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duckprintspressOn Saturday, Duck Prints Press hosted a Patreon panel in which I and two other members of the press with experience serving as lead editor on projects discussed how we go about doing that (Max Jason Peterson and Alex Bauer). To prepare for my role in the panel, I wrote a long, looooong document on roughly the steps I follow in roughly the order I do them for all the Press’s anthology projects. The other folks in the panel each had different sets of experiences and different procedures they’ve followed, so if you’re curious what the others do, I highly recommend watching the panel – the recording is available to all our backers at the $7/month, $10/month, and $25/month levels, as are all our old panel recordings, and for this panel, well, Max, Alex, and I were having so much fun talking about lead editing that we went almost 30 minutes over-length. I’d like to think folks who watch it stand to learn a lot about running anthologies (as I have done), lead-editing an association journal (as Max has done), and/or coordinating fanzines (as Alex has done). Max has also written a blog post about his approach, and I expect to post that for y’all once it’s been edited.
For the types of anthologies I coordinate for Duck Prints Press, the actual editing stage is only one part of planning and implementing projects that typically take us a bit over a year to take from “glimmer of an idea” to “completed book in our hands.” What follows in this blog post are the steps I go through – though some, I did the first time and haven’t done, or haven’t done as much, since, because I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re looking to run a project, you may not need to do them all, and it may make more sense for some projects to do these steps in a different order or skip some entirely. This guide is focused on how we do our story-only anthologies, though for projects that include art like our Queer Fanworks Inspired By… series, it’s fairly similar, just add “and art” and “and artists” to almost every place we talk about just stories or authors.
One thing that was very clear during our panel conversation is that finding a set of steps that worked for us each as individual creators was really important to our success, so look at what follows more as one way to handle project coordination, not as any suggestion that my approach is any way superior to any other approach. It’s just…how I do it, it’s worked for me and been refined to meet my personal and my press’s needs across dozen anthologies we’ve completed or have in progress.
Project Concept. Figure out the core concept for the anthology. For DPP, this generally means picking two to three key “every story must” concepts, in addition to “queer,” which is a given. So we might pick a genre (such as we did in Aether Beyond the Binary – stories must be in the aetherpunk genre) or a setting (such as magical coffee shops for Add Magic to Taste) or a type of relationship (such as the mlm/wlw themes for the Masquerade anthologies) or a vibe (such as fluff for Add Magic to Taste) or a “characters must be this” (such as monsters for Monsterotica). We usually pick no more than 5 “must includes” – combined, they have to result in a overarching concept narrow enough that readers will know what kinds of stories to expect and broad enough to still allow for variety. When we do five, one is always queer and another is always happy ending.
Market Research. At this stage, I do market research to see what other people are doing similar to the concept we’ve come up with. If the proposed project is too similar to others that exist, it could cause drama, reduce sales, or it might demonstrate viability (because similar projects have done well!). There are many approaches to doing this research and which makes most sense will depend on the nature of the project – for example, for a fandom zine, dig into the fandom and see what other zines are in the works, such as by searching for “fandom name” + “zine” in your preferred search engine. For a fiction project, try searching popular book retailers, past Kickstarter projects, or joining groups on Facebook, Discord, or other platforms and seeing what people there are involved in. Some questions to consider while doing this research:
Scope. Having picked a concept and assessed its viability, it’s time to figure out the nuts and bolts of what the book will contain and who you’re looking to recruit to contribute to it. I generally do scope AFTER concept because the answers to some of the following questions will depend on what kinds of stories we’re looking for, and also on the results of market research into projects with similar concepts. Some questions to consider at this stage are:
Budget. At least a basic budget is necessary to figure out the scope, as the questions just above should make clear. It’s not enough to say “it’ll cost this much,” “we’ll pay that much,” there needs to be a baseline idea of how similar projects have performed and a realistic guess of earning potential. It’s often necessary to go back to revise step 3, “Scope,” based on the results of figuring out a budget. Some of these questions, you may have answered in the first round of market research, but if not, go back and do more market research. You don’t need to have all the answers yet, but having a vague idea of them is essential to creating a realistic project that can actually be accomplished. To help answer some of the questions proposed in Scope, consider:
Feasibility. Having done all the above research and planning, establish the feasibility of the propose project aligned with all the above, then greenlight the project. Plans may need to be scaled down, or it may be discovered one has been too conservative and ideas can be scaled up.
Timeline. At this point, making the project go forward means having an idea of how long you intend to work on each step of the process – both an internal timeline (for production and such) and an external one (for contributors to consider). How to structure a timeline will depend on how you are structuring your project, of course. Because timelines for any individual project are so long, we generally have four or more projects at some stage of this process at all times (for example, right now, we are in the Planning stage for our next Queer Fanworks Inspired By project, in the Submission Review period for Monsterotica, in the Editing Period for Scholarly Pursuits, and in the Production stage for A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Duck Prints Press projects use a model in which we recruit contributors to write stories after they are selected, this is what we’re currently doing:
Title. We always aim to have a title before going public with a project, as a solid title is part of the hook. While it’s not absolutely necessary, having a title gives a project a certain degree of reality and credibility. It’s hard to convince stakeholders (potential contributors, customers, advertisers, collaborators, etc.) that the person/people putting the project together have really thought things through if the planners can’t even say “I’m working on a project and it’s called This.”
Create Recruitment Guidelines. There are a lot of considerations when figuring out who is contributing to the project, and final decisions will depend on variables such as whether the project is a fan-project or original works, who the target audience is, what contacts the planners have and networking the intend to do, and more. For example, if someone who already is embedded in author communities is planning an anthology, they may be looking at recruiting a handful of high-profile anchor authors from among their known circle of acquaintances and friends-of-friends, or the planner may have enough name recognition to reach out to fellow authors they don’t know and say, “I’m doing this, are you interested?” On the other hand, a fandom project will look toward who is involved in the fandom, and a project planned by relatively unknown people will likely only be able to pull other relatively unknown people to be the creators (though you never know!). Some questions to consider at this stage:
Prepare Recruitment Materials. Getting the word out requires at least one catchy graphic and (obviously) you’ll need rules, rules, rules. Check out the rules and guidelines for other similar projects, they’re often a great place to start. Calls for submissions for zine projects, indie publishers, even big presses, can often be found with simple web searches. You’ll also need to figure out where you’re posting these rules – social media? a wiki? a project web page? – and how you’re disseminating these materials, and how you’ll be accepting applications.
Deciding on a recruiting approach may require making new social media accounts, creating a webpage and/or wiki, doing preliminary audience building, researching how certain groups of writers usually find out about projects, outreaching to contacts, recruiting “anchor” creators, etc. There is absolutely no “if you build it, they will come” philosophy applicable to collaborative projects. While sometimes it’s possible to get a leg-up by working in a known fandom or recruiting popular anchor creators, there’s never a guarantee, and having some online presence established before hand will be necessary for most any project. Even a project that’s locally based – for example, “poetry anthology of local poets I recruit with help from the library” – can benefit from an online presence, as it helps establish credibility and gives people a place to get more information.
A strong set of rules should include:
Recruitment. Once everything is set up, open the flood gates!
Contributor Selection. Use whatever evaluation method you’ll be using to select contributors. How you’ll be doing this should be decided when you Prepared Recruitment Materials. This is what Duck Prints Press does:
Some venues will offer personalized feedback to accepted and/or non-accepted creators. Doing so is very time-consuming, so try to be realistic in what you’ll have time to do, and also understand that sending people (some of whom may be your friends) negative feedback on their work is really challenging and that some percentage of people will take it badly no matter how kind and gentle you are. Definitely weigh all that while considering who, and how often, to send personalized information.
Contracts. Every single person you work on a for-profit project with (even a for-profit zine) should have a contract. Make sure you use a good one – the sample contracts at SFWA are a good place to start – and make sure creators have time to review them, ask questions, and amend them. Make sure terms are clear and fair. Make sure that creators are working in ways legal for you to hire them (by which I mostly mean that you are working within the bounds of what legally counts as contract work/that contributors count as contractors – link is to US rules, this will vary by country), and that you have the fiscal framework – the necessary accounts and such – to transfer them the money. Pay attention to what countries they’re in, as this may impact hireability. Ideally, get a lawyer and a CPA involved.
Put Together the Anthology. With all the pre-production steps completed, you’re now finally at the fun part – actually putting together a book! Now, because Duck Prints Press doesn’t just accept stories, we diverge from a lot of other places at this stage. For the majority of anthology folks, this is the step where they take completed stories, edit them, and make them into an anthology, wham bam thank you ma’am. For us, this is the stage where the bulk of the work begins. Here’s what we do:
Determine the Book’s Technical Specifications: To proceed with putting the book together, you’ll need to know it’s technical specifications. Some of this should have been considered during the earlier budgeting phase, but now that the actual anthology is taking shape with actual stories, it’s time to make the final decisions and stick with them. Some questions to consider at this point:
Cover Art. When basic technical specifications for the physical book or e-book have been established, it’s time to pick art. For e-book-only projects, following the guidelines given in something like the Smashwords Style Guide is a solid approach, as those are fairly universal. For a physical book, this is also when to decide what style of cover one wants, if there’ll be an artist hired, if the art is wrap around, how any text on the cover will be presented, etc. Don’t use genAI. It makes you look like a hack.
Merchandise. Obviously, many projects won’t be accompanied merchandise, but if you intend to make any merch, now is a good time to sort that out. Decide what, if any, non-book stuff you’ll be making, figure out what art is going on that stuff, and work out the cost and logistics of making it. Our full process for merch is really outside the scope of this blog post, but as a few references that might be helpful to folks, here are the vendors I’m currently using/have used and would use again if appropriate to the project:
Typesetting. The cover and the interior of the book will look best if they have coordinate fonts and styles, so as the cover art comes together, it’s also good to considering how the interior of the book will look. If graphics or vectors are needed, make sure that all necessary licenses are appropriate for the project, or hire artists. At this point, you’ll also want to:
Budget Redux. If the budget hasn’t already been updated since the initial tentative budget you made early in the project, this is a good time to do so. That initial tentative budget is now months old and out-of-date and unexpected expenses always come up. I usually maintain sheets with project expenses, actual earnings/sales, and actual expenditures. Keep your vendor list handy, and remember that economies of scale are your friend – ordering more will virtually always mean your per-unit cost is lower – but also remember that anything you have left over, you’ll need to do something with (store, sell, vend, dump (DON’T DUMP), whatever it is, you’ll have to deal with it).
Prepare to Sell the Book. Sales approaches will look very differentldepending on how the book is being sold. A more traditional sales model might mean making a listing for the book on Ingram Spark or draft2digital or a similar platform and opening pre-sales. For Duck Prints Press, selling books usually means crowdfunding. Getting into the nuts and bolts of a crowdfunding campaign is a whole other can of worms and outside the scope of this already over-length blog post, but needless to say, if the lead editor/project organizer is also responsible for the “actually selling the book” part, while wrapping up all the above is the moment to get on that, especially once the cover is complete and ready to be shared. Some places even open pre-orders sooner than that, with a temporary “front cover pending” graphic.
Last Checks. Before the book goes “live” in whatever way that’s happening (privately funded advance print run, print-on-demand, warehousing, whatever), I always take a a day or three before releasing a book into the wild and look over absolutely everything, all the aspects of the typeset, ever word of every single page from the text on the cover to the “About” page and the back blurb, and make sure I haven’t missed anything. I personally tend to think we’re “ready” if the average rate I spot errors at this stage is under 1 error per page. One-per-page would be too much for actually going to print, but those are the ones I’m fixing in the last read-through, and if I’m finding that few, even fewer will slip by my in the end.
Get a Physical Proof of Your Print Book. I know it’s expensive. I know it adds time to fulfillment. I know, I know. But you never know how wrong things can go until you’ve actually seen how wrong they can go. Review the proof carefully and fix anything that needs to be fixed before any books go out to backers/buyers! E-book distributors will often have a version of a proof too; if you’re able to review something before it officially goes to customers, do so. The time to find out that something has gone wrong is BEFORE any customers have it, not when you get a pile of complaints.
Hope like heck that everything is good ’cause that was it, that was the last chance.
Books! You have books! This may mean a shipment of your prints arrives on your, or may mean launch day comes on Ingram Spark or wherever you’re getting distribution from sends it out, or that all your zine pieces are ready to go, or any of a number of other end points depending on the nature of the project, but regardless…
Congratulations, you have a book!!
Pay Absolutely Everyone. When you pay contributors, vendors, artists, editors, and everyone else involved, will depend on how you’re raising money and the terms of your contracts. Regardless, when the moment comes, pay everyone promptly. The lead editor, the person in charge of the project, gets their cut last. For me, that means that across all these projects, I’ve never taken a paycheck (I’m going to take my first this month and I’m very excited even though it’s very little money). I never said this was a lucrative job. If you want piles of cash, don’t publish books. But truly, the most important thing about this kind of work is to be a person of your word, which means making sure customers get exactly what they paid for, and making sure contributors and vendors get exactly what they’re owed. A project that fails at these two key points has failed, so do your best!
Anyway, this is an overview of a huge process and even as an overview this blog post is 5,000 words long. I focused on the planning parts, as a strong, solid, well-thought-out plan is the foundation on which a successful, satisfying project is built.
Drilling down into the actual implementation of any of these steps is a topic for future posts. If there’s an area you want to know more about, drop me an ask!
For the types of anthologies I coordinate for Duck Prints Press, the actual editing stage is only one part of planning and implementing projects that typically take us a bit over a year to take from “glimmer of an idea” to “completed book in our hands.” What follows in this blog post are the steps I go through – though some, I did the first time and haven’t done, or haven’t done as much, since, because I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re looking to run a project, you may not need to do them all, and it may make more sense for some projects to do these steps in a different order or skip some entirely. This guide is focused on how we do our story-only anthologies, though for projects that include art like our Queer Fanworks Inspired By… series, it’s fairly similar, just add “and art” and “and artists” to almost every place we talk about just stories or authors.
One thing that was very clear during our panel conversation is that finding a set of steps that worked for us each as individual creators was really important to our success, so look at what follows more as one way to handle project coordination, not as any suggestion that my approach is any way superior to any other approach. It’s just…how I do it, it’s worked for me and been refined to meet my personal and my press’s needs across dozen anthologies we’ve completed or have in progress.
Project Concept. Figure out the core concept for the anthology. For DPP, this generally means picking two to three key “every story must” concepts, in addition to “queer,” which is a given. So we might pick a genre (such as we did in Aether Beyond the Binary – stories must be in the aetherpunk genre) or a setting (such as magical coffee shops for Add Magic to Taste) or a type of relationship (such as the mlm/wlw themes for the Masquerade anthologies) or a vibe (such as fluff for Add Magic to Taste) or a “characters must be this” (such as monsters for Monsterotica). We usually pick no more than 5 “must includes” – combined, they have to result in a overarching concept narrow enough that readers will know what kinds of stories to expect and broad enough to still allow for variety. When we do five, one is always queer and another is always happy ending.
Market Research. At this stage, I do market research to see what other people are doing similar to the concept we’ve come up with. If the proposed project is too similar to others that exist, it could cause drama, reduce sales, or it might demonstrate viability (because similar projects have done well!). There are many approaches to doing this research and which makes most sense will depend on the nature of the project – for example, for a fandom zine, dig into the fandom and see what other zines are in the works, such as by searching for “fandom name” + “zine” in your preferred search engine. For a fiction project, try searching popular book retailers, past Kickstarter projects, or joining groups on Facebook, Discord, or other platforms and seeing what people there are involved in. Some questions to consider while doing this research:
- Are there any books with similar concepts?
- How parallel is this idea to what other people are doing?
- Is this different enough to be distinct?
- Will this step on toes?
- Do similar projects appear to have been successful?
- How long ago were similar projects completed?
- If there are no similar projects, are there any indications as to why not (such as attempts being made and failing due to lack of interest)?
Scope. Having picked a concept and assessed its viability, it’s time to figure out the nuts and bolts of what the book will contain and who you’re looking to recruit to contribute to it. I generally do scope AFTER concept because the answers to some of the following questions will depend on what kinds of stories we’re looking for, and also on the results of market research into projects with similar concepts. Some questions to consider at this stage are:
- How many stories will be in the anthology?
- How long will the stories be?
- How long will that result in the book being, and roughly how much will that cost to print?
- How much will authors be paid?
- How much money do we expect to be able to raise?
- How many copies do we think we’ll be able to sell?
- Will there be non-stories such as art or graphics or maps? If so, where will those come from and who is making them?
Budget. At least a basic budget is necessary to figure out the scope, as the questions just above should make clear. It’s not enough to say “it’ll cost this much,” “we’ll pay that much,” there needs to be a baseline idea of how similar projects have performed and a realistic guess of earning potential. It’s often necessary to go back to revise step 3, “Scope,” based on the results of figuring out a budget. Some of these questions, you may have answered in the first round of market research, but if not, go back and do more market research. You don’t need to have all the answers yet, but having a vague idea of them is essential to creating a realistic project that can actually be accomplished. To help answer some of the questions proposed in Scope, consider:
- How have similar projects performed?
- How much did they cost to make?
- How much did they charge buyers?
- What vendors do this kind of work, and how much do they cost, and do they have good reviews?
Feasibility. Having done all the above research and planning, establish the feasibility of the propose project aligned with all the above, then greenlight the project. Plans may need to be scaled down, or it may be discovered one has been too conservative and ideas can be scaled up.
Timeline. At this point, making the project go forward means having an idea of how long you intend to work on each step of the process – both an internal timeline (for production and such) and an external one (for contributors to consider). How to structure a timeline will depend on how you are structuring your project, of course. Because timelines for any individual project are so long, we generally have four or more projects at some stage of this process at all times (for example, right now, we are in the Planning stage for our next Queer Fanworks Inspired By project, in the Submission Review period for Monsterotica, in the Editing Period for Scholarly Pursuits, and in the Production stage for A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Duck Prints Press projects use a model in which we recruit contributors to write stories after they are selected, this is what we’re currently doing:
- Planning: one to three months, usually done in the background in bits and pieces while working on other projects. This includes all the above steps and many steps that follow, such as drafting the rules. All the steps after this, I’ll be getting into more below.
- Recruitment: up to a month, including time for pre-announcements before submissions actually open.
- Submission Review: roughly a month, though when we get a lot of applications, we may need longer. This includes several days set aside for anonymizing entries and preparing review materials.
- Writing Period: two months.
- Editing Period: six months. During this time, we also plan the entire rest of the book and campaign – cover art, interior appearance, accompanying merchandise, etc., are all prepared while we’re editing.
- Crowdfunding: around one month, including pre-announcements, cover reveals, etc.
- Production: around three months, including the time it takes funding to clear, the book and all merchandise to be finalized, orders to be placed, proofs to be reviewed, manufacturing to be done, etc. During this period, we also do preparation on received merchandise, such as putting pins on backers and individually packaging small merchandise for distribution.
- Campaign Fulfillment: one week.
- Publication: this doesn’t take more than a few days, but we generally take a few weeks off intentionally; we aim to publish our crowdfunded books roughly six weeks after campaign fulfillment, so that campaign backers get their rewards first and have some time with them before the books are available to the general public and any extra merchandise is offered for sale.
- Total: sixteen to twenty months from “okay, let’s plan an anthology” to “okay, put that book in the books.”
Title. We always aim to have a title before going public with a project, as a solid title is part of the hook. While it’s not absolutely necessary, having a title gives a project a certain degree of reality and credibility. It’s hard to convince stakeholders (potential contributors, customers, advertisers, collaborators, etc.) that the person/people putting the project together have really thought things through if the planners can’t even say “I’m working on a project and it’s called This.”
Create Recruitment Guidelines. There are a lot of considerations when figuring out who is contributing to the project, and final decisions will depend on variables such as whether the project is a fan-project or original works, who the target audience is, what contacts the planners have and networking the intend to do, and more. For example, if someone who already is embedded in author communities is planning an anthology, they may be looking at recruiting a handful of high-profile anchor authors from among their known circle of acquaintances and friends-of-friends, or the planner may have enough name recognition to reach out to fellow authors they don’t know and say, “I’m doing this, are you interested?” On the other hand, a fandom project will look toward who is involved in the fandom, and a project planned by relatively unknown people will likely only be able to pull other relatively unknown people to be the creators (though you never know!). Some questions to consider at this stage:
- Who will be the creators for the project?
- How will they be recruited?
- If the project takes applications, how will the final contributor list be selected from among applicants?
- If you’re using a rubric like DPP is, you’ll need the rubric written, including leaving enough time for co-runners/other stakeholders to offer feedback to conclude with a tool that everyone can agree on.
Prepare Recruitment Materials. Getting the word out requires at least one catchy graphic and (obviously) you’ll need rules, rules, rules. Check out the rules and guidelines for other similar projects, they’re often a great place to start. Calls for submissions for zine projects, indie publishers, even big presses, can often be found with simple web searches. You’ll also need to figure out where you’re posting these rules – social media? a wiki? a project web page? – and how you’re disseminating these materials, and how you’ll be accepting applications.
Deciding on a recruiting approach may require making new social media accounts, creating a webpage and/or wiki, doing preliminary audience building, researching how certain groups of writers usually find out about projects, outreaching to contacts, recruiting “anchor” creators, etc. There is absolutely no “if you build it, they will come” philosophy applicable to collaborative projects. While sometimes it’s possible to get a leg-up by working in a known fandom or recruiting popular anchor creators, there’s never a guarantee, and having some online presence established before hand will be necessary for most any project. Even a project that’s locally based – for example, “poetry anthology of local poets I recruit with help from the library” – can benefit from an online presence, as it helps establish credibility and gives people a place to get more information.
A strong set of rules should include:
- What applicants the project will continue.
- What the applicants must submit.
- What rules the applicants must follow, and what will happen if they don’t follow them.
- What applicants should expect from the post-acceptance process.
- How much and how selected contributors will be paid.
- Contracts and rights transparency for contributor’s submitted pieces.
- Relevant scheduling and deadlines.
- How to apply.
- Detailed, clear information on what types of stories/art/etc. the project is seeking.
- When and from where applicants should expect follow-up communication, and which communication methods they must have access to/must check regularly to ensure smooth communication throughout the project.
- Transparency on the selection process.
- Information about the entity soliciting the applications.
Recruitment. Once everything is set up, open the flood gates!
- Be prepared for people to send in questions, and give clear and consistent answers.
- Be prepared for people to ask the same questions eight times, and continue to give clear and consistent answers. Don’t let it get under your skin that you’re repeating yourself. It takes a lot of patience to do this kind of work in a way that doesn’t alienate people. Always remember that while you, as the planner, are neck-deep in this so it seems really big and important, for most people it’ll be one of eleventy billion things they are doing, and they will absolutely miss details.
- Be sure you know how you’ll handle people who violate the rules or apply even though they aren’t eligible, because things like this will always happen.
- Having some form letters and boilerplate pre-prepared can be helpful for handling the flood of communication that usually comes with a recruitment period.
Contributor Selection. Use whatever evaluation method you’ll be using to select contributors. How you’ll be doing this should be decided when you Prepared Recruitment Materials. This is what Duck Prints Press does:
- Check eligibility; contact ineligible authors.
- Anonymize eligible applications.
- Review all applications using a rubric, minimum three reviewers per submission.
- Do statistics to standardize results across reviewers.
- Add up and average all standardized reviews.
- The top rated people are accepted, because math.
- Reviewer meeting to make sure there are no red flags or issues that can be identified at this point, and no one amazing who may be getting overlooked.
- Identity “almost” people – people who almost made it but didn’t quite hit the cut off – and invite them to the Discord/encourage them to write with the Press on future projects.
- Contact all applicants and send them messages as appropriate, whether that’s rejections, acceptances, conditional invitations, etc.
Some venues will offer personalized feedback to accepted and/or non-accepted creators. Doing so is very time-consuming, so try to be realistic in what you’ll have time to do, and also understand that sending people (some of whom may be your friends) negative feedback on their work is really challenging and that some percentage of people will take it badly no matter how kind and gentle you are. Definitely weigh all that while considering who, and how often, to send personalized information.
Contracts. Every single person you work on a for-profit project with (even a for-profit zine) should have a contract. Make sure you use a good one – the sample contracts at SFWA are a good place to start – and make sure creators have time to review them, ask questions, and amend them. Make sure terms are clear and fair. Make sure that creators are working in ways legal for you to hire them (by which I mostly mean that you are working within the bounds of what legally counts as contract work/that contributors count as contractors – link is to US rules, this will vary by country), and that you have the fiscal framework – the necessary accounts and such – to transfer them the money. Pay attention to what countries they’re in, as this may impact hireability. Ideally, get a lawyer and a CPA involved.
Put Together the Anthology. With all the pre-production steps completed, you’re now finally at the fun part – actually putting together a book! Now, because Duck Prints Press doesn’t just accept stories, we diverge from a lot of other places at this stage. For the majority of anthology folks, this is the step where they take completed stories, edit them, and make them into an anthology, wham bam thank you ma’am. For us, this is the stage where the bulk of the work begins. Here’s what we do:
- Writing Period. As we accept pitches/story concepts, once creators are accepted, they need to Make The Thing. During this period, which lasts two months as we currently handle scheduling, we have one mid-way check-in and one final check-in. We look over the mid-way check-ins to make sure nothing has gone radically off the rails (it rarely has) and the final check-in is when we ask contributors to submit their stories to the best of their ability. Because DPP deliberately is structured to accommodate people who may, for any number of reasons, have challenges meeting deadlines (family concerns, ADHD, unpredictable physical disabilities, etc., etc.), we don’t necessarily penalize people for missing these deadlines, as long as communication is maintained.
- Editing Period. Once the final check-ins are submitted, we enter into an extended six-month editing period. Because we can’t possibly edit everything we receive at once, this long period means that creators who need more time have it, and we can get started immediately on the stories that are ready for review. For each of our anthologies, we have a team of editors we’ve recruited in the past from among previous contributors (how we do that is a topic for a whole other blog post), and that team divides the work and then, when each story is ready, they get passed to the lead editor (that’d be me) for the final review. Our editing steps are:
- Concept Editing: review the work for issues at the paragraph-or-higher level. We do no sentence-level or spelling/punctuation/grammar (SPAG) edits at this stage, we only look for conceptual issues that’ll require rewriting of part of the story to fix. Roughly half the stories submitted to us do not need concept editing, and most of the rest don’t require much.
- SPAG Editing: once the story is clear, conceptually, and contains everything it needs to effectively tell the author’s envisioned story, we get nuts-and-bolts on line edits. We may need several rounds of SPAG editing to get the manuscript fully polished and gleaming.
- Final Editing: the story is passed to the lead editor (always me, so far) for final review.
- Art Projects. When we include art, the process is a bit different. Artists usually need less time to complete their work, and because art has far fewer rules than fiction, we do not edit artworks for “content.” We do, however, do a review process to make sure that we think the colors will print true and that all technical specifications for printing are being met, such as size, bleed, etc.
Determine the Book’s Technical Specifications: To proceed with putting the book together, you’ll need to know it’s technical specifications. Some of this should have been considered during the earlier budgeting phase, but now that the actual anthology is taking shape with actual stories, it’s time to make the final decisions and stick with them. Some questions to consider at this point:
- Will the book be printed?
- What e-book formats will the book be produced in?
- For printed books:
- What size will the book be?
- Will it be printed in color?
- What kinds of paper will you be using?
- Will the book have special features?
- Softcover or hard cover?
Cover Art. When basic technical specifications for the physical book or e-book have been established, it’s time to pick art. For e-book-only projects, following the guidelines given in something like the Smashwords Style Guide is a solid approach, as those are fairly universal. For a physical book, this is also when to decide what style of cover one wants, if there’ll be an artist hired, if the art is wrap around, how any text on the cover will be presented, etc. Don’t use genAI. It makes you look like a hack.
Merchandise. Obviously, many projects won’t be accompanied merchandise, but if you intend to make any merch, now is a good time to sort that out. Decide what, if any, non-book stuff you’ll be making, figure out what art is going on that stuff, and work out the cost and logistics of making it. Our full process for merch is really outside the scope of this blog post, but as a few references that might be helpful to folks, here are the vendors I’m currently using/have used and would use again if appropriate to the project:
- Alchemy: we do all our enamel-ware with Alchemy. We’ve also done woven patches and custom fans.
- AnyPromo and 4Imprint: both sources for more “general” merch, the sort you’d expect at, I don’t know, a corporate retreat – logoed shirts and water bottles and pens and the like. I’ve done a couple products with each.
- Bookplate Ink: custom bookplates
- EmpowerFantasy Plush: custom plushies!
- Maryland China: did lovely custom-imprinted teaware for one of our projects.
- Printkeg: a good source for paper goods, and I’ve also gotten banners from them.
- Speculative Wicktion: custom candles! We’ve worked with him twice.
- UPrinting: we do most of our paper goods with them, currently including bookmarks, note cards, postcards, and more.
- Vistaprint: yet another good source for paper goods, though I’ve personally only used them for business cards.
- Vograce: a popular fandom choice for a lot of merch. We’ve done stickers, magnets, acrylic key chains, lanyards, and more with them.
- Papermart: not a merch vendor – this is my preferred packaging material vendor at the moment.
Typesetting. The cover and the interior of the book will look best if they have coordinate fonts and styles, so as the cover art comes together, it’s also good to considering how the interior of the book will look. If graphics or vectors are needed, make sure that all necessary licenses are appropriate for the project, or hire artists. At this point, you’ll also want to:
- Figure out work order. I usually do this randomly and then tweak it a little. Other people do it meticulously. It’s up to you.
- Front and back matter. Copyright notice, creator bios, table of contents, index, etc.
- Assemble the entire manuscript. Depending on what format(s) are being made, what this will look like will vary – what’s necessary to prepare for print isn’t the same as what’s necessary to prepare for a PDF and neither is the same as what is necessary for an ePub.
- Finalize all exterior and interior art.
- Finalizing the cover will involve getting the blurb together as well.
Budget Redux. If the budget hasn’t already been updated since the initial tentative budget you made early in the project, this is a good time to do so. That initial tentative budget is now months old and out-of-date and unexpected expenses always come up. I usually maintain sheets with project expenses, actual earnings/sales, and actual expenditures. Keep your vendor list handy, and remember that economies of scale are your friend – ordering more will virtually always mean your per-unit cost is lower – but also remember that anything you have left over, you’ll need to do something with (store, sell, vend, dump (DON’T DUMP), whatever it is, you’ll have to deal with it).
Prepare to Sell the Book. Sales approaches will look very differentldepending on how the book is being sold. A more traditional sales model might mean making a listing for the book on Ingram Spark or draft2digital or a similar platform and opening pre-sales. For Duck Prints Press, selling books usually means crowdfunding. Getting into the nuts and bolts of a crowdfunding campaign is a whole other can of worms and outside the scope of this already over-length blog post, but needless to say, if the lead editor/project organizer is also responsible for the “actually selling the book” part, while wrapping up all the above is the moment to get on that, especially once the cover is complete and ready to be shared. Some places even open pre-orders sooner than that, with a temporary “front cover pending” graphic.
Last Checks. Before the book goes “live” in whatever way that’s happening (privately funded advance print run, print-on-demand, warehousing, whatever), I always take a a day or three before releasing a book into the wild and look over absolutely everything, all the aspects of the typeset, ever word of every single page from the text on the cover to the “About” page and the back blurb, and make sure I haven’t missed anything. I personally tend to think we’re “ready” if the average rate I spot errors at this stage is under 1 error per page. One-per-page would be too much for actually going to print, but those are the ones I’m fixing in the last read-through, and if I’m finding that few, even fewer will slip by my in the end.
Get a Physical Proof of Your Print Book. I know it’s expensive. I know it adds time to fulfillment. I know, I know. But you never know how wrong things can go until you’ve actually seen how wrong they can go. Review the proof carefully and fix anything that needs to be fixed before any books go out to backers/buyers! E-book distributors will often have a version of a proof too; if you’re able to review something before it officially goes to customers, do so. The time to find out that something has gone wrong is BEFORE any customers have it, not when you get a pile of complaints.
Hope like heck that everything is good ’cause that was it, that was the last chance.
Books! You have books! This may mean a shipment of your prints arrives on your, or may mean launch day comes on Ingram Spark or wherever you’re getting distribution from sends it out, or that all your zine pieces are ready to go, or any of a number of other end points depending on the nature of the project, but regardless…
Congratulations, you have a book!!
Pay Absolutely Everyone. When you pay contributors, vendors, artists, editors, and everyone else involved, will depend on how you’re raising money and the terms of your contracts. Regardless, when the moment comes, pay everyone promptly. The lead editor, the person in charge of the project, gets their cut last. For me, that means that across all these projects, I’ve never taken a paycheck (I’m going to take my first this month and I’m very excited even though it’s very little money). I never said this was a lucrative job. If you want piles of cash, don’t publish books. But truly, the most important thing about this kind of work is to be a person of your word, which means making sure customers get exactly what they paid for, and making sure contributors and vendors get exactly what they’re owed. A project that fails at these two key points has failed, so do your best!
Anyway, this is an overview of a huge process and even as an overview this blog post is 5,000 words long. I focused on the planning parts, as a strong, solid, well-thought-out plan is the foundation on which a successful, satisfying project is built.
Drilling down into the actual implementation of any of these steps is a topic for future posts. If there’s an area you want to know more about, drop me an ask!
