I was once interested in publishing a SF anthology. Formatting and editing was nbd -- I was going to use Amazon's KDP software package for most of it, which can take a .docx and output an ebook in 5 minutes. I've done it before for non-anthology books I've published, and it couldn't be easier, though I understand why people might avoid Amazon in this day and age.
The real trouble was getting the rights to all of the different stories! Though everybody I was able to get in touch with was great -- in particular, Peter Watts, Alan Dean Foster, David Moles, and Walter Jon Williams -- many authors were totally impossible to reach! I ended up scrapping the idea after a few stories I was intent on collecting in the anthology were unobtainable. (And this after I had already paid an initial sum to many of the authors.) Finding alternates and embarking on more contract negotiations just seemed like too much work.
Anyway, I bought your anthology, will review when I'm done reading, and sincerely respect the hard work that went into it!
The absolute hardest story in the anthology to get rights for was "Stars Don't Dream" by Chi Hui. It's a translation of a story that won an award in China, but Chi Hui doesn't speak English, and her contact info was extremely hard to obtain (I had to get help from the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine). We did the entire contract discussion via a combination of Google Translate and my very weak Mandarin I learned in college.
(I'm a huge Peter Watts fan, btw)
From a macro societal perspective, would this evolve "copyright" into a more balanced (value generating) deal for all of society?
> Japan has a scheme for orphaned games where if you can prove you did due diligence in searching for a rightsholder and couldn't find one, you can go ahead with rereleasing the game and the royalty payments get held in escrow by the government in case the rightsholder comes forward. I wish the US had something similar for cases like these.
Source:
(previous example that I remember: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/05/27/companies/j... )
This is contrary to most (all?) other parts of the law where everything is allowed that isn't forbidden.
So it's the right of authors to ignore email requests to discuss a re-publication if they so wish.
What would work is an orphan works exemption, whereby if a work is not available and its not possible to trace the copyright holders you could use it.
The other problem is the term of copyright is far too long. it is ridiculous that something written during the reign of Queen Victoria could remain in copyright into the 21st century in the UK and EU. US law is slightly saner (in avoiding bringing out of copyright works back into copyright) but not much.
We have that in place for open source software. No one is contacting the authors on GitHub they just grab and use it.
Second thing is big bad guys will see if someone copyright is just a person that doesn’t have means to fight for themselves in court - you still have to sue them and still have to get initial cost of lawyers.
Last but not least there is a lot of content that you don’t want to be easily tied to the owner because history is showing us how that can be used to hunt down people having “wrong ideas”.
> A Dry, Quiet War by Tony Daniel
> ZeroS by Peter Watts
> A Soldier of the City by David Moles
> The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka
> Lady Be Good by Jack Campbell
> Mid-Death by Alan Dean Foster
> Weaponized Math by Jonathan Brazee
> Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams
> Highwaymen by Ken MacLeod
> Second Skin by Paul McAuley
> The Dread And Fear of Kings by Richard Paul Russo
> Herbig-Haro by Harry Turtledove
> The Lost Dorsai by Gordon Dickson
> Cincinnatus by Joel Rosenberg
> The Proud Foot of the Conqueror by Reginald Bretnor
It's the stories lower on the list that were unobtainable. Dickson, Rosenberg, and Bretnor being dead (may they all rest in peace,) did not help matters.
A feature matrix[3] compares various text formats and ecosystems for generating PDF files.
[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...
edit: just found your article with more info on your process! https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/how-i-curate-an-a...
As I wrote in that blog you linked, I tried to interleave the stories so that you get alternating vibes as you go through the book. I know not every story will be for everyone, but I hope you find most of them interesting!
I plan on pursuing as close to the same process as I can next year, I want to put out the most consistently concept-focused Year's Best out there.
Are you comfortable speaking about the financial side? What does an editor get per copy sold, what does an author get? (In the science world, for instance, editors tend to get money often, but authors never get paid for articles or book chapters.)
Hopefully, now that you have experience in the process and all your code ready, you can repeat the exercise with higher efficiency and profitability.
The only addendum to that answer is that after being featured on HN last week I'm now over halfway toward break-even.
The leverage the simple (perhaps messy) scripts and code that these tools gave the author is simply incredible. So satisfying to read and a a really great achievement. Congratulations and thanks for the write up.
This anthology is actually a "Year's Best" -- they're reprints selected from a pool of 391 stories printed in the big science fiction magazines last year. So I'm not opening for submissions, or anything like that (I have done that before, back when I published a magazine). For this anthology I reached out to the authors about the best concept-driven stories I read last year, and fortunately they all agreed to let me publish their stories.
I have been reading old ones (very old, in some cases), they can be quite hard to find and I am absolutely blown away by the quality and the depth of vision in some of those older collections. Stories whose writers never had a second piece in print anywhere.
Short story SF is a very interesting genre to me and I'm super happy to see you make this effort.
I agree that there are many forgotten gems in old science fiction short stories. I just counted on my bookshelf, I own 19 of those old collections in physical form and I'm sure many more in ebook form.
I really dislike Ron L. Hubbard but besides having a knack for tooting his own horn he also had a great eye for good stories.
Have you thought of asking the writers that have already 'arrived' to write a short story on commission? That would lift up the stature of all of the stories you've picked out to be curated. I saw you mentioned Greg Egan, that is definitely a big name.
I've considered commissions many times, I go back and forth on it. I wouldn't want to put a commissioned story into a "Year's Best" anthology, just because I truly want it to be a "Year's Best" -- i.e. I need to evaluate ALL the stories published to the best of my ability and choose the best regardless of name recognition.
I could commission some and create a new themed book separate from the "Year's Best", but that's hit and miss. The main issue with commissions for me is that you never really know if the thing you're commissioning is going to turn out how you want. If the authors are well-known it will probably be good, but I've had many editor friends commission stuff that was just phoned in.
I re-read that one just after he died. Amazing stuff.
> I've considered commissions many times, I go back and forth on it. I wouldn't want to put a commissioned story into a "Year's Best" anthology, just because I truly want it to be a "Year's Best" -- i.e. I need to evaluate ALL the stories published to the best of my ability and choose the best regardless of name recognition.
That's a good point. Otoh, 'best' is always going to be subjective and you could make it explicit: A novel short story by X and the best of Y.
> I could commission some and create a new themed book separate from the "Year's Best", but that's hit and miss. The main issue with commissions for me is that you never really know if the thing you're commissioning is going to turn out how you want. If the authors are well-known it will probably be good, but I've had many editor friends commission stuff that was just phoned in.
Ok. That's probably a matter of having an authentic connection to the writers whose work you would like to commission.
I used to run 'daz.com', as a community for people interested in music, much like Musicbrainz, with connections between bands through collaborations and shared individuals to help discover new music. As a side project I thought of commissioning a piece of music. This really opened my eyes to what it costs to produce a high quality piece and that was priced right out of the ballpark but what struck me is that the few artists that I had contact with all had already used the site and had made sure that their own record there was accurate. This was amazing and made me quite happy, even so, they had pretty high standards and when all was said and done it went nowhere. We did manage to raise the profile of a few artists whose work was otherwise less known and I made a number of very interesting contacts.
I'm not going to name drop anybody but suffice to say that I found it amazing that you could just reach out to A-list artists and get a well thought out and very helpful response.
And well-known authors are similar to other artists in the fact that they have steep rates for commissions. For instance, https://clarkesworldmagazine.com pays a flat reasonable rate of 14 cents per word ($840 for a 6k word story). I've talked to well-known authors who would charge $5/word for that same story on commission ($30k)
I’m surprised handling meta data in several yaml files is easier than one excel workbook, but each to their own I guess.
I'm sure an excel pro would find excel much easier, I just like writing Python more than excel macros!
I wrote a post about the ralan closure in 2023: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/ralan.com-closes-...
If you're looking for places to submit, https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ is now the place I recommend to check.
The entire section under "original short stories" is how the website used to look back when it was a science fiction magazine.
Think Weirder Vol. 02 will arrive in October 2026"
Good job answering my top 2 questions!
__mharrison__•2mo ago
We learned about ebooks, HTML, and they each write a short story, which was included in an ebook (and a physical book).
Pretty amazing the tools we have access to. Of course, now I would use typst instead of latex for the physical book part.
bramadityaw•2mo ago
TimorousBestie•2mo ago
__mharrison__•2mo ago
ashton314•2mo ago
__mharrison__•2mo ago
It served its purpose, but typst is so much better.
GiovanniP•2mo ago
There is also a wide choice of output formats.