Babel Clash

There’s a big difference between working with reprints and working with original fiction, so let me just pick one—the reprint anthologies—to focus on.
For a reprint anthology, the first thing you have to settle on is the theme.  I base my decision to do a theme on a couple of factors:

1. It is one of my favorite sub-genres.
2. There is a wealth of material fitting the theme to choose from.
3. Of the stories fitting the theme, several are excellent stories by well-known writers.
4. The theme is currently popular, or I have reason to believe it will be popular by the time the book comes out.
5. There are not many similarly-themed anthologies in print.
6. Of the similarly-themed anthologies that do exist, few collect the best of that theme in one volume, and no such anthology had been done recently.

For me personally, items 1 and 2 are essential. Items 3 and 4 are also essential because if you want to continue editing anthologies, you need them to sell, and even with a good sales track record, a publisher will be hesitant or unable to commit to a project that doesn’t seem like it is commercial enough to warrant their investment of time and money in publishing it. Items 5 and 6 would also be true in an ideal situation, but not necessarily a requirement.

Once the theme is selected, I research. What I try to do is scour the annals of sf history searching for all the stories that fit the theme. I try to be as comprehensive in my research as possible, because I don’t want to miss anything that should have been considered for inclusion. I think of these theme anthologies as “best of” type books, in that I’m focusing on a particular sub-genre or theme and presenting the stories that I consider to be the cream of the crop (with certain qualifiers, such as “of the last 30 years” etc.).

To help me do that, I’ve been soliciting recommendations online. A bit of crowdsourcing, you might say. What I’m using now is powered by Google Docs; I just create a form that lets you enter a recommendation and when you submit it, it’s entered into a spreadsheet. Obviously, some of these type of recommendations turn out to be false leads, but I may have missed out on some really good stories had I not done that. It’s possible I would have found them anyway, but it certainly saved me a lot of time hunting.

Now, of course, I do a lot of research otherwise, both online, and via reference books, and by talking to friends and colleagues. Sometimes I have certain authors in mind who I’m thinking must have written a story on a particular theme, and I go hunting around for the appropriate story that way. I also have a few intern-types who help me out by reading certain collections, anthologies, or magazines for me to let me know if there are stories in them that fit any of the themes I’m working on (or are close enough that I should take a look and decide myself). Another good source of research is short fiction reviews; a good review will tell me enough about a story to let me know if it’s something I need to hunt down or not—not based on the reviewers opinion of the story, but by their description of what the story’s about.

At some point, the process becomes all about reading. Just reading any and all of the relevant stories I’ve been able to get my hands on. (Well, okay, it becomes all about reading and tracking down the stories.) As I read things, I make notes in a spreadsheet to keep track of what I’ve already read, and I give things a rating on a scale of 1-10 indicating how much I liked each one, so that when I go back later, I can see which stories I need to re-read and which ones I just didn’t like enough to consider including.

I also make notes about any sub-themes relevant to each story. While editing The Living Dead, for instance, I was making notes regarding the type of zombies featured in each story, because I wanted to showcase the diversity of the zombie trope, and not overload the book with all one kind of zombie, or neglect to include variations on the theme I deemed important to include. In the Holmes anthology, meanwhile, I was noting which stories were straight mysteries and which were hybrids of mystery and fantasy, science fiction, or horror.

The reason for doing this is because I think anthologies are all about diversity and balance. An anthology that isn’t diverse enough in its examination of the theme may get boring by the time you’ve read 30-something stories that vary only slightly from the baseline. Ideally what you want is a good percentage that sticks close to the baseline, some that explores one extreme of the sub-genre, then some that explores the other end of the spectrum, so that ideally you showcase the full range of what the your anthology’s theme is capable of.

As I progress in my reading, I start to sketch out a table of contents and try to get word counts on as many stories as possible so that I can see how much room I have to work with, and can start considering which stories may be on the longlist but won’t make the final cut. Wastelands was about 150,000 words, while The Living Dead, By Blood We Live, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were all around 230,000. So that’s the goal I’m shooting for, not a certain number of stories. The Living Dead was originally going to be about the size of Wastelands, but I was finding so much good stuff that it seemed impossible to do the definitive type of book we were shooting for unless we had more space. The Living Dead 2 is going to be about the same length, and whereas the first one had 34 stories, it looks like the sequel will have about 45 (though its contents are still settling), so it’s all about word count rather than number of stories. Despite all that space, it can be quite difficult to narrow down your selections to just those stories that will make it into the anthology. In every anthology I’ve done so far, I had to refrain from using quite a number of excellent stories I really would have liked to include.

Once I’ve decided which of the stories I felt were best and best represented the theme of the anthology, I make my final selections and send out contracts and payments and all that kind of business-stuff that probably won’t interest anyone but writers. For my reprint anthologies, almost all of the stories will be reprinted as they originally appeared, though on occasion I will ask an author to make some changes to a story before reprinting it. I do this rarely, and will only really consider doing mild editing, not the heavier editing I might consider on a previously unpublished story. In order to get electronic versions of the stories, I often have to scan and optical character recognition software to digitize the texts so that I can send an RTF file to the publisher for typesetting. More recent stories are often available in electronic format already, and I can get those from the author, but the author’s own manuscripts are often the unedited versions they submitted rather than the final versions that appeared in print, and so might have slight changes or errors from the published text, so they have to be gone over to ensure the text I’m using is correct.

Once I’ve selected my final table of contents, I go about ordering the stories, which is kind of a strange combination of science and art. The first and last stories in an anthology are kind of “honor positions” in that the stories are placed there for being among the best in the book. I usually also try to place a very strong story right in the middle of the book, and then I go about ordering the other stories, shuffling them around until I get something that feels right.

And finally, I write the introduction to the book, setting the stage for the stories that follow, and write the individual story introductions (the header that precedes each story). Starting with the Holmes anthology, I recruited my colleague David Barr Kirtley—who loves header notes—to help me write them, as I always found them to be an incredibly draining task to complete. (That’s why Dave has that “with” credit on the title page of the Holmes anthology.)

I say finally, though that’s just the end of assembling the anthology. Then you have to start selling it. Which is probably an entirely different post, but it speaks a bit to your question of the secret of my success. I’ve setup websites for each of my anthologies—if you go to my website www.johnjosephadams.com, you’ll find links to each of the individual anthology websites—that offer up several free stories so you can sample the anthology before you buy it, along with interviews with many of the authors in which they discuss the background behind and inspirations for their stories.

If I have any secret to anthology success, it’s either there in what I’ve laid out above, or I have it, and I don’t even know what it is. So I think that answers both of your questions!

Thanks again for having me here on Babel Clash.

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