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

An extremely brief update on progress.

Contributing authors and I have completed the complete edit on our DREAD MONDAYS manuscript, and we’re ready for galley proofs!

The image above is of a part of my 4’x8′ glass “white board” where I track various project elements. It’s what I believe will be the final arrangement of stories and sections (along with word counts for those sections) for the forthcoming Dread Mondays horror anthology (releases 10/25/2025). I just took these notes today.

I woke up at five a.m. today, finalized a galley proof, and sent it to authors.

If you’re not sure what a galley proof is, don’t worry—that’s what I’m here for. A galley proof represents the as-close-to-final version of a text as a publisher can get before getting last, non-substantive change requests from authors.

Feel free to steal or improve upon this correspondence—this is the email I sent to authors along with a galley-proof copy of Dread Mondays:

Gang.

We have arrived at the GALLEY PROOF phase of our project. Yipee!

Please aim to get back to me by Thursday, July 3^rd to allow us to get this ARC out to folks in early July rather than in early August. If you need more time, let me know, and I’ll take another careful look at your story before sending out ARCs / review copies.

To help this go smoothly, focus on three elements, if nothing else:

1. the table of contents

2. your story, and

3. your author bio

Here’s how we should do this to ensure clear communication.

1. Make a copy of this spreadsheet (or if you don’t use google suite, make a sheet of your own that accomplishes the same objectives as this one does).

2. Change the file name to include your name and story title.

3. Log any errors you find in the text by noting the page number, the present text, and what the text should say instead. Feel free to add a note if you want to explain anything. (Delete my examples when you understand the format of this sheet.)

4. Go back through your notes and consider: Do I need to make this change? If you don’t, delete your note. We want to avoid significant changes at this point and need to be on the lookout for spacing, punctuation, and word-level errors. (If you’ve found a really awful sentence, cool, let’s fix that, too, but let’s not go re-editing anything significant.)

How to submit feedback:

• Either download the spreadsheet you’ve created and respond to this email with the notes attached

OR

• Share the notes sheet with my gmail address (–) and respond to this email with a link to that shared document.

Again, our hopeful deadline here is Thursday, July 3rd. Try your best to get back to me by then or sooner.

I’ll work on those trigger warnings throughout this week, so no need to worry about that placeholder text now.

Thank you, everyone!

Steve

PS – Please feel free to review more than what’s noted above in terms of the content of this book, but I not expecting you to do so.

Here’s a page I added to the manuscript file to indicate to whomever is reading the book that this isn’t a final print version:

I have committed to dedicate my full residency time in France to my own writing, so I’m really glad to be where I am with both books releasing this fall.

That’s it!

Behind-the-Scenes Headquarters