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

A few days back, I sent a note to all contributing authors asking for their participation in a recorded video call that we can use for promoting the anthology (Costs of Living). In the past few days, I’ve had something like 18 or 20 of our authors make appointments via a doodle poll I sent out. Today I did the first two interviews.

The point of this post, like every one I make, is to give folks a view of the process of putting producing and distributing this anthology. In this case, I ran into a few snags in the first few minutes that put me into a mild panic as the google meeting wouldn’t let me record without upgrading my account, and my zoom platform just wasn’t working at all (login errors where I’ve literally never had login errors before).

My first interviewee was forgiving and kind, and she let me work out those kinks and held tight while I did so. I wound up upgrading my google account. I figured it’s worth the 12 bucks (the monthly fee), since I wanted a surefire way of getting these recordings done—and they’ll mostly all be done in a month, so if I don’t want the account after that, I can downgrade.

The interviews themselves went very well, and I’m excited to get into this. I’ve noted some of the questions I’ve asked each author (I intend to ask everyone the same basic series of questions / offer the same prompts):

• Please introduce us to you as a writer. What have you published, and what’s your writing career look like? Help us get to know you.
• Who are you reading? Which authors/books would you recommend right now?
• Introduce us to this story. We don’t want spoilers, but for those who have read and enjoyed your work in this anthology, we want to give them a peek behind the curtain. What ideas inspired you to write the story?
• When you tell people that you like to read and write horror, what does that word mean to you? Can you give us your working definition of the word horror as a genre concept?
• What drew you to submit to the Costs of Living call for submissions? We’re an unknown entity, so I know we’re not on everyone’s list. What caught your attention about our call. (And how did you hear about the call?)
• What’s next for you? What are your goals for the coming year? What are you working on?
• Is there anything I’m forgetting—anything you want me to ask you?

As I carry out these interviews, I don’t expect this list to change much. The videos on the whole will be stronger as a group if the pattern stays pretty similar, I think.

Next I’ll be working over the raw footage, editing, and planning a release schedule for these videos on our new youtube page.

I don’t expect the videos to cause the page to explode in popularity, but I look at the marketing efforts I’m doing as a kind of ecosystem of effort, such that when someone googles the project and wants to know more, there’s a lot there for folks to find and get into. And I’m thinking into the future, too. It’ll be good to have a backlog of author interviews on our page.

Now I’m wondering: Do I need to get people to sign release forms specifically for this video, or does the email invitation plus their opting in, given that explanation, suffice? Oy vey.