Although I created Knight Writing Press in 2013 ( I think) to self-publish some of my works, five years ago, a group of my friends helped me with an experiment to see if I could be a publisher. We used Draft2Digital to publish and royalty share, and I put a 5 year limit in the contract in case the whole project went south. (Why does going south mean bad or crazy, anyway? I’ll have to look that up! **edit. Some interesting thoughts here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42358/origin-of-the-idiom-go-south )
That five years is up today, and the first anthology I published is now officially out of print.
Over the course of the last five years, Knight Writing Press and its imprint Enrapturing Tales have published 15 anthologies. Which means I have worked with just under 200 authors on contracts and editing. Multiply that by how many stories I didn’t accept, and I can’t really guess at the size of the slush pile I’ve read. I wish I had kept track. (Hmm… It occurs to me there is a way to find out… **edit. Nope not really. I can track around 700 of them, but a bunch of the rejections are lost to history as they weren’t really needed to be tracked. I thought i could track the emails, but they were largely deleted because they were sent to submission addresses that were sent with attachments that ate up storage space. Oh well. A lot. That’s my answer. A lot. )
I’ve also worked with a handful of editors through this endeavor, giving some a chance to learn what it’s like, some a chance to do something they wanted, and some who where helping me carry through when I felt overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed? Oh yeah. Well. In that same 5 years, I was involved in at least 15 other projects, including editing two (three? I lose track) anthologies I wasn’t the publisher of, writing two novels (one published), editing four (I think **edited to add, looking back on things, I think it was seven) novels for others and who knows how many short stories, updating my book on writing tips and writing another that was exclusive to StoryBundle. (Was! I am working on that!) A big handful of short stories of my own, and who knows what else. I lose track! Do something and move on! Have to so it don’t make me cray-cray.
But seriously, this has been an incredible experience, and I thank everyone who has been involved.
Where is Knight Writing Press going now? I’m not sure. I am in the middle of working on the second novel of a trilogy, putting together a super-secret super-cool project, writing a couple of short stories I promised elsewhere, and some major real-life stuff. So, for the moment, I have no actual plans for more anthologies.
Thanks for reading as I pat myself on the back for 5 years of publishing anthologies.
