Launch Party: Wrapping Up

Shipping out the authors' copies.

Thanks for joining us during our virtual launch party. We've posted interviews, profiles, excerpts, even one entire story on YouTube. We mailed out the authors' copies of Strangely Funny today. They're traveling from California to Israel.

No rest for the batty, however... we're starting the whole process again with All Hallows' Evil. I've sent out six acceptances so far and will be sending more in the near future.

Changes I'm making:

• There's a bigger gap in time from ordering the print copies to receiving the books than suggested by our printer. We'll allow for that in our schedule.
• I've begun making changes to the guidelines. There are three things our guidelines are supposed to accomplish: identify the type of story we want to publish, make the stories easier for me to read, and facilitate formatting for print and e-books. The last is the most difficult.
• Some booksellers only allow you to submit 20 names max as contributing authors. I was annoyed that we couldn't list all of Strangely Funny's authors, and they weren't pleased about it either. We will probably limit the number of authors we accept per anthology until that changes. Otherwise, I have to ask someone to be selfless or choose whom to leave out. Neither is a particularly satisfactory option.

Gwen and I are already discussing what anthologies we'll be publishing next year. We haven't made many decisions yet, but one of them will be Strangely Funny 2. Reading the stories and interviewing the authors was too much fun to only experience once.