by Kaye George
1. Have a dream first! Ours was a short story anthology,
since our group, Austin Mystery Writers, was made up of both published and
unpublished writers. Our idea arose out of a bantering session about a trip my
husband took on the Mega Bus. It looked like a good place for a murder to me:
finite number of suspects, isolated location (the bus makes only one short stop
between Knoxville and Washington DC), and a long time period for everyone to
get on everyone else’s nerves. The others came up with other ideas that
involved vehicles, then we branches out to wheels, and we had our theme. Our
dream was to get an anthology of wheel-related stories published.
2. Map out the steps. I’m not saying you’ll always follow
the map, but it’s good to have one. We put together a time table. It included
story deadlines, critique deadlines, date to hand off to a professional editor,
and a publishing timetable with a period of time for submitting, then a
schedule for self-publishing if that didn’t happen.
3. Get going. The dream will never happen if you don’t work
toward it. OK, maybe it won’t happen even if you do, but it sure won’t if you
don’t. You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket, right? Since our
group ranged from unpublished to multi-published, we thought we could add some
polish with some well-known names. So we invited a couple of Texas authors to
join us, Reavis Worttham and Earl Staggs. They both accepted! We were on our
way.
4. Try to hit your milestones. We stuck to our schedule for
writing, critiquing, and editing. Meanwhile, we had gathered names of likely
publishers. When our edits came back from Ramona Defelice Long, we started
querying with Wildside Press. I liked them because they had done the Guppy
anthologies and we were happy with them.
5. Celebrate when you get there! We were VERY pleased when
Wildside accepted our stories. We threw away the rest of the schedule and left
everything in their capable hands. What a thrill it was when MURDER ON WHEELS was
published in April with a perfect cover for the project. Now we’re endeavoring
to promote our volume and make Wildside glad they took us on.
If you’d like to check out the stories, here are some links:
5 comments:
I'm glad you had that dream. It's good to share dreams.
Thanks for finding this Gale!
Thanks again, Kaye, to you and the rest of the Austin Mystery Writers for letting me go along for the ride in Murder on Wheels. It was a smooth and professional, first class adventure all the way, and I'm happy to have been part of it.
By the way, do you know what's great about dreams? There's no limit to how many you can have, and they're FREE.
Very good point about dreams, Earl! Smooth and professional that's us. It was just like riding a bike--when we'd never ridden one before and had no sense of balance. Thank YOU for lending credence to the collection.
It was fun and a good learning experience! And now that I've been through the process, when it's time to find a publisher for my book, I'll have a better idea of what to expect.
I'm so glad we did it!
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