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On 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
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!
