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

You may or may not be aware that part of the machine I’ve been cranking up in support of our still-new (we turn one year old this month!) is a place on our website for publishing short works of horror fiction. It’s a small way we can find a home for those stories submitted for the anthologies that didn’t quite make the cut, so to speak—not because they aren’t good, but because they didn’t fit the tone and congress of stories just so.

We are leaning heavily into horror of the mundane for these shorts, and focusing specifically on workplaces and suburban horror. To break it down:

• January’s short was a sardonic and silly take on a middle school newsletter.
• February’s featured a dark rendition of lovers’ anniversary gifts. March’s tale had kids telling spooky stories to (or asking spooky questions of) their father.
• April’s work (from an author out of Zimbabwe, yay!) features a unique take on what I’d dub quiet dystopian workplace speculative horror.
• May will have us joining a protagonist, Scarlett the handywoman, who matches brawn and wits with a potentially haunted oven.
• June’s story was so close to the Dread Mondays anthology but I just had way too many submissions set in corporate offices—here, a protagonist faces the terrible prospect of being named employee of the year along with all of that award’s consequences.
• In July, a man gets a massage he’ll never really get over.
• In August, a female warehouse employee deals with the bullshit that comes with being a female in an almost all-male space after dark.
• September finds a character facing the sins of her father… during a zombie apocalypse!

Maintaining this element of the website has been fairly easy and fun, and it allows me a cheap avenue to offer publication (especially but not exclusively) to first-time or early-career authors. It does require time, though, and ten dollars per month in author’s fees. These aren’t nothing-considerations, given that I still won’t have any income to speak of until we launch our first two anthologies in September and October, respectively.

I have two main ways of tracking the workflow I’m about to describe: I’ve got a month-by-month checklist on a whiteboard in my office as well as an electronic spreadsheet for process notes and payment details.

The trick is building submission review, editing, and responding to queries into my monthly work schedule. I also pre-post / schedule posts on the website for future months as soon as the editing process is complete and pre-design the images that accompany each story.

On this point: Regularity is critical, so I don’t want to accidentally miss a post. Every story automatically posts at 2:07 AM on the first of its assigned month (those subscribing to the page get an automatic email containing that story, and my social media accounts automatically post the announcement I’ve set up when the story goes live; I also receive an email, so I can remember to boost for it wherever else I think to do so and so I can email the author to remind them to promote their story).

Additionally, to ease the online-publication process elements:

• I’ve used my standard “editorial comments” email to set the expectations about work process around edits.
• I use a standard “sorry, but we must pass” email template and then add to it to personalize responses to near misses.
• I have a standard boilerplate contract ready to rock that just takes a few adjustments to be fit for a given author’s specific case.

I want to be personal, personable, and considerate, but I also have to maintain a steady workflow. The balance is an important one.

I’m also thinking about submitting these stories to “best of” consideration with the Horror Writers Association juries and with Ellen Datlow, if stories submitted in our scenario qualify for each of those lists. (The ones in the anthologies definitely qualify, but I have to look into the rules and expectations to check on the online publications.)

There’s also a small chance that at some point I might reach back out to the authors who’ve had work published on the site to have that work included in an anthology of collected Whisper House Press Featured Stories. Who knows what the future might hold?

Let me know if you have any questions, folks!

Until next time.

– steve

post scriptum: Every one of these posts needs a few things: some keyword tags, the “behind the scenes headquarters” button, the note at the top, and an image I made using Canva a while back. I also need something like an “excerpt” that’ll appear with the story on the home page under its featured image, and I need text for the social posts. So if we’re going “behind the scenes” on the “behind the scenes” posts…

Behind-the-Scenes Headquarters