Anthology Timeline

In yesterday's post, I described the justification for a self-published anthology of the stories of my writing group. Today, I'm going to talk about how all of that will come together.

Let's work backwards. We want this thing ready in time for Christmas. In fact, we'd like it to be able to ship by Thanksgiving, just so there won't be any time problems. Given the 6-8 week lead time for getting everything listed in the appropriate distribution databases, that means we would want to have the finished product uploaded by October 1st. Let's say it takes a month to do all the editing, so that puts us at September 1st to have all the finished and approved content. Which means that authors need to have the two months before that for revisions, so any requested revisions go out by July 1st. Based on that, I think a June 1st submission date is warranted.

So, here's the proposed timeline:

• June 1st: Deadline for submissions
• June: Editors read stories, send them back to authors for revisions
• July 1st: All revision requests back to authors
• July - August: Authors and editors work on revising stories
• September 1st: All revisions due
• September: Layout
• October 1st: Layout completed, submitted to publisher. Order galley copy for final revisions

The book would be available for purchase from the Lulu website pretty much as soon as it is uploaded, but we'll have to wait 6-8 weeks for the full listing on Amazon and the like.