Today it is my pleasure to welcome Nicola Gestalt, talking a little about her experience editing the House of Erotica anthology, Valves and Vixens. Over to you Nicola…
Valves & Vixens: An Editor’s Perspective
This is an anthology I’ve wanted to do for a while so I was very happy when House of Erotica gave me the go ahead and opportunity to run with it. Having settled on the name and then seeing the cover design I knew we were on to something. The cover is just simply gorgeous what do you think?
With all that put into place I organised the deadline and then released it into the world. Soon stories were flooding in and I was happily surprised about the number of submissions I received. Even happier with the number of really good submissions I received. We had so many in fact that House of Erotica agreed to let me put together a second volume even before the deadline of the first.
Reading through the submissions at time felt like an uphill struggle due to the number of them that were coming in but I was so glad of that! I had a great spread as well and was happy to see that they weren’t all set in Victorian England as so many Steampunk stories tend to be. Instead we had stories from feudal Japan all the way to New Orleans with a few surprising stops in-between.
When I read stories I put them into three different piles. The Yes Pile is the stories I have read and know I just have to accept. The No Pile is where stories that don’t fit the submission guidelines end up sometimes it’s because they are too short, too long or simply don’t fit at all. The Maybe Pile is the one that is most populated as that has the stories I like but can’t quite see how they all fit together as an anthology yet. Once the deadline is over and I’ve read all the stories I will revisit the Maybe Pile and work out which ones fit the ones I have already accepted, trying to cut down on stories that are too similar to ones I have already accepted. This is what takes the most time but eventually I ended up with the stories I felt worked well together and covered the spread of pairings and heat levels.
The stories are then jiggled around to find the best way of putting them together and of course edited.
Once the foreword was written by the simply amazing Professor Elemental we put the whole book together and turned it into Valves & Vixens!
And being a glutton for punishment I’m doing it all over again for Valves & Vixens Volume 2 and Cosmic Encounters (for those science fiction fans out there).
You can buy Valves & Vixens in both ebook and print here:
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00LAD2QKS
Amazon USA: http://amzn.com/B00LAD2QKS
All Romance Ebooks: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-valvesvixens-1556820-362.html
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Many thanks to Nicola for dropping by today,
Happy reading everyone,
Kay xx