Once you have your submissions in order, you’ll get down to the nitty gritty of edits. This is tricky because you don’t want to accept someone without first seeing a publishable essay, but you also don’t want to ask anyone to work on spec. In the end, you will have to cut some essays you’ve poured countless hours of editing into, and some writers will be mad at you.
This will happen because the anthology will take on a life of its own. It will find a shape for itself, an agenda you didn’t know it had, and some of the work you thought you wanted will not fit into the book. You will cut some solid writers because of issues beyond the quality of the writing. You will feel terrible about this.
Lesson six for anthology contributors: No clip is worth a month of your life. Do not put work into an anthology essay just to get it published. If it’s not an essay or story you would have written anyway, you would do better to go write something else. If you get cut at the last minute, and what you’ve produced is a great piece of prose, you’ll find another home for it, and thank your editor for her help. If, on the other hand, you’ve just written an essay for an anthology called, “Chicken Soup for the Pennsylvania Scrapple Factory Worker’s Soul,” you may have a hard time sending your essay to literary magazines. Unless you’re really into Scrapple.
Once you have your essays picked and in hand, roughly edited, you will spend weeks line editing. You will spend weeks re-ordering. You will end up cutting one last essay when another, better author turns in a final essay 4,000 words longer than their first draft. Because you will have length limits. You will be sick at night over this. You will stare at the ceiling and not sleep, composing emails to the writer you need to reject at the very end.
Lesson seven for anthology contributors: Until you’ve signed a contract, don’t put your anthology clip on your CV or résumé. Seriously. No matter how much your editor seems to like you.
Now you’ll struggle with the order of the book. You’ll copyedit and proofread in hopes of impressing your copyeditor and your proofreader. You’ll fact-check and find some errors and begin to lose your mind. Each new mistake will convince you that another mistake has slipped beneath your radar. You will begin to see funny colors on your computer screen, and in your sleep.
Lesson eight for anthology contributors: Proof your own work. Clean copy will make your editor love you, will make your relationship with your editor better.
Now you’ll have to deal with the book’s cover, which will be horrendous the first time you see it. You will have to write an acknowledgements page and your contributors’ notes. One contributor will send you a three page list of every poem he’s ever published, and another will offer only, “Jim Johns lives in Maryland.” You will not be sure if these notes should be more alike, or if you should allow each contributor to “express themself.” You will spend far too much time thinking about this.
Lesson nine for anthology contributors: Offer your editor a long and short bio, and suggest that she choose and edit as needed.
Marketing the Anthology
And now you’ll begin to worry that your book is not going to sell. You’ll find that blurbs are nearly impossible to get, and that reviews are even harder. You’ll feel responsible for all your contributors, and responsible to the indie press bankrolling your strange little project. You’ll dream about P.R., and realize that your poet-soul has completely disappeared. When you begin to fantasize about product placement on a “Chrismakah” episode of the O.C., you realize that you are no longer a superior poet of great integrity, and that you might actually be better off working for the publicity department at AOL Time Warner.
Lesson ten for anthology contributors: If you know reviewers, bloggers, journalists, offer to share those contacts with your editor. She will love you. She will not know how to ask for such contacts, but she will feel less alone in her sleazy pursuit of sales.
Finally, you will be finished. You will only need to sit and wait and hope and pray. You will also realize that it has been a year since you last wrote a poem or essay of your own, and you will swear up and down that you’ll never get tangled in such a project again.
Until a few weeks later, at a party, when you overhear some friends discussing how much they all love southern cooking, about how they’ve all experienced so many good nights at southern diners and cafes and shrimpshacks.
And you will say quietly to yourself, as you listen to them all chatter about fishfries in Alabama and BBQ in Texas, “This gives me an idea.”
Laurel Snyder is the editor of "Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes" (Soft Skull Press, 2006) and the magazine Killingthebuddha.com. She lives in Atlanta and blogs daily at JewishyIrishy.com.