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Episode 37 – Spec Fic Anthology Kickstarter with Colin Coyle
Colin Coyle returns to the show to talk about a passion project of Colin Coyle and Parvus Press, the crowd-sourced IF THIS GOES ON anthology (kickstarter running through June 28), edited by Cat Rambo (president of SFWA) and featuring original short political spec fic stories by thirty authors.
Political climate:
2016 Presidential Election
Muslim Ban
Vice Charlottesville documentary
In IF THIS GOES ON, contributing authors were asked to go 20-200 years from now, purposefully taking the current policies and climates to the worst extreme to communicate to audiences, “This is what we need to avoid.”
One or two of the stories are clearly political, but some are Gibson-esque time travel, character driven sociopolitical, or explore stored memory.
Parvus Press received 260 submissions for the anthology during the 90 day submission window.
Colin explains it’s pretty easy to tell, even just from the cover letter, when someone is trying to shoe-horn an existing piece into the theme.
A posse of slush readers was started by Cat Rambo and the submission call went out. All submissions submitted were reviewed without any identifying information so that the work was considered on its own merit alone.
The stories got a ranked pass based on relevance to the theme and quality of the story. It’s important for a slush reader to recognize there was something to a story even if they don’t know what it was. Each story was read by two of the slush readers then reviewed by Cat Rambo.
An advantage of anthologies is that not every story has to appeal to every reader who picks up the book, so Colin was able to put some different kinds of stories in there even if they were a risk, because he was confident there’s something in there for everyone.
IF THIS GOES ON involves a variety of tones and viewpoints as they explore the same ideas.
When you ask people how bad could it get in the next thirty years, multiple entrants came back with themes of us being reduced to eating “man’s best friend” (eating fido).
The first round was pretty high-level because of the budget and timeline, with only final notes and edits made rather than a developmental edit as a novel published by Parvus Press might receive.
Now, Parvus Press is fully committed to printing this book, but is running a Kickstarter campaign to help offset the extra costs involved since IF THIS GOES ON was added to their 2018 catalog somewhat last minute (after the Charlottesville marches). If the Kickstarter is successfully funded at their goal of $10,000, the anthology will cost about the same to produce as a normal novel (roughly $5,000). (Pretty please, back now to help keep Rekka’s next novel on track!)
If the funding reaches stretch goals, Parvus Press will be able to pay their initial readers a bonus for their time, and the stretch goals go up from there until they’ve shipped a copy of the book to members of the House of Repre...
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Colin Coyle returns to the show to talk about a passion project of Colin Coyle and Parvus Press, the crowd-sourced IF THIS GOES ON anthology (kickstarter running through June 28), edited by Cat Rambo (president of SFWA) and featuring original short political spec fic stories by thirty authors.
Political climate:
2016 Presidential Election
Muslim Ban
Vice Charlottesville documentary
In IF THIS GOES ON, contributing authors were asked to go 20-200 years from now, purposefully taking the current policies and climates to the worst extreme to communicate to audiences, “This is what we need to avoid.”
One or two of the stories are clearly political, but some are Gibson-esque time travel, character driven sociopolitical, or explore stored memory.
Parvus Press received 260 submissions for the anthology during the 90 day submission window.
Colin explains it’s pretty easy to tell, even just from the cover letter, when someone is trying to shoe-horn an existing piece into the theme.
A posse of slush readers was started by Cat Rambo and the submission call went out. All submissions submitted were reviewed without any identifying information so that the work was considered on its own merit alone.
The stories got a ranked pass based on relevance to the theme and quality of the story. It’s important for a slush reader to recognize there was something to a story even if they don’t know what it was. Each story was read by two of the slush readers then reviewed by Cat Rambo.
An advantage of anthologies is that not every story has to appeal to every reader who picks up the book, so Colin was able to put some different kinds of stories in there even if they were a risk, because he was confident there’s something in there for everyone.
IF THIS GOES ON involves a variety of tones and viewpoints as they explore the same ideas.
When you ask people how bad could it get in the next thirty years, multiple entrants came back with themes of us being reduced to eating “man’s best friend” (eating fido).
The first round was pretty high-level because of the budget and timeline, with only final notes and edits made rather than a developmental edit as a novel published by Parvus Press might receive.
Now, Parvus Press is fully committed to printing this book, but is running a Kickstarter campaign to help offset the extra costs involved since IF THIS GOES ON was added to their 2018 catalog somewhat last minute (after the Charlottesville marches). If the Kickstarter is successfully funded at their goal of $10,000, the anthology will cost about the same to produce as a normal novel (roughly $5,000). (Pretty please, back now to help keep Rekka’s next novel on track!)
If the funding reaches stretch goals, Parvus Press will be able to pay their initial readers a bonus for their time, and the stretch goals go up from there until they’ve shipped a copy of the book to members of the House of Repre...