Intro Post and Ancestor Anthology

[sarenth.livejournal.com]

 Hello, I am Sarenth.  I have been the Assistant Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.com, an online occult e-zine, and one of the co-founders for The Pandoran Society, an eclectic Pagan spirituality group.  I have written for Rending the Veil and Witches and Pagans magazine, and regularly blog about my spirituality and experiences here.

I was recently inspired to begin work on an Ancestor Anthology, and I am interested in having a wide range of voices on it.  I was turned onto this group from a friend on my blog, and I am wondering if and how this community can help me out.  I still need a good number of writers, and any suggestions for the book are also welcome.  I'm rather new to the entire concept of crowdfunding, so any resources I could be pointed to would help as well.


The Call for Submission is listed below.  


Publishing Company: Asphodel Press

Working Title: Calls to Our Ancestors

An anthology of prayers, poems, devotional pieces, essays, personal experience, and/or artwork in honor of our Ancestors. This anthology draws from a variety of sources and authors, and may include Ancestor worship with Gods, spirits and/or human Dead.

What is not desired: fanfic, ego-stroking, self-aggrandizement. It’s one thing if you believe you’re sired by a God/dess, it’s another to treat other humans as lower than yourself.

Word Length: 800 words minimum for essays. Long essays welcome and encouraged. Please submit with no specialized fonts, in .doc, .docx, or .rtf file format. Any devotional pieces, artwork, and other visual submissions need to be no less than 300 dpi, preferably .tiff or .png for lossless quality.

Contributors will not be paid for this contribution. This is a one-time publishing opportunity, so you retain all rights to your piece and can use it as you wish after publication.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to benefit a charity that benefits the elderly and/or Ancestors in some way, such as Cultural Survival. I am soliciting suggestions for charities to donate the proceeds to.

Any contributors need to give their legal names and addresses in the email for a release form for their work.

The deadline for submissions is June 2nd, 2011 at 11:59pm, Eastern Summer Time (GMT-4)  [This may be extended if needed.]

Interested parties may email Sarenth@gmail.com.

Comments

Welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

We're glad you found this community.

>> I was turned onto this group from a friend on my blog, and I am wondering if and how this community can help me out. <<

1) Check out the Memories. There are several posts about audience interaction and networking, etc.

2) I've also written a post on how to attract contributors.
http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/8055.html

3) People are welcome to post updates on crowdfunded projects. I'm not sure if yours is currently set up that way -- are you fundraising to cover production costs or anything like that?

>> I still need a good number of writers, and any suggestions for the book are also welcome. <<

Do you take reprints? Will contributors get a comp copy? If the answers are no, that could be why the response has been low. It's not necessarily required to pay in cash, but people usually want some kind of benefit for doing things. There are lots of options.

>> I'm rather new to the entire concept of crowdfunding, so any resources I could be pointed to would help as well. <<

I have a lot of resources gathered on my website:
http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/crowdfunding.html
Start on the main page. Then use the pulldown menu to browse the various subsections.

If you have specific questions, you're welcome to ask.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Once you familiarize yourself with the different ways people are crowdfunding projects, you might look at either setting up a way to accept donations directly or enrolling in a program like Kickstarter to raise money to cover production costs, the cost of contributors' copies, and maybe even a token payment.

It might also be possible to give contributors a discount code to order one copy apiece at cost, though I agree that if you can raise enough money to provide at least a copy of the anthology to each contributor, you would get more submissions.

Pre-orders might also help you cover those costs; I don't know how you are planning to print, but ordering one at a time is always the most expensive way to go, and is also often not the best quality. In talking to book sellers about POD, they noted that the covers are frequently blurry, which, they said absolutely does affect the in-store sales of books from indie publishers who use those printers.

[sarenth.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the quick, informative posts.

If anything, the crowdfunding would be paying for contributors' copies. I have no money with which to buy them, and help toward that would help greatly.