HEY
i was thinking about a short story anthology too, open to submission for everyone who has an account on this website
basically the purpose of this anthology would be to build up hype for the website and the people on the website. it would not be for profit, but when the anthology is finished, we'd sell it for 99 cents on amazon (the lowest price possible) and any income we make from that, we would give it to the authors whose submissions we've accepted by proportion of their word count out of the total word count
so if we make 10 dollars the first month (that means about 30 people bought it that month*), we would give one dollar to the person whose word count is 10% of the total word count
* why 30 ppl? at 99 cents a sell, we would receive 33 cents per purchase, so 30 people buying it would equate to 10 dollars
i don't think we'll make much money from it because of two reasons
1) we'll have submissions from all over the place. ie: historical romance, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, science fiction and fantasy, etc
2) the level of expertise in the stories themselves will not be professional grade. we're basically talking about random people from all over the world who aren't professional authors. the only good thing we know for a fact is that everyone will have significant writing experience (since everyone is play-by-post roleplayer) although that doesn't mean we'll have fiction writing experience
anyway, here's how i propose how the work will be divided.
we'll need editors, a cover artist (we can ask for submissions, and we'll say that we won't pay for the art -- this can change of course), authors (duh)
and that's it
editors will be divided into several genres:
science fiction and fantasy
romance
history
anime
general literature (like modern urban)
and whatever we'll need
the cover artist is very important because the cover is very important to how well a book/anthology sells on amazon. word of mouth is important, too. the blurb is important as well. the title. and the market of buyers who will actually buy something like this is important (i don't think there'll be many except maybe ourselves ... but this is debatable)
we will need experienced editors to make this work, who are willing to work with the submissions to make them best quality. even then, i doubt we'll make 200 dollars overall. anthologies just don't work well (especially one with such a vast spread of material over all genres) and the other reason anthologies don't work as well as novels is because there will be so many different problems and characters. in a novel, you have a single main problem and some characters which you will follow throughout the novel. in an anthology, you will have many different problems and characters that it'll be difficult for the reader to latch on to others besides the one that made him/her buy the anthology.
we'll need an overall editer (main editor), and then editors for the genres
i am not a skilled editor. I'm a semi skilled writer. but i'm willing to volunteer to edit the science fiction and fantasy portion of this anthology
what does everyone think?