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An original anthology happens in much the same way as a reprint anthology with one major exception: The anthologist asks the authors to write stories on the anthology’s theme. It isn’t always easy to reach bestselling authors, but since I’ve been doing anthologies for many years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in the business—both as a writer and as an editor. It also helps if you’ve done books in the past that the author likes, as he or she might be more apt to say, “Sure, I’ll try to write something for you.”
So before you try to sell an original anthology to a publisher, you’ve got to have a list of top-notch authors who have expressed interest in writing a story for the book. Needless to say, original anthologies are also more expensive because each author has to schedule the time to write a brand new story. Short fiction takes a lot of time and thought, and the writers will have to take time away from their novel projects, which also have deadlines. So it can be a nervous business.
Once you’ve sold the project, you let the writers know…and then you cross your fingers and hope the stories will come in. And you hope that the stories will be wonderful. That’s why anthologists choose those authors who are at the very top of their field and have great track records for quality and producing to deadline.
I’ve been lucky with anthologies because I’ve been able to get great stories from great writers…and as we all know, it’s the writers who make the anthology.
What about the anthologist…?
Well, once he has an idea for an original anthology and sells it to a publisher, then he—or she—becomes a midwife, a cajoler, and a packager.
Thank goodness for the authors!
There are two kinds of anthologies: reprint and original. The Dragon Book is original, in that none of the stories have appeared anywhere else before. They are all new.
A reprint anthology is much easier. The anthologist gathers a fistful of stories that he’s read in magazines or other anthologies that he really likes, arranges them in an order that feels right, and, voila, one has a reprint anthology. Of course, you have to have an idea for the book, a theme such as dragons or witches or unicorns, etc. (Well, not always…some anthologies are just collections of great stories written within a specified period of time.) And after the anthologist finds the stories, he then has to sell the anthology to a publisher and then acquire rights from each author or author’s estate to reprint each story.
The anthologist sends out contracts and then pays each author out of the proceeds that the publisher has paid him. Once the anthologist has turned in the book, the publisher produces a copyedited version, and galleys and page proofs, which the anthologist reads to make sure any mistakes have been corrected. The publisher hires an illustrator to produce a cover—or this is sometimes done ‘in-house’ by the publisher’s art department. And eventually, you, the reader, have a book. If a lot of people like it, the book will sell well; and the anthologist and the authors will share a percentage of the profits (royalties).
I should mention here that I’m leaving out a lot of steps, such as marketing, publicity, and so on.
Before I began today’s blog, I surfed the net a bit and found that a website called Daily Screenwriter (http://screenwriterdaily.blogspot.com) had posted a quote I gave some time ago in an interview. The funny thing is that same quote is constantly reprinted on the web—not that it’s such a great quote. In fact, it states the obvious, but maybe it’s a useful observation about the process of writing.
Here’s the oft-reprinted quote: “For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.”
And that’s absolutely true—I find the act of writing to be essentially mysterious and have spent a lifetime trying to figure it out. I get an idea, I do research, I sit down in front of the laptop and stare into a blank screen and, somehow, words appear, characters come to life, and the plot thickens, so to speak.
I’ve had characters go ‘on strike’ when I’ve tried to push them into a plot that obviously wasn’t going to work. I’ve had minor characters become major characters by upstaging everyone; and there have been times when I’m typing that it feels like I’m watching television: I see my characters doing this and that, and I just want to find out what’s going to happen next.
Now all this is very different from the process of editing an anthology. Editing is fun. It’s exciting. But it isn’t really mysterious. That’s because I’m just gathering stories that writers have created out of that mysterious thin air.
The late Avram Davidson—who wrote some of the most interesting fantasy novels and stories of the 20th Century—once said, “Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like.”
Well, although we Australians know what a wombat looks like, he’s probably right that everyone else doesn’t. But we all have some sort of picture in our heads of a dragon…a huge reptilian creature with gleaming scales that can fly and breathe fire. We also know that dragons can live in caves and greedily hoard treasure, as in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit; and they can also be wise and benevolent, like the Chinese Dragon. And sometimes they don’t have wings and don’t breathe fire. Sometimes they’re depicted as gigantic snakes or worms, and sometimes they are creatures friendly to mankind…partners in the battle against evil, as depicted in Anne McCaffrey’s bestselling Dragonrider series.
And since I’m going on about dragons, here are a handful of classic fantasy books that contain these mythical creatures:
Rogue Dragon by Avram Davidson
Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dragon Griaule sequence of novellas by Lucius Shepard
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance
Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams
Of course, you might need to do some library detective work to find some of these titles.
I’m not sure how the young adult category is defined by scholars and purists, but I think the basic difference between YA and ‘adult’ is that in YA the protagonists are…young. So trilogies such as The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials are, to my mind, YA.
I’m writing this blog while I’m writing a fantasy novel that takes place in the Italian Renaissance and is based on the strange and wonderful theories of the Gnostics. It’s an odd sensation moving from a haunted cathedral in Florence to…Dragons.
You can—should you be so inclined—check me out at my website: www.jackdann.com. You can also just Google me. Alas, you’ll probably discover that there’s a game that’s been circulating on the net for years called “The Man Who Melted Jack Dann”. (I won’t give away how the game is played, although you’ve probably guessed.) Ah, one spends a lifetime trying to create great literature and ends up being a word game! Life—or at least my life—seems to be full of these little ironies.
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