Anthology Editors Editing and Proofreading Services

You put out a call, and four hundred stories arrive. Perhaps thirty are good. Perhaps eight are the book you had in your head. The other three hundred and ninety-two represent months of other people's work, most of it aimed at a target you described in two paragraphs — and the gap between what you meant and what you wrote is measured in submissions you have to decline and writers who feel their time was wasted.

We work on what anthology editors write — calls for submissions and guidelines, theme statements and framing documents, contributor briefs and commissioning letters, acceptance and rejection correspondence, editorial notes to individual contributors, the introduction and any linking material, contributor biographies and their house style, permissions and rights correspondence, funding applications and publisher proposals, and the pitch that persuades a press to take the collection. Our editors work on the document that determines what lands in your inbox.

The call for submissions is where an anthology is shaped, and its weakness is always the theme statement. "Stories about home, broadly interpreted" will bring you four hundred stories about houses, mothers and immigration, and you will spend eleven weeks discovering that you wanted something more specific than you were able to say. We work on these so the theme is stated once as a sentence and then narrowed by what it is not, since exclusions do more work than descriptions and cost you nothing to write; so two or three examples are given of the kind of thing you mean — published pieces, ideally by other people, because a writer can calibrate against an actual story in a way no adjective allows; so the practical constraints are unambiguous, covering length as a firm range rather than a guideline, simultaneous submissions, previously published work, reprints, and whether you pay and how much; so the response time is stated and honoured, given that this is the single thing writers judge editors on; and so the guidelines say who you particularly want to hear from without implying that anyone else should not bother. Calls written this way halve the reading and improve the book.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished submissions, contributor correspondence and unannounced projects. We are editors rather than agents or publishers, and we offer no view on which pieces to take or whether a collection will sell. What we can do is make the call describe the book you actually want.