Publishing an Anthology in Two Months

I've asked Andrew MacRae, Editor in Chief of Darkhouse Books, to tell us a bit about how he and his team made the decision to produce an anthology aimed at the upcoming presidential election, and pulled together an anthology in two months, from call for submissions to release on October 1, 2016.

KM Rockwood

Publishing an Anthology in Two Months

Or

Are you insane?

The genesis for our new anthology of short stories, We’ve Been Trumped! sparked into being in the early days of this past August. That was when Donald Trump, Manhattan businessman and presumed political neophyte, seized control of the Republican Party and became their candidate for President of the United States.

We did a quick search on the title and found it hadn’t been used for a book, at least not yet. (We did find an MP3 recording by Oxley’s Midnight Runners with the same title. You’ll see it when you search Amazon for “We’ve Been Trumped”. One of these days we’re going to download it and check it out.)

But we also found that Trump-Lit is a quickly percolating genre–and at the same time, one that is, probably, doomed to a short shelf life. Rapid development was necessary if we were to join the throng and publish by October 1, our self-inflicted deadline. We got to work.

First, we crafted our call for submissions. We set the story length range between 2,500 and 5,000 words, though we would consider stories shorter and longer than those lengths. (More on this later.) We asked for stories that were about life under President Trump, but not about the gentleman himself. (Ditto) We warned authors that, because of the onrushing deadline, only minimal edits would be made, and proof copies would not be available prior to publication. Not stated in the submission call, but already decided, was that further in the interest of a quick turnaround, we would forgo writing an introduction for each story, or a general one for the book. While practical, that was a surprisingly difficult decision to make and keep.

We posted our call for submissions on Duotrope, Creative Writers Opportunity List (crwropps,) Facebook, and other avenues, including notifying authors whom we have already published–several of whom have stories in this anthology. Submissions began arriving within hours. And so did the complications.

The first was story length. We received stories as short as fifty words, and as long as nineteen thousand. Most of them ran under three thousand. It became clear that this anthology was going to have a large number of stories in it to meet our 65,000 word target for the volume. With 250 words per page as an average, that would result in a book 260 pages long.

The second complication we encountered was that a majority of those submitting stories could not help using Donald Trump as a character. This became apparent within two weeks of opening the submission period. Accepting reality with great reluctance, we modified our submissions call and removed the Trump Exclusionary Clause.

Submissions closed on September 15. We had already read most of the stories by the closing date and were able to rank them, select the lineup, and let authors know the results within two days. Twenty-nine stories were selected, for a total word count of just over 65,000.

Readers of the table of contents will recognize many names, but there are too many to list in this post. However two authors require special mention, as they are part of Writers Who Kill. KM Rockwood’s story, A Phone Call to the White House, under the pen name of Pat Anne Sirs, might be considered a descendent of Bob Newhart’s one-sided telephone calls, while Warren Bull’s story, The Wall, is a short, snappy vignette with a lasting bite.

Multiple activity tracks commenced at this point. The cover needed finishing; the stories needed arranging and editing; the book’s structure needed designing and setting up for both paperback and ebook. By some miracle all were done in time for our release on September 30, one day ahead of schedule.

Paperback copies of We’ve Been Trumped! may be ordered through Amazon or your favorite bookstore. (Hand them the ISBN number, 978-1-945467-05-9, and suggest they consult their Ingram catalog.) Ebook editions are available for Kindle and Nook, and hopefully soon, Kobo.

Finally, in closing, we’d like to thank all the authors who contributed to this anthology.

Andrew MacRae

Editor in Chief

Darkhouse Books