Episode 9: Publishing an Anthology

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Welcome my beautiful cinnabar moth or any kind of mark, you want to be to this week’s episode of The Writers Triangle. And like two weeks ago, it is storming today. So you may hear lots of booms and crashes. That can’t be helped I need to record today, looking at my schedule, so the weather is not cooperating with me. But hopefully like me you enjoy thunderstorms because I love it. And the way our apartment is situated, we’re literally in the cloud that is causing the thunderstorm. We’re not very high up. But for some reason in Nagoya, the thunderstorm clouds sit really low, close to the Earth. So they swallow up our apartment, which is kind of cool. Because you get to see the lightning that’s happening inside the cloud which I don’t know, I find interesting. But I digress. I start right off with a digression. Today we’ll be talking about creating an anthology. So an anthology is a collection of short stories, which you probably already know. It can be a single author, or it can be a group of authors. And I decided to create the winter anthology A Cold Christmas and the Darkest of Winters back in, gosh, February of 2021. And I felt like it would be a no brainer, because it was just right after winter. And I thought a lot of people would have winter on their mind is still very wintry in February, February is the coldest month in Japan, at least in Nagoya it is. And March starts to warm up a little bit. So I thought, you know, February and March would be a great month to put that call out for short stories. So how it begins, for me how the creation of an anthology begins, is like with everything I want eight months before it needs to be done. So I actually had the idea a full 11 months before it needs to be published in January. And then it was just figuring out how to get the call out there. And how to find authors and what I wanted it to be about. And I just decided I just wanted it to be about winter. And I didn’t care what genre I didn’t want erotica or faith to be either of the genres. But other than that it was open to every genre. After I had that conceptualization done, I needed to write a submissions guideline page for our website. And I had to think about, okay, what do I want the process of submission to be? What do I want the word count to be? What do I want the length of the anthology to be? And that kind of for me, was the process of starting at the end. And starting at the end means starting with what do I want the end word count to be? And then figuring out how, what would be the length for every story to hit that word count. And as I’ve shared 75,000 words is about our sweet spotL between 70 and 75,000 words. So I was like okay, I might get to be around 70,000 words. Looking at the information online, I felt was not very helpful. So I kind of just went with my gut and what works for us as a press and what which fit in with everything else that we had coming out in the year. Because online, they said anthologies can be as short as 50,000 words, and I really felt like a 50,000 word anthology would be so much shorter than everything else we had produced, that it that readers might feel cheated. So after when I was thinking about word count, and I did research online, and I saw that 50,000 to 80,000 word count. I was like, okay, that’s a really big spread, and like don’t go over 80,000. And I was like, okay, I don’t want to go over 80,000.

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And so I was thinking, what do I consider to be a short story? What length for me is a comfortable short story? And I was like 10 to 15 pages for me is a comfortable read as a short story. And I was like okay, so if I want to 15 pages, that’s going to be between 3000 and 3500 words. So I had my word count for the length of the stories that I wanted to read. I had my total that I wanted, I wanted between 70 and 75,000 words. So then you just do math. And I needed 26 stories. I needed between 25 and 26 stories. And we ended up with 25 stories, which I felt was a neater number than 26. Because I have a thing for the number five, and 25 is five times five. So I was like, okay, that feels really comfortable. The next thing to consider was did I want to create? Did I want to include line drawings for each story. It’s really typical in some circles for anthologies to have an artistic representation for each story. And I went back and forth on this, because I really wanted to. But if I’m completely honest, I didn’t want to have to contact 26 authors and get them to agree on the style of art. And get them – it just felt like too many cooks in the kitchen for me. Because picking an artist to do the 25 line drawings would not have been a problem. But having every author feel satisfied with the style of with the artistic styling of the art I felt was going to be next to impossible. And that was based on my experience with just working with three authors on book covers. At that point, I had done three book covers – four book covers, one of them had to be redone because it was not usable. And that was going based on what the author wanted and guiding and shaping the author and saying, you know what, this one doesn’t really work, it makes it – it made an adult book read as a middle grade book. And that really didn’t work. So looking at the process of doing cover art is like okay, one, the cover art needs to be fairly vanilla to incorporate the theme, and also to be representative of every book that is in the book. And incorporating line line drawings for each book, while it’s – for each story, while it is a nice touch, and usually quite enjoyable for the reader, it changes page count, it changes dimension. It doesn’t change the price of printing, because just as long as it’s a black line drawing is the same as printing words. Because nowadays, everything’s done by computers. So that was the beginning process of it was working out what I wanted in the book, what I wanted the call for submissions to be. And then writing the call for submissions was the next step because I decided no line drawing. I knew who my artist was going to be for the book cover. I reached out to them and scheduled time for them to do it. Ivan did it. He does most of our covers. And he was like sure, no problem, I’ll put them on schedule.

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And then once I put the call for submissions up to up on the website, it was really about creating buzz for it. And at the time, I think we maybe had 300 followers on Twitter. We have quite more than that now we have over over 1000 followers. But with the 300 followers, I knew it was going to be a challenge. And so I relied a lot on hashtags to amplify it. And I also used my other account, which is my private account TheMusicksInJapan, which Chad and I share together to amplify the call. And I was really lucky. We have a really tight knit group. I know. It may not seem like we have a tight knit connection with the majority of our followers because we have over 5000 followers, but we really do, and we communicate and talk with a lot of them on a regular basis. And so with that core group, we were able – they were really kind and amplified it. And then we were also fortunate enough that the authors that we had signed, amplified the call as well. So we started getting submissions in. And the submissions were amazing, just really wonderful reads. And as each time we got a submission, and we accepted it, we would tweet out the call plus the author who had submitted the story that had been accepted. And then of course, that author would retweet the fact that they had a short story accepted, which I was really grateful for, that each author did that because it really did amplify it. And then I started tweeting out a list of which authors would be in what and what order I thought the authors would be in and why we started conversations about it and created a snowball effect. As this was going simultaneously, our followers were increasing. So that increased the amplification of our voice and our ability to reach people and people’s interest in the anthology. And by then we had the first – our first book had launched, and that was enjoying some success. And people were starting to see what we were capable of as a press. Because we were having things like getting the book into libraries. And we had lots of reviews, and lots of buzz around, Not My Ruckus, which was our first book. And that was really exciting to see and to have the experience of. And we also paid 100 bucks a story. So that didn’t hurt either. Once we got all of the stories. And the stories really fell into two categories, they fell into a handful of stories that were centered around Christmas, which is what’s completely acceptable in the guidelines. And the majority of the stories were about winter, and they were either dark fantasy, horror, or dark contemporary literature or dark literary fiction, there you go. And we found the same with the Christmas stories. So we had a handful of stories that were just really great stories. But way too happy for the anthology. And that happened for about 10 authors that just wrote really, really happy stories that I wished we could have published. And I hope that they submit to the e-zine, because there’s super talented, and I enjoyed reading the stories. And I was just like, this is just way too happy, I’m sorry, there was just really no place to put them. Because all of our stories, so either dark, twisted or strange. And if it was just an ordinary day, and a happy story that really didn’t fit in with any of the other stories. Once we had all of the stories, it was time to figure out the – figure out and finalize the Table of Contents, which was tricky. I did the Table of Contents, I want to say about 10 or 15 times for what would flow for me as a reader. So I’m not sure that the readers are going to like the Table of Contents the way I did it.

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But basically, it was just how I thought the stories read best. And the opening story, I feel is the lightest story. And I wanted to make sure each story folded into the next. Some of the stories that I thought would really go well together were in different sections of the books. And I felt like it was better to keep A Cold Christmas really tight about the Christmas stories. And to keep The Darkest of Winters really tight about the stories that were just about winter rather than intermixing the stories. And if something I still – like the story is like the anthology is coming out I think it might have already launched. I think it might have already launched as I’m recording this a little bit early. I have to double check like when’s my date on this? Yeah. So I am releasing it this month. I’m recording after being at the beginning of November. And I’m like, huh, is this coming out at the end of November or the beginning? And it’s coming out in the middle of November in two weeks. Because I did – I’m doing two episodes today. So looking at that and really, I still – so the book even though it’s not published yet the book has already gone to typeset, and the book already has its cover. And I like the division. I think it would be weird for them to be intermixed, but there were some stories that would have flowed better if they had been next to each other except for the theme. And then there were other stories that really were served better by being separated by, by a different theme. And looking at The Darkest of Winter stories, there were just so many of those stories that we’re better served by being put behind a horror wall, or put behind The Darkest of Winter, like, these stories are all dark. And even the stories I thought would fit in a Cold Christmas, those stories are all dark too, really, I feel, overall, when everything is said and done, they’re better served by being separated. This is the kind of thing when creating an anthology that I kind of went back and forth on and had to really think about, and then having such a plain cover. I, I don’t know how it’s gonna sell, I don’t know, how they – how well the cover represents every single story. And I’ll be honest, I don’t think that the cover represents every single story. Because it is just a cold wintry feel on the cover. And we have such a wide variety. It’s an anthology. And I think that when people see the back cover, and read it and get that it’s an anthology. I think anthology lovers will love the book, that’s kind of how I feel about it. And I love a good anthology. So for me, when it comes to publishing and creating, I create content I want to consume. It’s the same with the podcast, I’m a huge fan of podcasts. I listen to podcasts all the time. So creating a podcast and like I would want to consume this. Creating the e-zine, I would want to consume this. Anthology, I would want to consume this. And we have another anthology coming out that I’m really excited about next year in 2022. And I feel like it’ll be interesting to see the choices, the different choices that the author gets to make because it’s a single author, versus what I had to make as a publishing house. Like one thing that they’re getting to do that I wasn’t able to do is they’re having couple of art pieces put in – not an a piece for every story, but just a few pieces put in. And it’;; be interesting to me to see the flow that they choose for the stories. As I’m reading the stories, I kind of have like a mental idea of what the flow would be. But I really want to be hands off on that – on that part. Because it’s part of the artistry, right, putting the story, the stories together.

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And I had a really fun time creating the content notes in conjunction with the authors. Because everything, that’s the content note, like every single thing that you can think of would need a content note in a book is in the anthology. And things that I never thought that I would need to put a content note in for is included in the anthology. Content notes I hadn’t even considered. And that was kind of exciting to me how how dark and, and twisted the whole thing is. Because I really like dark stories. And this time of year is personally for me a really dark time of year. And I find a lot of comfort in horror, and a lot of comfort in dark, really dark stories during this time of year. And I don’t hate Christmas. I enjoyed Christmas when I celebrated it. I don’t celebrate it anymore. Our son’s 27, and we don’t do gifts as a rule in our family. We don’t do birthday gifts. We sing Happy Birthday to each other and we might might watch a movie together or have a meal together. But it’s really we don’t celebrate birthdays. We don’t – I don’t celebrate my anniversary, like my wedding anniversary. We just don’t celebrate anything. And we used to as a family. It used to be like a huge deal. And we did extended extended family and all of that when we were in the United States, but moving to Japan, we really sort of started to guard our privacy of physical privacy quite jealously, and started to become very protective of our home and wanting privacy in our home. And I think the primary driving force behind that is the fact that our beds are in our living room. And we just like the view, I just really enjoyed the view. And don’t enjoy the bedrooms, the bedrooms out the front of the house, but that’s a digression. It is connected in that it contributed to my desire to create to create an anthology. So I really wanted to create something that was anti Christmas, something that was anti forced joy and force celebration. And the writers that – I actually I didn’t set out to create that, I would have been happy with the Happy Christmas anthology as well. It was just interesting to me that my deepest desires without any hunting or without any sort of statement, I think it kind of took a turn when Gwen tweeted at me, what do you think about horror? And I was like, I’m thirsty for a horror story. That would be awesome. And it was sort of after those kinds of tweets and people were asking, what do you think about this? And what do you think about that, and having conversations that they saw that I was open to darker stories, and they were like, cool, I have a dark winter story that I’d love to send you. And it sort of took – so I guess it did happen through conversations. But I don’t feel like it was directed, I feel like it was organic, and that I just put an open call out there. And all it said was short stories between 3000-3500 words about winter, they have to take place in winter. That was it. All genres welcome. And the horror community really responded well, and the dark writers really, writers who write dark content really responded well, and were into it. And so, that’s how the anthology came to be dark. And it was what I was hoping for. If I’m completely honest, as I said, I would have been happy with you know, merry Christmas, happy, light, fluffy stories.

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 But for me, I think it allows I think having such a dark collection of stories allows us to service the what I feel is the larger part of the world, that this time of year is heavy, that this time of year is dark. And they love to snuggle up with a good horror, it’s like very much a darker, twisted version of The Nightmare Before Christmas. And that’s why I think the Nightmare Before Christmas was so successful. Because, you know, the method and legend of Santa Claus wasn’t always built on a happy jolly person is actually built on, you know, Krampus and darker stories that are out there of where the Santa figure is like, like they said, a nightmare for Christmas, Santa Claus. And they call him Santa Claus and made that, you know, sharp teeth and claws and made him a very scary figure. And there’s room for that, you know, you see it in literature and you see it in art. I wanted everyone who’s having a hard time, this time of year to not feel alone. And to feel seen and to connect with our authors who get that this time of year can be filled with sorrow, and loss and loneliness. And I think after the way the past two years have been that this anthology is really written for everyone who’s missing someone at the at the family gathering this year, someone who, for everyone who’s just really had a rough two years. The past two years have really been tough. And I know for me personally, at the time that I was doing making the call for the anthology stories I had been isolating at home for a year. And then by the time we finalized the anthology, it had been 17 months. So from start of pandemic to time of my vaccination was 17 months. And that was a really long it was 1718 because of the double shots and it was a really long and difficult time for me and having these stories reading these stories, I did find comfort in it because the stories come from somewhere, you know. And there were some stories that was that are just really moving and speak to just how tough it is. But there are also stories, something really cool that happened. There also dark fantasy stories that are just so whimsical and ridiculous, but still have a very twisted end. And those stories, it’s like a roller coaster, right? Like it starts in it. It’s sad, and it goes down, and then it comes back up with something funny. And then it’s like, Ooh, that was chilly and dark. And sadness is the whole gamut of emotions. I hope everyone experiences the full gamut of emotions, sorrow, joy, delight, shock, or chills, thrills. I hope it’s a wild ride. And I hope everyone signs up, and they’re completely into the ride. I hope, I hope I really I trust the audience. And I think that I think that the back blurb sets a realistic expectation, I think the content note all the content notes, also set a realistic expectation of what the book is going to be. And will be including the content notes in the audio book as well. So anyone who picks up the audio book, or the paperback ebook, hard book, hardback, will have those content notes to guide them, to let them know whether or not this is something that that they should read. So I do advise, heavily, heavily advise everyone, please read the content notes, before you pick this book up and give it a read. Because it is a ride. And over the next month or so I’ll be talking about coming together, specifically the darkest of winter stories. And I’ll also be talking about the coldest of Christmas. I’m doing the darkest of winter stories first in the lineup in two weeks. And then in,

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I think four weeks, I’ll do the coldness of Christmas, because that’ll be December 11. And it just feels more organic to have the coldest of Christmas be closer to the actual holiday, if that makes sense. So what do you guys think about dark stories during the holidays? And what do you guys think about the anthology the way that I just described it? Can you let us know down in the comments? Does this sound like a book that you want to read? Does this sound like a book that you would be interested in? I’m really excited that we have several people who want to review it live, who are open to reviewing it, and they’re like this book sounds amazing. Yes, please, I would love to review this book. So that was exciting to get those review requests for the book, and made me feel like, okay, this book is this book is awesome. So we’ll be announcing on Twitter, when it’s closer to the reviews, the people that will be reviewing the book will be reviewing the anthology, and putting links to all their social and stuff. And that will happen next week. You guys know, I’ve been talking about pacing myself and not spoiling surprises, and giving every everything it’s time to breed and everything it’s time to, to marinate. And I feel like this month is really about focusing on the contributors to the easing and the cinnabar moth literary collections website. And so next month we’ll get into towards the end of this month, we’ll get into celebrating the people who are going to be reviewing because then we’ll have days for those reviews and such when we’re linking it to their social media. So yeah, stay tuned. As tag no spoilers. Everybody knows on Twitter will know that I’m like, I’d say more but spoilers. So thank you all of our beautiful cinnabar moss or any kind of math Do you want to be or you can even be a butterfly. But as I say every week I’m not Mariah Carey, and I’m not trying to bite her thing and we are cinnabar moth. Thank you for listening to the writers triangle. I appreciate your time and attention and I look forward to talking to you next week. Oh no, not next week. I look forward to talking to you in two weeks. Thank you. Bye