM. She stared at the screen, holding her breath..Seven views. Seven.It was excellent work too - those vintage overlays took hours. The story about that Prague subway station where people vanished? She'd researched for weeks. Added her own field recordings. Analyzed the folklore.But seven views.She cracked open warm cider, took a swig. Her eyeliner had smudged under her eyes. The ring light made her look half-dead."I'd give anything for people to finally hear me," she muttered into the can.She laughed bitter...

27 likes

HR

Maria Stavropoulou

Submitted to Contest #310

We call ourselves Hominimum Repertores. Finders of people. Our life's work is to scour the world for the right person for the right thing, one role at a time. We often sit in brightly-lit cubicles, behind screens always placed at the ergonomically approved height - top half of the screen at eye level, elbows square on the desk, back straight, knees at a 90 degree angle - and read through every little accomplishment that could pass for achievement until the candidate's past and future are as clear to us as the black Times New Roman font again...

26 likes

The Pages He Couldn't Read

Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #310

They said Benjamin Drew couldn’t spell his own name, but the words that came out of him were faster than justice and deeper than any man in that town cared to dig. He was born slow, which was the word they used in Mercy County when they meant something softer than retarded but harder than broken. His mother had fought like hell to keep him out of the institutions, but when she died, they put him in the last place that would take him—the Golden Fields Adult Living Center, a half-converted farmhouse stuck between a gravel pit and a closed-down...

24 likes

Loophole to Heaven

Hannah Lynn

Submitted to Contest #310

Loophole to Heaven I’ve often wondered about the reunion at The Pearly Gates. Are loved ones there upon your arrival to greet you, or do you have to wait around for them? Perhaps it’s like the airport where a guy is holding up a tattered sign displaying your name written with a Sharpie.What if no one shows up for you? While couples run to each other in slow motion, do you stand by and watch? You could take out your phone and idly scroll, pretending not to notice. Worse yet, what if your loved ones are actually terrible people? Are you stuck ...

23 likes

I Already Know The Title

Francis Kennedy

Submitted to Contest #310

Content Warning: This story contains graphic violence, gore and psychological horror which some readers may find disturbing. I stare at the back of her head, urging her hair to go up in flames - the smug bitch. I take a sip of my coffee without averting my gaze. She sits taking selfies with an obnoxious cup of something - a Frankenstein coffee. It took her ridiculously long to order the concoction, and she was downright nasty to the poor staff; threatening to post about the slow service to her thousands of followers. And then, had the audaci...

23 likes

The Widow’s Guide to Moving On (Sort Of)

Shirley Hartnett

Submitted to Contest #310

Day 1: The Ham IncidentFrank died at 6:17 a.m. on a Tuesday. By 10:42 a.m., someone brought a ham.It was still warm.I hadn’t even brushed my teeth. I was still wearing the sweatpants I’d slept in—correction, the sweatpants I hadn’t slept in, because no one sleeps on Day 0 of becoming a widow. They just lie there, staring at the ceiling, wondering if they’re supposed to call someone or if death notifies people on its own like some grim newsletter.The ham arrived in a foil tray, courtesy of Helen McAllister, whom I haven’t spoken to since she ...

22 likes

Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Submitted to Contest #310

He hadn’t written for years and now led a quiet, somewhat grumpy life in Chiang Mai. Once mildly famous for a debut novel in the ‘80s, he’d since produced nothing but half-finished drafts and the occasional smug email. As a 68-year-old (but only ever admitting to 55), he lived in Chiang Mai, a small city in northern Thailand. Popular with tourists, there was something exciting happening nearly every night of the week. So, his limited writing skills, such as they were, didn’t bother him - as long as his royalty cheque kept arriving. Whenever ...

21 likes

The Magdeline

Submitted to Contest #310

FirstThe water won't sleep. It harasses the boats all night long. It slaps the sides of each of them. This I do not understand. It sounds like a strap to a bare arm or leg. My heart beats so much faster. I look at all of the boats in the darkness. They are empty but sleepless. I should be asleep, but I came here. I want something to make it quiet in my head. It's so noisy inside of me. It must be like this at the temple. All those voices. Everyone I know is dreaming, but I can't. I cannot dream because I can't stop the wilderness inside of m...

21 likes

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Contest #310

This contest has ended. Thank you for your submissions.

$250

Prize money

247

Entries

103

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - Jul 11, 2025 EST

Won by Lisa Guth 🏆

Title: Letters from Lucknow, 1886

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

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