Joshua Palmatier

This is the ninth of a series of blog posts that I intend to do in order to show how I create the anthologies for Zombies Need Brains, the small press that I founded in order to produce anthologies. It's basically a behind-the-scenes look at the process, which will be covered in multiple parts. Obviously, this is only how I produce an anthology and there may be other roads to follow in order to produce one. Keep that in mind.


Here are the previous parts of the series:

Part 8: Cover: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/491810.html
Part 7: Copy Edits: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/491738.html
Part 6: Table of Contents: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/491496.html
Part 5: Editing: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/491105.html
Part 4: Slush Pile: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490870.html
Part 3: Funding: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490583.html
Part 2: Authors: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490491.html
Part 1: Concept: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490112.html


Ok, the stories have been edited and copy edited and you’ve created a file with all of the relevant information included, essentially the contents of the complete anthology when it’s printed. Now it needs to be designed, either for ebook, print, or both. Some editors and publishers do this themselves. I hire someone who has more design experience than I do to do it for Zombies Need Brains.

I usually send the copy edited file to the print designer first. (Note: This process came about after some trial and error and a sharp learning curve with the first few anthologies we produced.) The reason is because in order to get the correct dimensions for the final cover file, you need to know how many pages the print version is going to have so that you can account for the width of the spine on the cover flat. Once the print designer gets the file for the book, they begin the interior design of the book, creating a new file. This includes choosing a good, readable font for the print, choosing an appropriate font for the title, designing the chapter headers, incorporating any graphics that you have in the book into the file (such as graphics for the chapter headers, or illustrations interspersed through the written pages, etc.), formatting the pages so that everything is justified on the left and right and that there aren’t any weird spacing issues on any individual lines , making certain things are italicizes and bolded correctly, etc. The print designer is literally creating a file of exactly what each page in the final print version of the book will look like. If there is something wrong with this file, it will be wrong in the printed version.

Once I have this print-ready version of the anthology, I do what are called page proofs. I send the file to the editors and the authors for one last look. This is the LAST CHANCE for the authors or editors to make changes, and any changes they want to make have to SMALL. They can change nothing that will affect the page count of the book, so we’re talking fixing a few last typos that were missed (because there are always some), changing a word here or there, catching any weird formatting issues that cropped up during the design phase (such has paragraphs not being indented, paragraphs being indented too far, weird issues with italics and boldface, etc.). The authors of the stories are told to look at their story closely (as well as their author bio, the copyright page, the Table of Contents, and the signature page) and make certain their name is spelled right, the title of the story is correct, and report any errors they notice, because often you’ll see typos and such as soon as the story has been put into a different font or style or is showing up differently on your computer screen. I also have the editors read through the anthology looking for the same thing.

Meanwhile, the page count has been sent to the cover designer so that they can finalize the size of the cover flat file.

Once everyone has gotten back to me with their last minute changes for the page proofs, I send the file back to the print designer to make all of those changes. This new corrected file is sent to the ebook designer, who basically does the same thing as the print designer, except of course the file they’re creating is specific to the different ebook platforms. I have my ebook designer produce three types of ebook files—epubs, mobis, and PDFs. But of course there are other ebook file types out there.

In the end, what I’ll have is a set of files that I can use to produce ebooks and print books of the anthology. At this point, the only thing left to do is figure out how I want to distribute the books to the world, which is the last part of this series and this process. At least, the last part that I intend to discuss in this series.

And now a word from our sponsor:

*****************


Zombies Need Brains is currently running a Kickstarter (tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals) to fund THREE new SF&F anthologies and we need your help! We can't produce anthologies unless we can get the funding to pay the authors, the cover artists, the print and ebook designers, and the printers. That's where the Kickstarter comes in, and you, THE FANS! We've got a ton of stunning anchor authors on board, including NY Times bestselling authors and award winners. And we've got a ton of great reward levels, such as tuckerizations, signed copies of books by your favorite authors, and more! Our themes for this current Kickstarter are:

PORTALS: In the blink of an eye, the familiar disappears as you step into the unknown. What new creatures will you meet? What strange planets will you explore? Will you find happiness, or doom? Open the pages of PORTALS, the newest anthology from the small press Zombies Need Brains, and you just might find out. From wardrobes to monoliths, wormholes to fairy rings, there is a rich tradition of stories in both science fiction and fantasy that explore what happens when--by accident or design--characters are transported from one world to another. Join fourteen of today’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors as they offer fresh takes on this classic theme. Whether a routine trip or unexpected journey, each tale will explore new worlds of adventure, mystery, humor, and horror, with stories for every taste and fancy. Edited by S.C. Butler and Patricia Bray, PORTALS will contain approximately fourteen stories with an average length of up to 6,000 words each. It will include short stories by: Jacey Bedford, F. Brett Cox, James Enge, Esther Friesner, Nancy Holzner, Gini Koch, Violette Malan, Jaime Lee Moyer, and Ian Tregillis.

TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED: In our spam boxes today, we both received notices that our bank accounts required resolution, and the content of the spam contained the following sentence: "We have noticed that you need to resolve important security issues on your account to prevent temporal deactivation." Of course, our immediate thought was of a new anthology called TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED! For this follow-up to 2015’s TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, we are looking for stories that take a person, object, event, or phenomenon and somehow, during the course of the plot, “temporally deactivate” it, whatever that may mean in the context of the story. “Temporal deactivation” should refer to something more than a simple death, malfunction, or termination, and instead should touch in some way on issues of time — its flow, distortion, dislocation, etc. Edited by David B. Coe & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: C.S. Friedman, Faith Hunter, D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, Stephen Leigh, Misty Massey, Jenna Rhodes, and Edmund R. Schubert.

ALTERNATE PEACE: All too often, alternate histories are based on a battle or assassination. We’re looking for stories where change grew out of more peaceful activities…science, business, and culture. Imagine a world in which the branch point from our own was caused by scientific endeavor, social change, natural forces, or other points of divergence which don’t rely on military activity or violence. Edited by Steven H Silver & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: D.B. Jackson, Stephen Leigh, Ian R. MacLeod, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kari Sperring, Harry Turtledove, Rick Wilber.

If you'd like to help fund these anthologies, swing on by the Kickstarter at http://tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals! And share the Kickstarter with your friends, family, and total strangers! We need more SF&F anthologies!




"Portals" by Justin Adams of Varia Studios

This is the seventh of a series of blog posts that I wrote last year in order to show how I create the anthologies for Zombies Need Brains, the small press that I founded in order to produce anthologies. It's basically a behind-the-scenes look at the process, which will be covered in multiple parts. Obviously, this is only how I produce an anthology and there may be other roads to follow in order to produce one. Keep that in mind.

Here are the previous parts of the series:

Part 6: Table of Contents: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/491496.html
Part 5: Editing: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/491105.html
Part 4: Slush Pile: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490870.html
Part 3: Funding: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490583.html
Part 2: Authors: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490491.html
Part 1: Concept: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490112.html

At this point, the authors have revised their stories and sent them all back in on time! Ha, ha! But seriously, let’s say you have all of the revised stories back from the authors and you’ve got the Table of Contents all figured out. It’s now time to put all of the stories into one giant file, including front matter (things like the “Also by” page, the copyright page, the title page, the dedication, the acknowledgments, the ToC, the signature page, etc). If you’ve got an “About the Authors” section or an “About the Editors” section, add that at the end, after the stories. If you’ve got a thank you page to Kickstarters or something like that, add that in there as well. Basically, you need to create the file that will represent the book when it goes to the ebook designer and/or print designer. It should have everything in it. BUT, before you send it out to be designed, there’s one more crucial phase: the copy edit.

The best thing you can do to produce a professional anthology is to hire a copy editor to go through the entire book and look for any and all typos, grammar errors, inconsistencies, basically anything that could be wrong with the book. A professional copy editor costs some money, but it’s strongly suggested and hopefully you’ve factored the cost into your funding. No one wants to read a book that has a typo every couple of paragraphs. No one wants to read a book that has some serious formatting issue that make it difficult to read. No one likes it when there are inconsistencies from page 1 to page 200. All of these are reasons that readers will put a book down and potentially give it a bad review. They certainly aren’t likely to recommend it to a friend. A copy editor can save you from all of this.

At Zombies Need Brains, I also have the editors go through the stories and find as many errors as they can and make corrections and such using track changes. All of these changes are then sent to the authors for approval. The author can either accept the suggested changes (and once again, like the revision letters, they are only suggestions), or they can propose alternative changes that fix the problems. Once the author has signed off on all of the copy edits—from the copy editor and the editors—then the book’s file is ready to be sent to the print and ebook designers.

There are some publishers where the copy edits aren’t seen by the authors and are simply implemented automatically without their approval. This is fairly common, but ZNB would rather the author be as much a part of the process as possible, and wants the authors to have the final say on anything related to their stories. So I always try to run anything being altered in a story by the author.

The anthology is off to the print and ebook designers, which may take some time depending on the complexity of the book, how many graphics it contains, etc. Again, the editor doesn’t get this time to relax. They’ve now got to start considering the cover—both the art and the back cover copy. That’s addressed in the next part of this series.

And now a word from our sponsor:

*****************

Zombies Need Brains is currently running a Kickstarter (tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals) to fund THREE new SF&F anthologies and we need your help! We can't produce anthologies unless we can get the funding to pay the authors, the cover artists, the print and ebook designers, and the printers. That's where the Kickstarter comes in, and you, THE FANS! We've got a ton of stunning anchor authors on board, including NY Times bestselling authors and award winners. And we've got a ton of great reward levels, such as tuckerizations, signed copies of books by your favorite authors, and more! Our themes for this current Kickstarter are:

PORTALS: In the blink of an eye, the familiar disappears as you step into the unknown. What new creatures will you meet? What strange planets will you explore? Will you find happiness, or doom? Open the pages of PORTALS, the newest anthology from the small press Zombies Need Brains, and you just might find out. From wardrobes to monoliths, wormholes to fairy rings, there is a rich tradition of stories in both science fiction and fantasy that explore what happens when--by accident or design--characters are transported from one world to another. Join fourteen of today’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors as they offer fresh takes on this classic theme. Whether a routine trip or unexpected journey, each tale will explore new worlds of adventure, mystery, humor, and horror, with stories for every taste and fancy. Edited by S.C. Butler and Patricia Bray, PORTALS will contain approximately fourteen stories with an average length of up to 6,000 words each. It will include short stories by: Jacey Bedford, F. Brett Cox, James Enge, Esther Friesner, Nancy Holzner, Gini Koch, Violette Malan, Jaime Lee Moyer, and Ian Tregillis.

TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED: In our spam boxes today, we both received notices that our bank accounts required resolution, and the content of the spam contained the following sentence: "We have noticed that you need to resolve important security issues on your account to prevent temporal deactivation." Of course, our immediate thought was of a new anthology called TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED! For this follow-up to 2015’s TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, we are looking for stories that take a person, object, event, or phenomenon and somehow, during the course of the plot, “temporally deactivate” it, whatever that may mean in the context of the story. “Temporal deactivation” should refer to something more than a simple death, malfunction, or termination, and instead should touch in some way on issues of time — its flow, distortion, dislocation, etc. Edited by David B. Coe & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: C.S. Friedman, Faith Hunter, D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, Stephen Leigh, Misty Massey, Jenna Rhodes, and Edmund R. Schubert.

ALTERNATE PEACE: All too often, alternate histories are based on a battle or assassination. We’re looking for stories where change grew out of more peaceful activities…science, business, and culture. Imagine a world in which the branch point from our own was caused by scientific endeavor, social change, natural forces, or other points of divergence which don’t rely on military activity or violence. Edited by Steven H Silver & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: D.B. Jackson, Stephen Leigh, Ian R. MacLeod, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kari Sperring, Harry Turtledove, Rick Wilber.

If you'd like to help fund these anthologies, swing on by the Kickstarter at http://tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals! And share the Kickstarter with your friends, family, and total strangers! We need more SF&F anthologies!




"Portals" by Justin Adams of Varia Studios

This is the fifth of a series of blog posts that I wrote last year in order to show how I create the anthologies for Zombies Need Brains. It's basically a behind-the-scenes look at the process, which will be covered in multiple parts. Obviously, this is only how I produce an anthology and there may be other roads to follow in order to produce one. Keep that in mind.

Here are the previous parts of the series:

Part 4: Slush Pile: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490870.html
Part 3: Funding: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490583.html
Part 2: Authors: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490491.html
Part 1: Concept: http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490112.html

At this point, you now have all of the stories you intend to put into the anthology. Now comes the heart of your job: editing. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

First, of course, you need to read through all of the stories with an eye towards how you can make the story better. That’s the entire goal. And at the same time, you have to respect the integrity of the author—their style, their voice, the story that they intended to tell. You aren’t trying to rewrite their story to what YOU think it should be; you’re trying to understand the heart of the story that the author wanted to tell and figure out how to improve on what’s written on the paper. It’s rare that a story can’t be improved in some manner. Writers aren’t perfect. In fact, most writers are, in general, unhappy with the story they wrote on some level, because they had this grand vision of the story in their head, and rarely does that grand vision translate completely onto the page. (I can say this because I’ve written so much myself and it never comes out the way I imagined it in my head.) So most writers are open to suggestions for how to improve the story … as long as they recognize that you respect what they wrote in the first place.

And that’s probably the key to editing: everything you say is just a suggestion. You should phrase the revision letter that you send to each author with that in mind. What you try to do as an editor is explain where you feel there are flaws in the story—plot holes, characters acting out of character, infodumps, too much setting, too little setting, not enough worldbuilding, too much worldbuilding, etc. You need to get across to the author why you feel there is a flaw there. If they can see why you have a problem with that section, then they can figure out a way to fix it. (Note: At this stage, you are NOT looking for typos or grammar errors or small stuff that like; you’re looking for the big picture story issues—plot, structure, character, setting, worldbuilding, etc.) Sometimes I’ll offer up a few suggestions as to how I might fix it, but this is mainly an attempt to clarify what I think the issue is in that section. I don’t expect the author to use my suggestions (unless they want to). In fact, I expect them to come up with their own solution, because in the end it’s their story and they usually come up with a better fix anyway. But even then, the decision to change the story in any way is still the author’s. And they may decide that the way it’s currently written is fine and not change anything at all in that section.

Basically, you need to remember that you’re dealing with real people, who are more personally involved in the story than you are. They’ve poured their heart into the story. One of the more delicate interactions you’re going to have during the entire course of creating this anthology will be writing the revision letters for the authors. You need to get across what you think can be improved, but at the same time you can’t be completely and totally blunt about it (unless you’ve worked with the author many times already and have an understanding with them). The majority of the time, I’m dealing with authors I’ve never worked with before. I don’t know how they’d react to a short, blunt assessment of the story. So write the revision letter with the idea that you and the author are collaborators. You both have the same goal: make the story better.

Writers need to keep this in mind as well. The editor (if they’re a good editor) isn’t trying to tear your story apart. They like the story, otherwise it wouldn’t have made it to the editing stage. They simply want to polish it up, take off its sharper edges, make it shine. Yes, it’s hard to step back and try to see what the editor is trying to say, especially after you struggled to get those words down on the page in the first place, but remember that they’re trying to make the story the best it can possibly be. And also remember that, in the end, you don’t have to listen to them. A good editor simply wants you to consider what they’re saying, because they don’t have the personal attachment to the story. They have a little distance, perhaps enough to see things that you haven’t yet. The editor’s suggestions are not attacks.

Once you’ve written the revision letters, the majority of the work passes back onto the authors. You have to give them a little time to absorb your suggestions, to come to terms with them, and then come up with their own solutions. As an editor, mostly you’re just waiting for the “final” stories to come back in. But be prepared to have a few conversations with the authors as well. They may bounce ideas off of you. They may need to discuss your suggestions—either to clarify what you meant or even to disagree with you and try to explain why. Often these conversations lead to a better understanding of what the story wants to be by both the editor and the author. Throughout this process, both sides need to keep in mind that it’s a collaboration.

While the authors are working on their revisions, what the editor should be doing is considering the Table of Contents for the anthology. This is a surprisingly complicated process for most anthologies, so will be the topic of the next post in this blog series.

And now a word from our sponsor:

*****************

Zombies Need Brains is currently running a Kickstarter (tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals) to fund THREE new SF&F anthologies and we need your help! We can't produce anthologies unless we can get the funding to pay the authors, the cover artists, the print and ebook designers, and the printers. That's where the Kickstarter comes in, and you, THE FANS! We've got a ton of stunning anchor authors on board, including NY Times bestselling authors and award winners. And we've got a ton of great reward levels, such as tuckerizations, signed copies of books by your favorite authors, and more! Our themes for this current Kickstarter are:

PORTALS: In the blink of an eye, the familiar disappears as you step into the unknown. What new creatures will you meet? What strange planets will you explore? Will you find happiness, or doom? Open the pages of PORTALS, the newest anthology from the small press Zombies Need Brains, and you just might find out. From wardrobes to monoliths, wormholes to fairy rings, there is a rich tradition of stories in both science fiction and fantasy that explore what happens when--by accident or design--characters are transported from one world to another. Join fourteen of today’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors as they offer fresh takes on this classic theme. Whether a routine trip or unexpected journey, each tale will explore new worlds of adventure, mystery, humor, and horror, with stories for every taste and fancy. Edited by S.C. Butler and Patricia Bray, PORTALS will contain approximately fourteen stories with an average length of up to 6,000 words each. It will include short stories by: Jacey Bedford, F. Brett Cox, James Enge, Esther Friesner, Nancy Holzner, Gini Koch, Violette Malan, Jaime Lee Moyer, and Ian Tregillis.

TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED: In our spam boxes today, we both received notices that our bank accounts required resolution, and the content of the spam contained the following sentence: "We have noticed that you need to resolve important security issues on your account to prevent temporal deactivation." Of course, our immediate thought was of a new anthology called TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED! For this follow-up to 2015’s TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, we are looking for stories that take a person, object, event, or phenomenon and somehow, during the course of the plot, “temporally deactivate” it, whatever that may mean in the context of the story. “Temporal deactivation” should refer to something more than a simple death, malfunction, or termination, and instead should touch in some way on issues of time — its flow, distortion, dislocation, etc. Edited by David B. Coe & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: C.S. Friedman, Faith Hunter, D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, Stephen Leigh, Misty Massey, Jenna Rhodes, and Edmund R. Schubert.

ALTERNATE PEACE: All too often, alternate histories are based on a battle or assassination. We’re looking for stories where change grew out of more peaceful activities…science, business, and culture. Imagine a world in which the branch point from our own was caused by scientific endeavor, social change, natural forces, or other points of divergence which don’t rely on military activity or violence. Edited by Steven H Silver & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: D.B. Jackson, Stephen Leigh, Ian R. MacLeod, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kari Sperring, Harry Turtledove, Rick Wilber.

If you'd like to help fund these anthologies, swing on by the Kickstarter at http://tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals! And share the Kickstarter with your friends, family, and total strangers! We need more SF&F anthologies!




"Portals" by Justin Adams of Varia Studios

This is the third of a series of blog posts that I wrote last year in order to show how I create the anthologies for Zombies Need Brains. It's basically a behind-the-scenes look at the process, which will be covered in multiple parts. Obviously, this is only how I produce an anthology and there may be other roads to follow in order to produce one. Keep that in mind.

Once you have your theme nailed down [see http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490112.html], and you have some or all of the authors lined up (unless you’re doing an anthology where you find the stories purely through an open call) [here http://jpskewedthrone.dreamwidth.org/490491.html], the next question you really need to ask yourself—and it’s the most important question of all really—is how you’re going to fund the anthology. There are TONS of costs involved in an anthology. Producing one isn’t even remotely close to being cheap. Not if you want a professional-looking product in the end, anyway. And Zombies Need Brains is all about producing professional-quality books. Here are some of those costs laid out for you:

Payment of the authors: No author wants to work for nothing. If you can figure out a way to pay them something, do so. ZNB has a policy that we will always pay the authors a minimum of what SFWA (the Science Fiction Writer of America) deems professional pay. Right now, that’s 6 cents per word. If it goes up, we’ll increase what we pay. But whatever you decide to pay the authors, and whatever they agree is fair, YOU NEED TO PAY YOUR AUTHORS! On time. No excuses. ZNB is proud that we’ve been prompt with advances and royalties since we started and we intend to continue.

Payment to the cover artist: Your anthology really needs good cover art. Readers can spot Photoshopped covers from across the bookstore and the general reaction to them is, “Not a quality cover, there can’t possibly be quality stories inside.” This may or may not be true, but books are unfortunately judged by their covers. You need to invest in high quality cover art, and you need to pay your cover artist. The same principles apply here as for the authors above. And no, good cover art isn’t generally cheap. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be exorbitant either. But it’s another cost you need to factor into your funding.

Payment to the ebook and print designers: Again, what the ebook and print books look like on the inside MATTERS! It pays to pay someone to do a professional job on both. And again, this costs money and needs to be factored into your funding. Same principles as authors and artists.

Payment for a cover designer: Same principles as above. Pay for quality cover design. You want the book to stand out on the shelf, right? That doesn’t all come from the cover art. The title, back cover copy, etc. are all important as well.

Payment of editors and copy editors: This is starting to sound redundant and you probably get the point, but again, PAY FOR QUALITY SERVICE! No one wants to read a book with grammar errors and typos every two sentences. Hire someone to find and fix all of those errors! You want to put out the best product possible.

OK, enough of that, you get the idea. Quality matters. Pay for it. But HOW do you pay for it? Well, if you’re independently wealthy then this is a mote point, so you should just skip to the next step in this process. However, I’M not independently wealthy. Which means that I needed to find a way to raise the funds for these project dreams of mine. If you happen to have an “in” with a traditional publisher, perhaps you can sell the idea to one of them, or even perhaps a small press. Basically, for both of these, you’re going to have to pitch the anthology theme to them, along with any authors you have lined up, and perhaps they’ll be interested enough to offer you a contract. (This is how Patricia Bray and I sold our first two anthologies—AFTER HOURS: TALES FROM THE UR-BAR and THE MODERN FAE’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING HUMANITY--to DAW.) Another simple (HA!) way is to get a loan—from a bank, from a friend, whatever. I have no experience with this, so leave that to you to figure out. I chose not to do this because I fear debt and don’t want to “owe” anyone anything, whether it’s a bank or my mom or a friend or whatever. So if you don’t just have the money, or you’ve pitched it to a publisher with no success, and don’t want to get a loan, what’s left? Thankfully, we have this new social entrepreneurial (holy s**t I spelled that correctly on the first try) thing called crowdfunding. Seriously, ZNB would not exist without crowdfunding. Ten years ago, what I’m doing now would have been impossible. So:

Crowdfunding: This is what we’re doing right now in an attempt to fund three new anthologies. Basically, you work up a write-up of your theme and your authors (if you have some) and you post your project on one of the crowdfunding sites out there, such as Kickstarter (what we use), Indiegogo, Patreon (if the project fits), GoFundMe, etc. Then you hope your project gets funded. Trust me, this is no cakewalk. There are hundreds of factors playing into whether a crowdfunded project succeeds. One of the reasons I think ZNB has been so successful (although we haven’t succeeded with all of our projects) is that we have the anchor authors helping us reach a large number of people. And that’s key. You need to reach a large audience, and hope they’re excited enough about the theme to hand you some money to make it happen. If you’re going to rely on just your friends and family to fund your project with crowdfunding, then why aren’t you just asking them for a loan? Besides, don’t you want to reach out the fans anyway? Don’t you want the book to get into their hands so they can read it, love it, and talk about it to other fans? The only way to do that is to somehow figure out a way to go BEYOND your own friends and family. I use the help of my anchor authors and the contacts that I’ve made through attending conventions, through my own published novels, through the previous Kickstarters I’ve run, etc. I’m slowly building up an audience that knows and trusts ZNB. But that takes effort and work and a ton of stress. When you start from scratch, it’s going to be difficult and you really need to plan ahead.

How can you get word of your project out there to others? Anchor authors, of course. Write a press release and send it to your local newspapers, radio stations, etc. Join some forums online ahead of time that might be interested in your project and participate in those forums; then when the project goes live, talk it up in the forums. Same for chat rooms, groups on Facebook, Yahoo!, etc. Go to conventions and talk about the project with people you meet in a friendly, casual way. All of these things need to be worked out AHEAD OF TIME, not after you’ve started the crowdfunding. It takes preparation and planning and, again, hard work.

There are also crowdfunding companies out there that attempt to specialize in bringing backers to your projects. ZNB has not used any of these companies, so you certainly don’t NEED them, but if that’s the route you want to go, then let me just say: be careful. Many, MANY of these companies are just scams. Do your research, find out about the company, look at some of the projects they say they’ve helped, contact the people running those projects and ask them how it was working with that company. Basically, make absolutely certain that the company is legitimate. Otherwise you’re wasting your money and your time. (As an aside, as soon as you start your crowdfunding campaign, you are going to be deluged with these companies contacting you—by message, by email, by phone [yes, phone]. Prepare yourself ahead of time.)

In the end, you need to find a way to get the money to make this anthology happen, and again, this is the most difficult and stressful part of the project. If this doesn’t happen, the project is dead in the water. Treat the funding of the anthology seriously, whether it’s getting another publisher to back your project, getting a loan, or using crowdfunding. In a beautiful world, we wouldn’t have to worry about the money, but we just don’t live there.

Let’s now take a breather and say the stress of funding the project is over. You’ve got the money, you’ve got the theme, you may even have some, none, or all of the authors lined up and ready to go. What’s next? Well, this is an anthology, isn’t it? You need STORIES. The next two posts in this series will be about reading that slush pile (if you have one) and then editing those stories once you’ve got them in hand. Stay tuned!

And now a word from our sponsor:

*****************

Zombies Need Brains is currently running a Kickstarter (tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals) to fund THREE new SF&F anthologies and we need your help! We can't produce anthologies unless we can get the funding to pay the authors, the cover artists, the print and ebook designers, and the printers. That's where the Kickstarter comes in, and you, THE FANS! We've got a ton of stunning anchor authors on board, including NY Times bestselling authors and award winners. And we've got a ton of great reward levels, such as tuckerizations, signed copies of books by your favorite authors, and more! Our themes for this current Kickstarter are:

PORTALS: In the blink of an eye, the familiar disappears as you step into the unknown. What new creatures will you meet? What strange planets will you explore? Will you find happiness, or doom? Open the pages of PORTALS, the newest anthology from the small press Zombies Need Brains, and you just might find out. From wardrobes to monoliths, wormholes to fairy rings, there is a rich tradition of stories in both science fiction and fantasy that explore what happens when--by accident or design--characters are transported from one world to another. Join fourteen of today’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors as they offer fresh takes on this classic theme. Whether a routine trip or unexpected journey, each tale will explore new worlds of adventure, mystery, humor, and horror, with stories for every taste and fancy. Edited by S.C. Butler and Patricia Bray, PORTALS will contain approximately fourteen stories with an average length of up to 6,000 words each. It will include short stories by: Jacey Bedford, F. Brett Cox, James Enge, Esther Friesner, Nancy Holzner, Gini Koch, Violette Malan, Jaime Lee Moyer, and Ian Tregillis.

TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED: In our spam boxes today, we both received notices that our bank accounts required resolution, and the content of the spam contained the following sentence: "We have noticed that you need to resolve important security issues on your account to prevent temporal deactivation." Of course, our immediate thought was of a new anthology called TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED! For this follow-up to 2015’s TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, we are looking for stories that take a person, object, event, or phenomenon and somehow, during the course of the plot, “temporally deactivate” it, whatever that may mean in the context of the story. “Temporal deactivation” should refer to something more than a simple death, malfunction, or termination, and instead should touch in some way on issues of time — its flow, distortion, dislocation, etc. Edited by David B. Coe & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: C.S. Friedman, Faith Hunter, D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, Stephen Leigh, Misty Massey, Jenna Rhodes, and Edmund R. Schubert.

ALTERNATE PEACE: All too often, alternate histories are based on a battle or assassination. We’re looking for stories where change grew out of more peaceful activities…science, business, and culture. Imagine a world in which the branch point from our own was caused by scientific endeavor, social change, natural forces, or other points of divergence which don’t rely on military activity or violence. Edited by Steven H Silver & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: D.B. Jackson, Stephen Leigh, Ian R. MacLeod, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kari Sperring, Harry Turtledove, Rick Wilber.

If you'd like to help fund these anthologies, swing on by the Kickstarter at http://tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals! And share the Kickstarter with your friends, family, and total strangers! We need more SF&F anthologies!




"Portals" by Justin Adams of Varia Studios

This is the first of a series of blog posts that I wrote last year to show how I create the anthologies for Zombies Need Brains, the small press that I founded in order to produce anthologies. It's basically a behind-the-scenes look at the process, which will be covered in multiple parts. Obviously, this is only how I produce an anthology and there may be other roads to follow in order to produce one. Keep that in mind.

So the first step in creating an anthology--at least a themed anthology, like the ones Zombies Need Brains creates--is to come up with a concept. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Ideas are a dime a dozen and can be found on every street corner. The problem is that not every idea will actually work as an anthology theme. There are some key aspects to the idea that need to be present in order for the anthology to work.

First, the idea has to have an immediate "cool" factor. There are two main reasons for this--it needs to appeal to writers and is needs to appeal to readers.

An anthology is, of course, composed of short stories and in order to get good short stories to fill your anthology, you need to have an idea that appeals to writers. When you give your elevator pitch for the theme to an author, their eyes need to light up and they need to say, "Oooo! That's cool! I already have an idea for it!" That initial idea they have is probably too cliche or obvious, but the key fact is that your theme must seize a writer by the throat with its awesomeness and squeeze the creative juices out of them. If you propose your theme and the writer sits back and says, "I need to think on this to see if I can come up with something, I'll get back to you," then the anthology has already failed. If you can't inspire the writers to write stunning stories, then you won't be able to pull the readers in either.

And that's the second thing about the theme's "cool" factor: it needs to draw in readers. You want people to buy the anthology, don't you? Well then, it better have a theme that makes readers sit up and say, "That rocks! I must have this anthology!" If you give the reader the elevator pitch, they need to immediately ask, "Where's the book?" Otherwise, it's never going to sell.

But a stunning "cool" factor isn't enough either. Your theme needs to be focused and broad all at the same time. It can't be too narrow, because then you'll end up getting a set of stories that are all exactly the same, and no one wants to read an anthology of story after story where they all involve exactly the same characters, set-up, setting, or outcome. There needs to be some room for variety, for the authors to interpret the theme in different and unique ways. For example, an anthology about werewolves with vampire lovers and an aversion to the night and the moon. You might get a few good stories with that theme, but once you put fifteen of them together in an anthology, they're going to start to sound repetitive.

At the same time, it can't be too broad either. If it's too broad, you'll end up with stories that are wildly different and perhaps have no cohesiveness to them at all. At that point, you may as well just say you're collecting random SF&F stories for the anthology. The themes needs to be narrowed down enough that there's some uniqueness to your anthology, something that makes it stand out on the shelves, but leave enough room for some variety between the stories. Again, this uniqueness should be part of the "cool" factor.

I think the Zombies Need Brains anthology CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE: STEAMPUNK VS ALIENS had such a theme--aliens invade a steampunk Earth. Focused but broad. As soon as Patricia Bray and I mentioned "steampunk vs aliens," most writers got all wide-eyed and you could see the idea engine spit out smoke and start churning. I don't think anyone we asked said they'd have to get back to us on whether they wanted to participate. Same for the readers. I think that's why that first Kickstarter we ran actually made its goal; readers were drawn in instantly by the concept. I see it happening again and again at the dealer's tables I set up for ZNB at cons. At the same time, the idea is broad enough that writers have some room to play with the idea. We never specify whether the aliens or the steampunk society wins. We never said what kind of aliens invade. This left a lot of leeway for the writers to get creative, which in the end gave as an extremely broad spectrum of stories. Variety is the spice of life, as they say.

So, coming up with a good, solid concept for your anthology is the first step. Once you have that idea nailed down, you're ready to move on to the next step: collecting authors and/or stories. That will be the topic of the next blog post in this series. In the meantime, here's a message from your sponsor:

*****************

Zombies Need Brains is currently running a Kickstarter (tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals) to fund THREE new SF&F anthologies and we need your help! We can't produce anthologies unless we can get the funding to pay the authors, the cover artists, the print and ebook designers, and the printers. That's where the Kickstarter comes in, and you, THE FANS! We've got a ton of stunning anchor authors on board, including NY Times bestselling authors and award winners. And we've got a ton of great reward levels, such as tuckerizations, signed copies of books by your favorite authors, and more! Our themes for this current Kickstarter are:

PORTALS: In the blink of an eye, the familiar disappears as you step into the unknown. What new creatures will you meet? What strange planets will you explore? Will you find happiness, or doom? Open the pages of PORTALS, the newest anthology from the small press Zombies Need Brains, and you just might find out. From wardrobes to monoliths, wormholes to fairy rings, there is a rich tradition of stories in both science fiction and fantasy that explore what happens when--by accident or design--characters are transported from one world to another. Join fourteen of today’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors as they offer fresh takes on this classic theme. Whether a routine trip or unexpected journey, each tale will explore new worlds of adventure, mystery, humor, and horror, with stories for every taste and fancy. Edited by S.C. Butler and Patricia Bray, PORTALS will contain approximately fourteen stories with an average length of up to 6,000 words each. It will include short stories by: Jacey Bedford, F. Brett Cox, James Enge, Esther Friesner, Nancy Holzner, Gini Koch, Violette Malan, Jaime Lee Moyer, and Ian Tregillis.

TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED: In our spam boxes today, we both received notices that our bank accounts required resolution, and the content of the spam contained the following sentence: "We have noticed that you need to resolve important security issues on your account to prevent temporal deactivation." Of course, our immediate thought was of a new anthology called TEMPORALLY DEACTIVATED! For this follow-up to 2015’s TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, we are looking for stories that take a person, object, event, or phenomenon and somehow, during the course of the plot, “temporally deactivate” it, whatever that may mean in the context of the story. “Temporal deactivation” should refer to something more than a simple death, malfunction, or termination, and instead should touch in some way on issues of time — its flow, distortion, dislocation, etc. Edited by David B. Coe & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: C.S. Friedman, Faith Hunter, D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, Stephen Leigh, Misty Massey, Jenna Rhodes, and Edmund R. Schubert.

ALTERNATE PEACE: All too often, alternate histories are based on a battle or assassination. We’re looking for stories where change grew out of more peaceful activities…science, business, and culture. Imagine a world in which the branch point from our own was caused by scientific endeavor, social change, natural forces, or other points of divergence which don’t rely on military activity or violence. Edited by Steven H Silver & Joshua Palmatier, it will contain approximately 14 stories with an average length of up to 6000 words each. It will include short stories by: D.B. Jackson, Stephen Leigh, Ian R. MacLeod, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kari Sperring, Harry Turtledove, Rick Wilber.

If you'd like to help fund these anthologies, swing on by the Kickstarter at http://tinyurl.com/ZNBPortals! And share the Kickstarter with your friends, family, and total strangers! We need more SF&F anthologies!




"Portals" by Justin Adams of Varia Studios