As promised, this month we’re diving more into the background behind the inaugural Spec. Fic. Society anthology: Holometabola. I wanted to give a behind-the-scenes of the process we followed to put this work together: it has been an incredible learning experience, and one I’d wholeheartedly recommend to emerging authors wanting to develop skills in publishing.

We followed an unusual process to produce Holometabola. We did things backwards: there was no submission process to apply to be in the anthology. This had two critical benefits for the anthology that made it stronger. Let’s get into it.

Why publish an anthology?

We wanted to publish a collection of short works as a product we could each hold up proudly, and say: we did this. Completing a project of this scale takes time and dedication, without much—if any—monetary reward. But what it does show is craft, and acts as an entry point to each author’s other works, introducing new readers to their audience.

What is a collaborative anthology?

A collaborative anthology is different from a standard anthology. There are a variety of models, but in our case, the authors were invited to participate before they had a finished story, idea, or even a theme for the collection. There was no submission and acceptance process.

This allowed our authors to be more experimental and try new ideas that they may have been too afraid to try, in a traditional model. Each piece went through multiple rounds of editing and feedback, so authors could test an approach, ask if it was working, and improve on the story with each round. With each round, there were fresh eyes, and familiar eyes, on each piece, to give the broadest range of how it was landing.

As well as allowing more freedom in the stories told, this process meant the editing was more rigorous and interactive. Through the rounds of editing and feedback, there were more back-and-forth conversations about intent, development, and possibilities than a classic submission process. Every single story was polished to its brightest shine before it was placed within the collection.

Finding authors to collaborate with

When I first had the idea compulsion to create this work, I was at GenreCon 2025—Australia’s premier convention for genre authors. Having spent years being involved in the community I was surrounded by people whose stories I knew I wanted to sit alongside mine.

But if you’re not yet part of a writing community, how can you find people to collaborate with?

Luckily, there’s lots of options. If you’re in Australia, there are Writing Fridays in every state, and these groups can be an excellent way to meet other writers and start getting to know each other. Many community centres have local writing groups, as well. Your online community is another great source for writing friends. But don’t rush into it. Take your time to get to know each other, because creating an anthology is a big process and you’ll be working together for some time before it comes to fruition.

Key questions about choosing collaborators

Here’s some key questions to consider when choosing who you’ll work with. There’s no right answer to each of these: rather, they help you set an expectation of what the process of working together might be like.

• How much time can you dedicate to the process? When it’s unequal (and it will be), are you all ok with that?
• What experience level are you each at? Are you at a similar level? Are some people going to need more support?
• What expertise do you have in the group, and what are people willing to contribute? Editing, design, websites, promotion, narration, etc?
• Are your deadlines going to be deadlines, or are they flexible? (My pet peeve is working hard to meet a deadline only to have the organiser change it last minute—so I always make it a rule that deadline changes happen at least a few days out, so everyone gets the same opportunity to re-organise their life!) Can you trust everyone to meet deadlines? Are there consequences if they don’t? How will you enforce that?
• Will every story have a place regardless of final quality? Will you put in place a final editorial decision?
• How will you deal with conflicts or resistance? For example, if, as editor, you ask for a change that the author refuses to make?
• Does everyone have compatible opinions about things like story rating (spice level, swear words, violence, gore, etc), genres to be included, use of AI?
•  Will you allow tie-ins to authors’ other works, fan fiction (be aware of copyright issues!), already-published stories, etc?
• What kind of cover do you all expect? The cover is the most important selling tool you have. How much will you budget on creating a strong cover?
• How much involvement do you expect from others in different stages: feedback and development, editing, proofreading, typesetting, publishing, promoting, launching?
• Who will share the costs and profits? How will you track and distribute this?

Everyone is human

Remember, everyone is human, life happens, and excitement is contagious, so you should expect the inevitable wax and wane of contributors’ capacity to be involved at different stages. Going into the process with your eyes open will result in a positive outcome rather than frustration that unfounded assumptions didn’t match reality.

Choosing a royalty-share and distribution method

Once you have your band of merry authors, it’s time to discuss how you’ll share any profits made from the experience. For our collaborative anthology, we chose to share some costs and to split profits.

For our eBook and Paperback version of Holometabola, we are using Draft2Digital for this. It has the functionality of adding multiple authors (we added 16 without a problem) as royalty-share contributors.

Each author needs to set up their own D2D account (yes, including the tax interview 😭) and the publisher can then invite them to accept the royalty split.

Because our Hardcover is being printed in a separate run, this split is being managed manually. If you’re not already set up as a publisher with an ABN, this is your first step before beginning a collaborate anthology.

Don’t forget a contract for your authors, too. The ASA has a dual author contract that you could adapt from as a starting point.

Launching and promoting the anthology

At this stage of the process, we have launched and run a successful Kickstarter campaign—it ends next week but was fully funded in five hours. (We were also featured here, which is fun!)

We chose a Kickstarter to promote and prelaunch the book because it allowed us to offer exclusive extras to go with the book, and an intensive, short window promotional period for all the involved authors to get the word out to their audiences. Kickstarter has a different audience to social media channels which can boost visibility, as well. We were able to draw on the experience of our contributing editors, Cathryn deVries and A. J. Caster, to establish and run our campaign. Cathryn has successfully run a Kickstarter for Son of Osivirius, and A. J. has done a lot of study on the topic. This made the process a lot easier to unravel.

Planning and implementing a Kickstarter campaign is a whole ‘nother conversation. It’s almost as big as the Anthology itself! If you’d like to know how we pulled this together, let me know. I’d love to share more about the process.

Key questions about promotion

The key things to think about when planning how you’ll promote your collaborative anthology are:

• How many people can you each reach?
• What is a realistic goal to aim for with pre-orders/backers/launch sales?
• Can you afford to invest any advertising money or will it all be organic?
• Who do you know that could help get the word out?
• What assets (images, videos etc) will you all need to promote the anthology? Who will/can create these?
• Who can you get blurbs/endorsements from? These usually come from other respected authors in your genre; ideally they say something nice that you can feature on the cover of your book. Reciprocity and friendships you’ve made through involvement in the community are key to knowing who’s appropriate to ask. Being able to deliver a professional early version of the product matters too.

Overall:  professionalism, realistic expectations, and doing your thinking work before starting will all contribute to a positive experience.

We will publicly launch in February 2027: over the next months we’ll be investigating book stores, getting the book online, and planning in-person events. Stay tuned for how we progress!