Whisper House Press

Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience

the editor

Whew! We’ve received some 150 submissions so far for our inaugural anthology, Costs of Living. Exciting!

I’ve read a lot of short stories in the last few weeks, and I’ve offered up eight contracts as of April 20th 2024.

I’ll be introducing the contributing authors after we secure a full book block (okay, I’ve been reading Debbie Berne’s The Design of Books—University of Chicago Press, 2024—and am smuggling in some lingo; I should say, rather, “…after our collection is complete”). I was shocked—shocked, I tell you—that it took this many submissions to get to an HOA story. Boy howdy, it is a good one! Hilarity! Monsters! Fines! It’s all going in there provided the author signs the contract I sent today.

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking a lot about: the author community should be extended into the publishing world. Hear me out.

I’m thinking, once I get my full slate of authors paid and signed, I will create a private group for them—a google group, a facebook group, whatever. We’re many moons from publication (think: September 2025), so perhaps we toy with this idea: authors can offer comments on one another’s accepted pieces to make them even better. We are a team, dammit. We’ want our book to win awards and dazzle our audience. I’m thinking, further, that not everyone will like this idea—authors may decline to participate, of course. But maybe there’s an opportunity to grow our writing-friend network and to bolster the success of our anthology (yes, ours) by participating in a review group (think: a step beyond a critique group) with other writers who publishing in the same collection. The entire crew could all look at one another’s stories before I give it the final editorial review and comment, since while it’s my vision that steers the ultimate thing we put out into the world, I will not pretend to be seeing 20/20.

Annnnnnd why not have a few team meetings about what we do/don’t want to do to market our book? It’s going to be a group effort, so why not coordinate a bit and take advantage of each of our strengths and attempt to compensate for one another’s weaknesses?

Is this madness? Have others done this thing and decided it was a dumb idea? Would you participate in such an effort if there were enough time to do so prior to publication?