Fellow Worldbuilders!    (Our instructions for the anthology)


Instructions from our head Worldbuilder...TRM, aka "Dark Lord"......

Jeremy and I have had a chat about the proposed Alliance of Worldbuilders anthology. This is what we feel we should do. 

1. The anthology will be a combination of flash fiction (up to 1,000 words) and short stories (up to 5,000 words) to showcase a range of skills. 

2. The genre will be any form of worldbuilding: fantasy and sci-fi in the main, but with any added flavour, be it horror, romance or anything else. 

3. The contributors who have been most active on the thread will be given priority to prevent a free-for-all, but in order not to let anyone in particular swamp the anthology there will be a limit of one “short” and two “flashes” per contributor. We should easily produce a dozen of each, which together will constitute a full novel-length book (72,000 words max). If there’s more material, we’ll consider a sequel. 

4. Contributions are called for the end of December with a cut off of end January, with a view to edit through to March and launch in April 2012. Contributions should be in Word documents or equivalent and emailed to Jeremy, who will collate a master document for editing and formatting purposes. 

5. The editorial board will comprise Jeremy and me, with any other volunteers. I think K A and Sam have put their hands up, or at least failed to take a step back. 

6. The pieces should all be stand-alone works, not extracts of novels or other works in progress, so as not to affect the publishable nature of those works in progress. Previous FFF entries are allowed. We can use worlds and characters from our existing works, as this project is a means of introducing our other works. 

7. The anthology will be an e-book to start with, but a print run will be considered if there is enough interest, judged on Twitter traffic and Facebook likes. Jeremy can organise all this through his publishing company. The ebook will be distributed free as a non-commercial venture, via Smashwords and Kindle. All contributors will grant Jeremy, as the publisher, non-exclusive One-time Electronic (World Wide Web) Publishing Rights. All rights remain with the contributors who are free to publish their pieces elsewhere should they so wish at any time. This should have the least impact on anyone who is under contract, but those people should check with their agents / publishers in any case. We’ll look into the niceties in due course. 

8. The ebook will be published by a collective: “The Alliance of Worldbuilders”. Jeremy can ensure we are all individually registered in the ISBN registry, but the ebook itself will have no author billing except for individual story attributions within the body of the ebook. 

9. All contributors will provide a 50-100 word biog to be placed after their stories or at the end of the ebook, and there will be hyperlinks to author pages, blogs etc. 

10. We’ll investigate getting some artwork in the ebook as well as on the cover, but we also propose “fan art” pages as part of the promotional effort. And we should all take part in the promotional effort with blogs and tweets and likes, and we’ll try to coordinate getting reviews in reputable literary magazines and review websites. 

11. I’m bracing myself to write an introduction, but it would be nice if we could get a notable outsider to do some kind of frontispiece. 

12. We call for suggestions for a title, and we’ll take a vote in due course from the suggestions. To start the ball rolling, I propose either "Words of the Alliance" or "Word from the Alliance", and Jeremy proposes "Flashes of Genius". 

That’s the plan. Nothing is set in stone. Nothing is prescriptive. This is a joint effort for all who wish to become involved. Let Jeremy and me have any suggestions or gripes. It will be interesting to see if we can pull this off and make something of it. 

So. Who’s in?    I AM!!