Rain, Glass, & Steel Anthology

Call for Submissions

Summary

Editor: Mark Feenstra
Submission Deadline: January 31, 2020
Expected Publication: Fall 2020
Story Length: Up to 10,000 words
Contact: mark@vancouvergenrewriters.com

Details

In order to showcase the diverse talents of our many wonderful Vancouver Genre Writers members, we are happy to announce our inaugural member anthology! The theme and title, as suggested by one of our members is Rain, Glass, & Steel. All submissions should play into those elements through theme, world building, or plot. Are you writing something contemporary that can actually be set in Vancouver? Even better! It is our hope that the theme Rain, Glass, & Steel is broad enough to encompass any genre you may be writing in.

There are no minimum word count requirements, however all submissions must be genre fiction!

Eligibility

This anthology is open to any and all Vancouver Genre Members in good standing. This means you’re are at least a somewhat active participant in our meetups, online discussions, or workshops. We’re not looking for reasons to exclude anyone, but if we run up against word count limitations and have contributors who seem to only be looking for a publishing opportunity, we will favour our more engaged members for inclusion.

Suitable Content

Ie: Sex, Swearing, & Violence
Swearing, sex, and violence should be tasteful and relevant to the plot. If you have Wolf of Wall Street level swearing in your story, it should probably be toned down for a wider audience. Intimacy and romance are more than okay, but explicit depictions of sexual acts (aka: erotica) are not. Violence is to be expected, but this probably isn’t the place to share your most grisly battlefield shit, mud, and guts story.
 

If we have YA authors submitting work (which we almost certainly will), we’d like them to be able to share the work with mature readers in their target audience without having to worry about what else is in the anthology.

The editorial team will have final authority on what qualifies as unsuitable content.
 

Submission, Editorial, and Publication Process

Work will be submitted to our editorial team by the deadline of January 31st, 2020 in accordance with the Submission Format guidelines illustrated below, or it will not be considered for inclusion.

Once your work has been submitted, it will go through an editorial process that may include subsequent requests for revisions. In order to maintain a standard of the highest possible quality across the anthology, it is a requirement that you be willing accept editorial feedback and consider reasonable revision requests. From this point, the work will be given a final proof read for typos and grammatical issues before being formatted for publication.

Unless you are a member of the editorial team, you will then wait patiently for the anthology to be fully edited and formatted. All contributors will be given an option to purchase print copies at cost, as well as being given a mechanism for sharing a few free digital copies. It is our hope that all contributing authors will participate in various marketing efforts following the publication of the anthology, however this is by no means mandatory.

Rights

We do not require sole publishing rights, however you will be asked to sign a contract granting One-Time rights for digital and print publication. We do not require that submissions are previously unpublished, however authors must disclose if their submission has already been published elsewhere along with verification that they currently hold the rights to said piece.

Submission Format

All submissions should be formatted according to the following guidelines and sent to mark@vancouvergenrewriters.com with the subject line: RGS Submission. Submissions must include an author biography before the story submission, preferably with a page break before the story. Please name your file something along the lines of StoryTitle-AuthorName.docx.

  • Author name at the top of page 1 with the biography blurb below that.
  • Biography should be in third person and not exceed 150 words.
  • Title and Author Name at the top of the second page with no page breaks before your story content.
  • 12-point double-spaced font.
  • No headers / No footers.
  • Saved in the .docx or .rtf file format.
  • All content should be written in Canadian English.

Please see this Sample Document [google docs link] for reference.

Compensation and Financial Accountability

Because this is a showcase project, there will be no compensation for contributors. Initial profits from digital sales will be used for marketing (Ads and promotional outlets) and to subsidize print runs. Excess profits will be kicked back into the Vancouver Genre Writers operating budget to pay for things like our meetup.com registration, workshop space rentals, and promotional avenues. If the anthology is wildly successful, we will discuss further distribution of funds as a group, with potential at this time for payments to be distributed to individual contributors. Anthology financials will be kept as transparent as possible throughout the process.

Call for Volunteers

As this is a not-for-profit endeavour, we will have to rely on volunteer assistance with the following tasks:

  • Developmental editing.
  • Proofreading.
  • Cover art.
  • Digital and print cover typography.
  • Print book sales and distribution (potentially).
  • Marketing and promotion.

If you wish to help with any of these tasks, please contact Mark through Discord. If you know someone who is willing to supply original cover art but is not a VGW member, please get in touch and we’ll discuss potential compensation for their contribution; please bear in mind this will be below market rate since we’re operating on a budget of somewhere between nothing and where-did-all-our-money-go? If you would like to help with developmental editing, please provide any previous experience you have in this area. Ideally we’ll have a few developmental editors to break up the workload.

Get Those Submissions In Early!

The earlier you submit your piece, the earlier we can begin the editorial process. Please make life easy for our volunteers, and give us time to space out the editing process instead of having to juggle a dozen projects on midnight of the deadline. The sooner we get everything read and edited, the sooner we can go to press.

Looking forward to reading everyone’s work!

– Mark