You have about a week left to enter your amazing piece of literature in my Word Weaver Writing Contest, so GET TO IT!

Prizes! (possibly for YOU if you win)

Fame! (totally possible)

A critique by ME! (for the first 25 entries and maybe a few more)

For details and to enter, click HERE

Last time a had a TON of people enter the contest at the last minute. And that’s okay, but why does everybody have to procrastinate?

Anyway, tick tock. I wanna read your stuff. Get it in!

ALSO

I had this reeeeeally cool idea.

(Actually, I think I had it a while ago and now I’m having it again.)

But you’re gonna LOVE this.

I think we should write an anthology together.

A bunch of short stories from a bunch of terrific authors, all centered around a common theme. Like scary stuff or Halloween, or Christmassy stuff for… you know – Christmas.

I know, I talked about something like this before.

This is different.

The writing contest opened my eyes.

Each of us write a few thousand words, maybe 3,000 – 10,000. It’s an anthology of short stories. (Heck, write more if you want. If you have a scary item ready to go, use that.)

Whaaaaattt???

Yeah!

I guess we’d need a deadline and a theme and we work back from there. So if it was Halloween (just an example), we’d need to release the book on, say, October 1 – and promote it all through October. People don’t wanna read a Halloween anthology at Thanksgiving. (Although scary probably sells year round…)

IF it was released October 1, it’d have to be edited in September. Which means it’d have to be written in August. Which is about a week away.

Well, you weren’t doing anything anyway…

And maybe that’s too short of a timeline. But like I said, scary sells year ’round.

So, a Christmas anthology might need to start in September.

Gasp.

We could do a few of these every year!

And along with authors I already know, we could incorporate the writing contest into the anthology. Like, selected stories from the contest get into/are invited to join the anthology (probably the winners), plus others of you who write and follow the blog…

I can see it going a lot of different ways

Which is why I’m asking you guys for input.

Here’s the benefit to YOU:

• 20 or so authors all contributing to and helping market a short story anthology. That’s 20x the marketing you’d have to do yourself.

• 20 authors posting about it on their blogs.

• 20 authors asking for blog tours and interviews to promote a book YOU are in means

• 20 times the number of people discovering your work!

• 20 is also just an example. Could be more, could be less.

• And oh by the way, for some of you that’ll be your first published work, so there’s that. Ammy fame awaits.

Each selected author will be listed on Amazon as contributing, and probably have their name on the cover, too, if they all fit. I’m not sure if they will, but that’s the plan.

Okay, so – what do you think???

Can we write stories for an October 1 release, or do you need more time?

A decent theme doesn’t need a holiday release date, BTW.

GIVE ME YOUR THOUGHTS!

How exciting of an idea is this!

Update number one: yes, you can use something from your blog. My preference would be once we decide to use it that you take it off the blog or at least archive it for a few months until after the book comes out.
Update number two: yes, you could use a chapter from a book as long as it feels pretty standalone.

Update number three: yes, you could contribute several times to the anthology. If you get three good ideas and you want to contribute them all, if they are all good, all three will go in. Pretty much it’s going to be me deciding what’s good, though.

Update number four: you guys can ask these questions in the comments section and stop emailing me if you want. But emails are fine, too.