Editor Interview: AnthologyBuilder

Authorized Reprints

Mindflights. Aoife's Kiss. ASIM. Magazines run by people who care, whose love shows through in the product they create, and who prove that a publication doesn't have to pay out gobs of money to be worthwhile.

I love Lois McMaster Bujold's work. Also Timothy Zahn, Brandon Sanderson, and a host of others. By design, though, my personal sensibilities don't have much influence on what we accept for AnthologyBuilder. We're intended to be an online repository of authorized reprints, so we look mostly at whether the place a submission was originally published meets our acceptance guidelines.

Well, we're customizable. Really. You can pick and choose any of the stories in our repository, have it bound in your own personal anthology, and we'll deliver it to your mailbox within a few weeks. Who else offers that?

Sometimes people ask us whether we'll consider a previously unpublished story. While we do take them in special circumstances, we are primarily a reprint market for stories that were originally sold to a paying publication. So if you have an unpublished story, please sell it elsewhere first, and THEN send it to us.

We want stories that visitors can include in anthologies of their own making, so we're always especially happy so see stories that match common themes. Vampires, spaceships, ghosts, dragons, deals with the Devil... all of these are topics which lend themselves nicely to anthology creation.

Too often people will submit stories that haven't been published yet, or that were published in a non-paying market. We're looking for stories that an editor had enough confidence in to pay money for up front.

While we do read the notes authors send in with their submissions, we don't expect a lot of formality, and we certainly don't hold it against you if you don't sent one.

When we reject stories, it's often because they weren't previously published as per our guidelines; in that case, we never read the story at all. Accepted stories are read through by a member of our staff to be sure they meet with our quality standards.

We check the market it was originally published in first; that's the most essential factor. We also read through the story to make sure its content is not too extreme for our customers, and to ensure that there are no eggregious typographical flaws. The stories I like most get linked to from our blog at anthobuilder.livejournal.com.

Oh good heavens. I don't even HAVE the life of an editor. I have the life of a mother and freelance software developer who sneaks off to read submissions while the kids are having milk and cookies.
Seriously. You don't want to hear about my daily life.