Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience.
the editor
I’m more than satisfied about how submissions have begun for Costs of Living (working title), the inaugural collection of short fiction (500-4,000 words) we plan to release in 2025. So far, we’ve received about 90 submissions responding to our call (link).
I’ve taken some steps to get the word out. Our call for submissions has been cross-posted on duotrope, submission grinder, and should appear on horrortree in the coming days. I’ve also seen it pop up in Authors Publish and I’ll bet it’s appeared on other lists. Let me know where you find the call, and I’ll add it here!
Notes on background operations:
- I’m working with Kyle Zielinsky, the photographer who snapped the image you see on our temporary homepage, to come up with an image that will be a suitable background for the cover design. (In my own Max in the Capital of Spies, I used a photo of the Berlin Wall I took six or seven years ago… and for this project’s cover, I wanted to get a hi-res image from a photographer whose work I hold in high esteem; Kyle is that photographer).
- I’ve registered the business Whisper House Press with the State of Utah and have obtained a Tax ID number so that I am able to pay taxes on sales. I’ll bet we’ll run in the red for a while, so hopefully I won’t actually owe anything while there’s no profit. (Later, when WHP is fantastically wealthy, we’ll switch to an LLC. Right now, though, I assess the risk of litigation is relatively low, and our expense-to-income ratio is absurdly high, and we have no employees apart from me and my registered agent (my wife)—so no LLC, for now.)
- Last year, I purchased a bundle of ISBNs from Bowker, and seven of those remain unused. I’ll pay for a barcode when we’re doing cover design later in the process—but it’s good to know the ISBN side of things is taken care of.
- I need to identify a contract we can use for our authors. I’ve signed several of these myself and will examine those, but I’m also looking around at other contract templates that are floating around out there. Essentially, we want a standard first-rights contract with rights reverting to author afterward and apart from first-to-publish rights (with a reasonable expiration on that right). I want to customize the contract to allow signatories to opt into the possibility of using the author’s story as a promotional tool (in, say, a “one story is free!” promo) in a marketing campaign (e.g. for kickstarter in Q1 of 2025).
- I’m developing a print and marketing budget that includes loose figures for more or less successful kickstarter campaigns, but the general idea will be to publish a small batch but to distribute individual copies far and wide for spreading the word (I recognize that “anthologies don’t sell” is a standard bit of advice, so I’m trying to learn what I can about who buys anthologies, as I know there are in fact quite a few of us out there who do love collected works of fiction).
The timeline of this publication (Costs of Living) is not yet set, but I intend the following:
- Submissions close either May 1st 2024 or when we’ve got 60k to 80k of high-quality submissions.
- This summer, I’ve got a research trip to Germany and Greece, and I’ll be reviewing submissions throughout that journey with an aim to have all selections made by August 2024. I tend to move faster than most, though, so it’s possible I’m overshooting with this estimate.
- Marketing campaign to begin in earnest in December of 2024.
- Kickstarter campaign, low key, in Quarter 1 of 2025.
- Finalized cover design will need to come before this point—say, November 2024. Wouldn’t it be cool to generate two or three options for contributing authors to vote on? This might end up being too expensive, but it’s a thought I’m having, and I like the idea.
- First copies of the text (wholesale price [TBD]) for authors and Kickstarter Backers will go out as soon as the KS campaign ends.
- Many Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) will be distributed in a 30 to 60 day push for press, lists, and for solicited reviews.
- Publication will occur 3 to 6 months after finalizing the text and cover and receiving galleys since many ARCs need to arrive with least 90 days’ breathing room prior to publication.
- This is a window I missed in a few cases on my own publication, so I’m learning my lesson and scheduling things more carefully with this lesson in mind on the next one.
- My guess is that publication of Costs of Living would happen sometime during Quarter #2, 2025.
If you have any questions about the publishing process, I’m happy to address them. In the future, we might do a video Q&A if there’s call for it. For now, I’ll continue documenting the process and sharing our progress.
steve capone jr., Author/Editor 
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