Editor Interview: Zombie Pirate Publishing

Short Story Anthologies

I'm a big fan of the work done by Aurealis Magazine and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. They've been releasing excellent fiction for years now. I also enjoy the classics like Asimov and Analog. You can probably tell I'm a big fan of science fiction.

My favorite authors are Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, Joe Haldeman, Stephen King, and many many more.

Our engagement with our authors. We run a vibrant facebook community with daily discussion. We also work directly with our authors during the editing phase to make sure that their final product is the very best it can be. We're always available to chat, to discuss anything on or off topic.

Send us something unexpected. We always have an idea of what we want, but the stories that I remember years after initially publishing them are the ones I couldn't have imagined when first creating the call for submissions. Obviously following the guidelines, and writing well are a given, but sending something that stands out for being outside the box will always put you in good stead.

I got into this because I'm a writer and a reader. If i recieve an intreguing story that pulls me along as I read it, then I'm going to want to publish it. Also, the submissions guidelines on our website are there for a reason. You'd be amazed how many people submit without having read them at all.

Our submission process is fairly straight forward. The biggest issue I run into is people formatting their document with spaces or tabs instead of using the rulers to indent. A much less common issue, but one that drives me crazy, is when someone has used a hard enter between lines to achieve double spacing instead of using the formatting tools.

People are free to send us that stuff in their submission, but we don't read any of it before we read the submission itself. We don't want to be influenced when reading a story. Once we've read it, we ask for that sort of info anyway.

Usually the whole thing. The only time we reject a story before completing it is if it will require a huge number of edits to make it work. That said, as we recieve more and more submissions for our calls for submissions, we are starting to judge stories earlier in the piece. If the ending of a story is excellent, but the beginning of the story gives me no reason to get to the end, then the story is flawed and the reader will struggle to get to the end to experience the excellent ending. It the reader is struggling to get to the end of the story, then I am reluctant to publish it. But we will always read at least 25% of a story before making a decision. I once published a story which was about 10 pages long. Most of the story was excellent. But the beginning was terrible. And it had no bearing on the tale at all. So we cut the first three pages and published the rest. If we'd stopped after a page or two, that excellent story wouldn't be in one of our books.

Each story is read by two different people before acceptance. This helps to temper personal preference and find the best stories we are submitted. Once its selected, if it needs any significant edits, we send those edits before announcing the short list of acceptances so we can make sure that the author is willing to work with us on changes. We aren't draconian about our edits. After all, it is the author's story, not ours. But if we are suggesting an edit to a secfion, then something needs to be done to address the underlying issue. Our suggestions might not be right for the author, but the reason we made the edits is still there. Authors willing to work with us to improve their final product are always something we're after.

Piles of printed submissions. Endless emails. Reading and reading and reading. Formatting and fiddling. Edits and suggestions. Wake up and do it all again.

All of our stories go through a line edit, and a copy edit. They are edited by either myself or Sam, and then again by one of the other authors in the book. All edits are added in google docs which allows us to mark all edits as their made and comment in the document. Then the author goes through one last time and either agrees or disagrees with the edtis that have been made. At this point Sam and I do 'The Big Day' of edits and go through all of the comments (taking the author's opinion into account) and make an executive decision on all of the edits and suggestions and comments.
If a story needs significant rewrites, however, we likely won't accept it. If there are hundreds of errors in a story, it's unlikely we ever made it to the end of the story. Most of our books include 20+ authors. If a story is taking half of the editing time required, then its taking away from the other stories and needs to be put aside.

We have occasionally, but not very often. This is something we are interested in doing more in future, however.