Tony Burton posted the below message on Facebook the other day regarding his laest anthology project. I print his call with his permission......
Anthology Call for Submissions
This year, Wolfmont Press resumes its crafting and publication of a charitable anthology with HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE.
HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE will be a collection of between fifteen and twenty short crime fiction pieces
that deal with crime among those in American who are at or near the
bottom of the social and economic scales. We are looking for about
twenty stories from 2,000 to 3,000 words in length, that explore crime
and punishment in the less-affluent portions of America. This may be in
the “Projects,” inner city slums, poverty-stricken pockets of rural
America, or anywhere else in the USA where you may see people hurting
because they don't have the financial resources to survive and thrive.
I am not going to push as hard this time to get the book to market.
So, the plan is to have this book published for the Spring 2014 sales
push. That gives me about six or seven months, maximum, to get
everything squared away.
Why HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE?
Approximately 15% of Americans live at or below the poverty level. And
this means that about 22% of all children live at or below the poverty
level. I have seen poverty in big cities, in small towns, and out in
the boonies. I have seen poor black people, poor white people, poor
Hispanic people, and poor people of many other ethnic groups. Poverty
and hunger do not care about racial, ethnic, geographical, or cultural
distinctions. A child of any color, whose belly is empty, feels the
same pangs.
And before we focus on children too much, consider
the older members of our society who live on fixed incomes while the
cost of living constantly increases. Our senior members of society
often may be too proud to mention it, but often poverty impacts their
food security as well.
This year's charitable anthology will benefit Feeding America® (www.feedingamerica.org), a charity devoted to feeding the poor across America. Feeding America® has a rating of 64 out of 70 with Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org),
and was formerly known as Second Harvest. If you are curious about
their mission or their rating with Charity Navigator, I encourage you to
go to those web sites and check them out. However, I will say here
that the Feeding America® network provides food assistance to more than
25,000,000 people facing hunger in the Unite States. Their network of
food banks serves all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto
Rico.
If you think you may be interested in helping with this effort, please contact me at tony@wolfmont.com for more particulars.
UPDATED LATE LAST NIGHT BY TONY ON FACEBOOK
More Details
Book format: Perfect-bound paperback, 8” x 5” or 8 ½” x 5 ½”, approximately 200 to 230 pages
Submission deadline: 10/1/2013
Deadline for final edits: 11/1/2013
Story guidelines: I understand crime fiction is understandably often
harsh and cruel, but I will not publish stories where there is cruelty
for the sake of shock value. I know people are killed in criminal acts,
but torture and gore do not necessarily need to be “onstage”. If you
think they do, you had better have a really good plot reason to have
them there. And I reserve the right to make the final determination,
regardless. As the Editor of this anthology, the judgment call is mine.
Likewise, criminals don't have clean vocabularies. On the other hand,
cursing and gutter language used simply as filler won't fly. If you
can't give me the idea that these are nasty guys without having every
paragraph carry a load of f-bombs, then you need to work on your writing
skills. Yeah, that's just my opinion, but it's the one that counts for
this anthology.
Publication rights: As the Author, if your
story is accepted, you must agree to release all print and ebook rights
to your story for 24 months following the initial publication date. The
book will remain in publication for 24 months.
Author
responsibilities: This anthology is for an important cause. It's not
just a book of stories. The money raised by this book and donated to
Feeding America will help to change lives for the better. The better
they sell, the better those lives will be.
Because of this, any
author MUST be willing to put a great deal of effort into selling these
books. That means making personal appearances, setting up book
signings, setting up interviews with local radio/newspaper/TV. If these
are not things you are willing to do, then no matter how good your
story may be, I can't put it in the anthology.
Caveats: In
order to keep this affordable, it will be published by using
print-on-demand. That means the books are printed as they are ordered.
I won't have 5,000 copies or even 500 copies sitting around in a
warehouse somewhere. Bookstores often don't like print-on-demand books,
as they view them as being less profitable. The average offset-printed
book has a profit margin of over 50% for the bookseller. The average
print-on-demand book has a profit margin closer to 40% or lower, simply
because they are more expensive to produce, per book.
That
means it may be hard to get your local bookseller to carry the book on
their shelves. That means that you may have to buy copies out of your
pocket and resell them. That's what I have to do. But if you do this, I
don't care what you do with any profits you may make from the book.
It's my responsibility, and mine alone, to make the donation to Feeding
America.
These are things that have been true with EVERY
charitable anthology Wolfmont Press has produced. And they are things
that the author should know well in advance of even submitting a story
for this anthology.
If you can live with these conditions
and caveats, and want to submit your short crime fiction meeting the
requirements stated above, contact me at tony@wolfmont.com with your
story idea.
Unfortunately, since my main computer died a couple of weeks ago, even
though I got it repaired, I can't access the Wolfmont website at the
present time to put things there or edit things. Anyway, I am posting
more details here. It starts out the same way as the previous post, but
there are more details near the end. And I am brutally honest in the
details, so try not to be shocked.
I will also post a link to the whole thing as a PDF file, on Dropbox.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/07o4dxyyyjenaso/HUNGRY%20anthology%20call.pdf
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