People Eating People Update

First: If you've sent me a submission and I haven't responded. QUERY NOW!

As it stands, we're gonna have a nice collection of stories that vary wildly in genre and tone. I'm only waiting for one piece that I solicited to be done.

As far as a launch date, I'm thinking probably mid to late September. I could launch earlier, but I was planning on sending the completed anthology out for review. Some places, like Publisher's Weekly, require you to submit your work one month before launch for them to review. And reviews are what we need to bring attention to the work, whether they be negative or positive. It's a cannibal anthology, expect negative reviews. Don't freak out about them. If you see one on a site, leave a thankful comment. You'd be surprised at how that affects reviewers.

I'm hoping to have a cover reveal in the next couple of weeks. I saw a couple of preliminary sketches that were very good but didn't really fit any of the stories. So the artist decided on a scene from Frank Larnerd's short story and is working on that now. He wanted to do something with steampunk and Frank's story provided that fodder.

A note on diversity: There's not much of it. I got about equal submission from male and females and acceptances went to more males. That's not because I'm partial to male work, it just happened to fall that way. I'm a first time anthologist who's not offering a lot reward for work, so my submission pool was smaller than most. It's hard to represent diversity from such a small pool.

I have no idea about the race or sexual orientation of my writers. If they'd like to tell me, fine. If not, that's fine too. I do know a couple of folks submitted from outside the US and had names that aren't frequently associated with caucasians. But of the 2 or 3 I got I really didn't think the work fit. I wished it had. International flavor would have been nice.

At first, I was leaning towards an ebook only release. Now I'm starting to change my mind. The book won't be a weighty volume and printing through Createspace should allow me to set a price under $10 quite easily. If that's possible, I'd like to do a paperback version. I think the art's gonna turn out great and art helps sell paperbacks more than ebooks (Actually I just made that up but it sounds true.)