The Writing and Marketing Show
The Writing and Marketing Show
The Art and Strategy of Anthology Creation
What happens when life throws you more curveballs than you can catch? After a year filled with personal challenges like a house flood, a fire, and a painful arm injury, I'm back to share my journey and triumphs. Despite these setbacks, I've successfully launched a new cozy mystery anthology under my Scott and Lawson imprint, bringing together the creative talents of 12 remarkable authors. In this episode, we'll explore the fascinating world of anthology publishing, dissecting different models—whether contributors are paid upfront or earn royalties. We'll unravel the strategic decisions behind whether an anthology should stand alone or become part of a series, and how branding plays a crucial role in these projects.
Publishing a Christmas-themed anthology involves more than just stringing stories together. I reveal the meticulous process of editing and formatting with vellumpub, adding unique touches like snowflake ornament breaks to create a magical reading experience. Discover the importance of author bios, blurbs, and even a festive recipe to enhance the book's appeal. We'll discuss our distribution strategy for both e-books and paperbacks, how pre-orders can boost visibility, and the pricing tactics ensuring fair compensation for all contributors. Wrapping up, I offer a heartfelt thank you to our listeners and invite you to stay connected through Patreon and social media, eager to see you join us next week for more engaging conversations.
Hi and welcome to the Writing and Marketing Show brought to you by author Wendy H Jones. This show does exactly what it says on the tin. It's jam-packed with interviews, advice, hints, tips and news to help you with the business of writing. It's all wrapped up in one lively podcast. So it's time to get on with the show podcast. So it's time to get on with the show. And welcome to the Writing and Marketing Show. This is episode 199 with author entrepreneur Wendy H Jones.
Speaker 1:As always, it's an absolute pleasure to have you join me here Now. It really is a pleasure today because regular listeners to this show will know that I haven't recorded anything for several months and there's been a number of reasons for that. Firstly, my house was flooded and I thought I would be back in by January, february at the latest, and it's taken a year for everything to be sorted out and me to get back. And this was a flood that wasn't really that bad, but it's been absolute nightmare dealing with companies. But anybody that's flooded or has a fire or anything, I absolutely feel for you because it just goes on and on and on and is extremely stressful. But to add to that I actually had. I was staying with my cousin and his house went on fire. So we had to bounce around from different places place to place, and we were moving every four or five days. We were all right, don't get me wrong. We had a roof over our heads, but it was still quite stressful and we were doing that for months. Then I was staying with my cousin again and his dog pulled me over. And when the dog pulled me over it smashed my arms completely, smashed my arm into four pieces, my top of my humerus. I had to have an operation, pin and plating and a bone graft, and it looks like I will be heading for a shoulder replacement. So it's been a very stressful year and the podcast had to come to a hiatus, because sometimes you just need to decide what is important and put some things aside for a season, which is actually what happened to me. So it's been a tough year.
Speaker 1:Really, have I managed to get anything done at all? Well, I have, actually, and this is why I'm coming back to the podcast today. One I was planning on coming back to it anyway. Two, I've released a cosy mystery anthology today under my Scott and Lawson publisher imprint, and I have published 12 other authors, and it's been an exciting time, I have to say, and working with the authors.
Speaker 1:So today I want to talk to you about writing anthologies. I thought that would be a really good topic writing anthologies because I've worked on a few anthologies where I've actually been a contributor and nothing to do with the publication, and then this will be my second anthology where I was publishing the anthology. So I thought I would give you some hints and tips about what can be done when you're publishing an anthology and also when you're contributing and how it all works together. So, first of all, what type of anthology are you going to write?
Speaker 1:I've done two different types of anthologies or should I say publish, not write? I've done two different anthologies. One was a nonfiction anthology and with the nonfiction anthology, what I did was paid the contributors for their chapter. So they were paid outright and then they kept they could keep the copyright, but they were paid outright for their chapter, and then they don't get any royalties because they were paid upfront. Now I'm not saying that was a massive amount, but everyone that was in it was happy to do it and they were paid. They were paid fairly for their work, which I really believe in. I 100% believe that authors should be paid for their work and I as a publisher, am 100% behind that and I don't ask them to contribute to anything or anything like that. They're all paid in one way or another. My second anthology excuse me, I've got a frog in my throat today as well. Another, my second anthology excuse me, I've got a frog in my throat today as well.
Speaker 1:The anthology that released today was a different model. That was a cozy mystery anthology and the authors, the contributing authors, will actually receive royalties from this, and I will receive royalties as well, obviously, as the publisher and one contributing author. So there's two different types, two different models, two different types of anthology. With the nonfiction anthology, what I did was I did six chapters of it, so it was about developing your creativity. It was called Creativity Matters and I contributed several of the chapters. Then I paid people for their expertise. So I paid someone for historical, I paid someone for drama, for writing for children's the children's market. Now I appreciate I write for the children's market and I probably could have done it myself, but I got a children's publisher and author to do that chapter. So I used that as a method of getting expertise in for the areas that I felt I couldn't do it quite so much justice, and that worked extremely well. And, as I say, the book is called Creativity Matters and it's for writers or people who want to be writers.
Speaker 1:I'm not really going to be talking about that today, but the things that I am talking about now, from now on will be for both anthologies, because they work both ways. So the first thing you need to do is decide is this a series or is it a standalone anthology? So both of mine were series. The non-fiction was in the Writing Matters series and the first one of my Cozy Mystery anthologies is the first in a new series called A Right Cozy Crime. So these are going to come out regularly. They're going to be Cozy Mystery anthologies and I've started a new series with this and we'll come to the branding for that in a moment. So A Right Cozy Crime is what it's called.
Speaker 1:Then you have to decide where you're going to start, how you're going to title the different books in it, because, again, it's part of your branding. You need to get your branding right right from the get-go. So I decided the Right Cozy Crime series. The books were going to be called A Right Cozy Christmas Crime, and then the next ones will be called A Right Cozy Historical Crime, a Right Cozy Culinary Crime and anything else I come up with in that series and the branding as part of the branding. So brand your series from the get-go. That's my first tip. You should be thinking about this before you even move forward with the anthology what your branding is going to be and what your overall series title is going to be.
Speaker 1:So that was easily done and I then pitched to. I didn't pitch, sorry. I asked people to pitch to me. They had to pitch their stories to me. Now the first one is actually everyone that's in it was a member of my Sisters in Crime UK Europe chapter. Now that was just easier because we were starting out, but in the future it's going to be opened up to everyone and I will probably use Submittable. So people had to pitch their ideas to me and then they were chosen to be in the anthology and we did have 14 people but one person dropped out and that's important to remember that people might drop out for various reasons. One person decided that she had an extremely busy year and wouldn't be able to put enough into it to do the story and get it out on time. So there are now 13 people.
Speaker 1:Then you have to decide what your word count is. Now I was in an anthology last year, or was the year before, and in that anthology the word count was up to 12,000 words per person. Now you've got to remember if you're publishing a book and every person has 12,000 words, with 10 people, you're going to have 120,000 words. That's a lot of words for an anthology. So you really need to think about your word count. So, because I was having 14 people in this anthology, I said 5,500 words, which meant that we had a manageable page count in the end. Because if you've got 120,000 word anthology, yes, it's massive, yes, it looks good, but it's going to cost a lot to get printed and to distribute and nobody's going to make any money out of it. So it's really important that you think about word count, not just oh, I'd like every story to be up to X. You need to think about if every story is up to X, what is that going to be in terms of the word count in the long run? So there's more to think about than you first imagine.
Speaker 1:So you then need to give clear guidelines to your authors If you want them to pitch to you, you need to give them clear guidelines as to what the anthology is about, the overall topic, and you need to give them an idea of the word count so that they pitch correctly. And what they usually do is there's two ways, again, that can be done. They can just pitch you the idea or they can pitch you the entire story. Usually it's they pitch you the entire story. They send the entire story to you and it's chosen or it's not chosen. And if you've got one that's written you've got some that are written then you can have them ready to go, and that's important. If someone is, if yours is the first one that goes in and it's say it was the right cozy culinary crime and yours is the first one about a chef that is working in hollywood, then you'll probably be with good shout. If your story is good. But then if somebody else sends it in with that, you're going to be saying, well, we've already got someone like that, that type of story, so it's not suitable. Anyway, I'm straying. So you need to give very clear guidelines to the people who will be submitting to you so that they know what you're expecting. You need to give them very clear guidelines as to the timing as well, and giving clear guidelines is key to all of this.
Speaker 1:So what I did was I set down key dates of when I would expect everything to happen. So the key dates were the first not the first draft that they write, but the first draft that they sent to the publisher needed to be in by X date. Then I said that it would need to be edited by X date, and what I did? I did peer editing, so everyone that was in the anthology edited someone else's. Now, before you think I haven't done any editing, that's not the case at all. They did get edited and proofread by me as well, but in the first instance there was peer editing. So they swapped with the person they were meant to be swapping with and they worked on their anthologies. They got feedback and they worked on their anthologies. Then I said they had to be returned to me, the publisher, by Y date, and that's what happened. They got them back to me.
Speaker 1:Now I'm very strict on dates. I remind people, I give them a two-week reminder, I give them a one-week reminder, then I give them a daily reminder. If they don't get it in by that date, then we're going to look at whether they should really be in the anthology. But again, that's up to you. Now I did have a couple of people who, for personal reasons, weren't able to get it in and they wrote to me and explained and said that something major had come up in their life and I fully understand that at the moment. So I gave them an extra week.
Speaker 1:You know you do have to build in some flexibility, but you can't just keep pushing back the date because it delays it for everything and everyone else and that isn't fair. Now mine got delayed slightly by two weeks because of my broken arm. I was in hospital, I was very unwell, I was in a lot of pain and I was being sick, so there was no way I could have done an anthology. So that's my next point Actually build in some leeway just in case there's something goes wrong and it needs to be delayed slightly. Now I'm not saying build in months, but at least a couple of weeks leeway is helpful. I think the publication date was delayed by about a week in the end with everything. But you do need to build in some flexibility. So be clear with your dates, let people know, remind them when you want everything in.
Speaker 1:Then, when it came into me, I read all the stories and did a bit of tweaking. I'm not talking major tweaking here, I'm talking the odd grammar mistake here, the odd sentence restructure, because it didn't just quite make sense. It wasn't a lot, it was very minor, and everybody got a chance to say that they were okay with that. I then formatted the book, and I did this using vellumpub. Now this is a Mac based program. You can use Atticus and other ones like that if you have a PC and I made sure that I edited it and not edited it, sorry formatted it and made sure it was an absolutely top notch document. I added, all in all, the other bits to do with books. One of the things that you need to remember is that you need to ask for bios from people. You need to ask for blurbs for people. So the way I structured it was I actually did a page that had the blurb, the chapter title and the blurb, then the story started on the next page and then it finished with their bio. So everything flowed like that through the whole book.
Speaker 1:I made sure that the book, everything, looked good. I put for the ornamental breaks. I used a little snowflake, because this is a Christmas book. So it's just those little added touches that can help lift the book up and make it look extremely professional, make it look as though a thought has gone into it, and that's what we wanted. So I made sure there was acknowledgments, there was coming soon, and I even threw in a Christmas recipe for snowball cheesecake. That's because most cozy mysteries have a recipe in it somewhere and in my story there was a chocolate not chocolate, sorry a snowball cheesecake. So it got added in and then I finished with coming soon. So make sure your layout and your formatting is up there with the best, that it looks good. I then sent.
Speaker 1:Once I'd done that, I sent the chapters and what they looked like in the paperback book to all the authors While they were looking at it. I was doing a final proofread of every single chapter. I went through it all and did a final edit and proofread. Then they sent back if there was anything that needed changed. Now, at this point I did make it clear that things couldn't be changed Like I want to change this bit of the plot. It was literally spelling, grammar and punctuation. At that point there wasn't much. There was two or three things, but things will always slip through. Once I'd made all the changes there, I gave it yet another read through for proofread and then you send it for publication and you need to decide whether you're going to go wide, whether you're going to have paperback, just e-book. I decided I was having e-book and paperback and it would be wide, and what I mean by wide is it's not just going to be on Amazon, it would be available on every other e-book distributor and it would be available to bookshops worldwide and also libraries, which I did. So everything was completed.
Speaker 1:The last thing you need to decide is do you want to put it up for pre-order? So I decided that, yes, I did want to put it up for pre-order. So it's up for pre-order now and it will come out on the 1st of November. I just like the neatness of it. And also, if you do pre-orders, any pre-orders will count towards where you go on the charts on the day it comes out on the 1st of November. So anybody that pre-orders it will come out then.
Speaker 1:So what else do we need to think about? You need to think about price. Do you want special pre-order pricing or do you want your price to be the same. What price point are you going to do? Well, I wanted it for 70%, because we've all got to make money out of it, so I did it for £3.99. The first one that you can do is £2.99. That's pounds, by the way. The first one you can do is £2.99 for 70%. But I did it at £3.99 because there are 13 authors that need to be paid, obviously. Then it will go up to £4.99 after the pre-order phase.
Speaker 1:So that was for the e-book, the paperback. I did it for £10.99. Now, the reason it's £10.99 is, if I did it for any less than that, none of the retailers would let me actually, or distributors would let me upload. So Amazon wouldn't let me upload because you wouldn't make enough money. Ingramspark wouldn't let me upload because you wouldn't make enough money. Mark wouldn't let me upload because you wouldn't make enough money. So that's the way I did it, no-transcript.
Speaker 1:And then you need to think about promoting it. Now, the ideal thing about having an anthology is, instead of one person promoting it, there's 13 people promoting it. Now for Christmas, a lot of people want paperbacks and, as of today, I'm still waiting for the paperback to go through the approval process, but I'm sure it will be through the approval process by tomorrow, process by tomorrow, and then we will be able to start to sell the paperbacks. We'll be able to sell author copies, and that's the other thing you need to decide how are your authors going to get author copies? Now, I'm not going to tell you how much I'm charging my authors for author copies, because that's private and I need to keep that close to my business. But obviously when you sell author copies, the publisher makes a little bit of money off of those as well, because otherwise we're not going to make any money and the publisher has all the outlay.
Speaker 1:And I had the out. What did I have outlay for Cover? I went to Kathy Helms of Avalon Graphics who did me the most phenomenal cover, and we're going to go back to branding because she showed me a series branding for it and it was absolutely outstanding. She's got the whole thing bang on Her creativity and the way she grasped what this was about. I could never have done that. It was absolutely perfect. So she has a series branding and a book branding and I'm obviously paying for the cover. I'm paying for some promotional stuff, I'm paying for a paid blog tour and I'm paying for some other things to promote the book. So when 13 people are promoting it, you're going to make a heck of a lot more money than if there's only one person promoting it, because you're going to get it out by 13 people.
Speaker 1:So who are the authors in my book? I want to give a shout out to them because they're all most of them are award-winning authors in their own right and they're all best-selling authors. So we have Linda Mather, sue Cook, melicity Pope, marta M McNair, sheena McLeod, pauline Tate, julia Fancelli-Clifford, diane Ascroft, gillian Duff, stella Oney, alex Grayson and Sophie Smythe, and they were amazing. They did a brilliant job. Their stories are excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them all and they have got their work in when it was meant to be in and they were absolutely superb. And they were also superb when things went wrong for me, because obviously they have got everything in on time and then I'm delaying it slightly. But they understood that sometimes life happens, major things happen in life and you take your eye off the ball for a couple of minutes, but other than that you know everything went to plan.
Speaker 1:Follow the guidelines. If someone said I am looking for cozy culinary crimes and they need to be 5500 words long, then do that. The other thing you can do is follow the formatting guidelines. If the if handing it in, you're told to do, um, just double line spacing and no other formatting, follow that. It makes it easier for for the publisher because they're obviously looking at what happens with that when they actually format it as a whole and they may have different ways they do it. So follow any of the formatting guidelines.
Speaker 1:Make sure you stick to the word count. Word count is crucial. If you say, well, I can only get it in 7,000, I'm sorry but the publisher doesn't want 7,000. They want 5,500 or whatever they've asked for. You know you have to look at your story and make cuts, make changes in order to get it down to the word count.
Speaker 1:Publishers are not saying they want a word count just to be difficult. They're saying we want a certain word count because they have worked out the word count for the book as a whole based on the number of authors that are invited to actually publish in the anthology. They're not doing it just to be difficult. They need to make sure that the series works together. They need to make sure that the printing costs are not going to be so astronomical, that you have to sell the book for 20 pounds, which nobody's going to buy. So they have a plan, they have a vision for this and that vision includes the word count. If there are dates that things need to be in, absolutely make sure your dates are in. You get them in on those dates.
Speaker 1:As I say, most publishers have built in a little bit of flexibility. So if they actually say, well, you know, we can give you an extra week, that's fine, use the extra week to get it in. If you keep putting it off and putting it off, you'll find that your story doesn't end up in the book because the publisher needs to think of all the authors in the anthology. They can't delay the publication because, remember, they're doing it not only for one author but for a number of authors. And they're doing it not only for one book but a series of books. And they will have the other series planned out and will be having authors submitting so that that can come out on time. But if one's delayed, the next one's going to be delayed. So you could be inconveniencing not just inconveniencing it's, you could be stopping the publication for hundreds of authors down the line because of the way everything works out.
Speaker 1:So it's very important really to stick to what is asked and, as I say, publishers do understand that life happens. But sometimes you know you need to put the pedal to the metal, as they say, or the metal to the pedal, or whatever way round it is. I can never remember and try and bring it out because it can't just get delayed ad infinitum, as they say. So the other thing is enjoy the process. It's an absolutely brilliant process. It's lovely being in an anthology.
Speaker 1:The excitement and the buzz is great because there's other people are excited and buzzing alongside you and that's important. You've got other people to bounce ideas off of. You've got other people who are excited. You've got other people who are creating a buzz about it. So share the other authors' posts, Share their names, say you're excited to be in with them in different things and just give the other authors a shout out and make sure you do your part in promoting the book, because it only works if every single contributor um promotes. If you, if every single contributor doesn't promote one, it's not getting as much exposure as it should do. And two, it's not fair on the person who um, it's not fair on the others, it's not fair on the other authors, because they're doing their bit and you should be doing yours as well. So I hope all this has helped you. It's certainly um, I've loved it. I've loved every step of the way. I'm so proud of the authors in this anthology. They've done a fantastic job. Their stories are outstanding and I would highly recommend that you take a look at the book and you can either buy an e-copy or a paperback If you like.
Speaker 1:Festive cozy mysteries. This one hey, I'm going to brag, this one is brilliant. I know it is because my authors are all brilliant. I know it is because my authors are all brilliant. So thank you for listening. I will put the details in the show notes of how you can buy the book. You can buy the paperbacks everywhere paperbacks are sold when it goes through the process. You can buy the e-book via I'm going to use a books to read link, which means that it will take you to the retailer of your choice, and I will put those in the show notes.
Speaker 1:So that's it for another week. I'll be back next week, I think I'll be talking to Biba Pierce, who writes mysteries, and we're going to be talking about writing Christmas books. As far as I know, that may get slightly delayed, in which case I'll have a different guest for you next week, but I'll be here with a guest. Forgive me please for the lack of podcasts for the last several months, but I hope you'll understand that life has been a bit difficult. So thank you once again, have a great week and keep reading and keep writing, and I will see you soon.
Speaker 1:That brings us to the end of another show. It was really good to have you on the show with me today. I'm Wendy H Jones and you can find me at wendyhjonescom. You can also find me on Patreon, where you can support me for as little as three dollars a month, which is less than the price of a tea or coffee. You go to patreoncom forward slash, wendy H Jones. I'm also Wendy H Jones on Facebook, twitter, instagram and Pinterest. Thank you for joining me today and I hope you found it both useful and interesting. Join me next week, when I will have another cracking guest for you. Until then, have a good week and keep writing, keep reading and keep learning.