Print Story WFC Book Follow-Up
Diary
By Kellnerin (Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 04:15:09 PM EST) WFC, WFC Book, WFC Anthology, electrons also available on demand (all tags)
Results of the previous diary summarized and creatively interpreted.


Editorial Content
The poll registered a resounding "no" on postmortem content in the book. That's cool. There was some interest in other editorial content (a foreword, or some form of "author's note" attached to the stories), but I think this is too much work to pull together. I'd considered just having a short note about each of the winning stories, based on an edited version of the postmortems, but even though all the winning entries were postmorted, the author's comments vary greatly from CRwM's annotated text to fleece's trademark minimalism to the more traditional narrative of the story-behind-the-story. So, unless anyone has any further suggestions, I don't think there'll be any content beyond the challenges themselves and the stories.

Which Stories Get Included
This was the most confusing part of the poll; the "more the merrier" option had a plurality, but the "best of" options outweighed that one, with people undecided on which filtering system they wanted.

So, my new proposal (which I'll use unless there are any strenuous objections) is a combination of fleece and 256's suggestions from the comments with a dash of Scrymarch: Taking the poll as a starting point, the winners of the WFCs (those who wish to participate) collectively decide where the cutoff point for inclusion lies for each round.

If anyone who participated in the WFCs did not get a story chosen by the above means, the editors will pick at least one of their entries for inclusion as well.

Then I'll take the list that comes out of this process and seek permission from the authors before finalizing the table of contents.*

Copyright
Creative Commons seems to be OK with most people, but I'll confirm this with authors when I contact them about using their stories in the collection.

Illustrations
I have nothing to add except to point out this comment of spacejack's.

Covers
I'll try to work out some way of incorporating thumbnails of the winning covers on the back cover, again with the creator's permission.

Digital Version
There'll at least be a PDF available for download. Other versions may be possible, depending on demand as well as my time and ability to produce them. Feel free to request a specific format, though it may not actually happen. Or if I can't/don't do it, maybe someone else will.

Money and Profit
Enough people thought the idea of making a small profit for hulver from this was a good one, so once we have a sense of what the book will cost to produce, we'll look at the pricing again and see if people are willing to chip in a few more bucks to a good cause.

OTHER THOUGHTS, COMMENTS, inquiries, suggestions, etc? Post below.


--
* The managing editor at my very first job had a mini-rant about how there's no such thing as a "table of" contents. It's just "contents." In the book, page vii (or whatever) is the "contents page." I have a lot of lingering neuroses from that first job, and this is but one of them.

< Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi on the Risks of Female Masturbation | BBC White season: 'Rivers of Blood' >
WFC Book Follow-Up | 11 comments (11 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback
Silly. by ana (4.00 / 3) #1 Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 04:35:50 PM EST
What appears on page vii is a table. The contents are the rest of the book.

Regular, or decaf abomination? --Kellnerin


tables by LilFlightTest (4.00 / 2) #2 Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 04:42:53 PM EST
i never really thought about it much, but to me it does seem to be a table, listing the contents. so technically it might be a table of contents, just as i could have a table of test results, but the table should be titled "contents".

or maybe i'm just nuts.
---------
Dance On, Gir!


Tell your former editor by yicky yacky (4.00 / 2) #3 Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 08:16:11 PM EST

to go stuff himself. There is more than one row where each row consists of a (String Identifier, Integer Location) tuple. For something that's not a table, it looks pretty damned tabular to me; table-y enough to eat your food on at any rate ...


----
24 days left ...


herself ... by Kellnerin (4.00 / 1) #4 Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 09:47:37 PM EST
And really, as neuroses go, that's one of the smaller ones I picked up. There were actually two managing editors I worked with back then (for two different imprints of the same house). One was hopelessly flaky and needed to hire assistants who already had significant experience in the industry (for she -- inevitably she -- would be the one who really made things run), while the other preferred her assistant to be a neophyte whom she could mold as she wished. Guess which one had the strong feeling about "Contents."

I was not a complete neophyte, but I'm pretty dangerously malleable.

In any case, LFT had it just about right. The issue is not the tabular nature of that book element, but the proper label to attach to it. No book published by *mumble imprint* has the heading "Table of Contents" on that page.

--
"If a tree is impetuous in the woods, does it make a sound?" -- aethucyn
[ Parent ]

insignificant sample ... by BlueOregon (4.00 / 1) #5 Thu Feb 22, 2007 at 12:06:40 AM EST

I'll pick up a half dozen or so books around my desk and let them decide:

  • Rainer Maria Rilke: Prose and Poetry. New York: Continnum -- contents
  • Barnes, Dick, A World Like Fire: Selected Poems. New York: Handsel -- contents
  • Payne, Jerry, Colloquial Hungarian. New York: Routledge -- contents
  • McGee, Harold, On Food and Cooking New York: Simon and Schuster -- contents
  • Bending the Landscape. New York: Overlook -- contents
  • Grudin, Robert, Book. New York: Penguin -- contents

I rest my case -- New York publishers use contents, not table of contents

QED.

_
"The german quoting guy is a little bit out there." (fleece)
[ Parent ]

I considered by yicky yacky (4.00 / 1) #8 Thu Feb 22, 2007 at 08:29:49 AM EST

that he may have been she the very microsecond after the post button was pressed, but decided to leave it gambled-upon rather than making things faffsome with deleted comments or posting corrections. And I would have got away with it too but for you meddlin' kids ... ;)

In titular matters, I cede correctness to you and LFT: My point was simply that the contents are in table form, but calling them one seems excessive and redundant, along the lines of describing something's location as being "in the Toyota car".


----
24 days left ...
[ Parent ]

contents? by Merekat (4.00 / 1) #6 Thu Feb 22, 2007 at 04:16:32 AM EST
My dad spent 50 years as a compositor. He'd hit any editor who tried that shit!



ed v. comp by Kellnerin (2.00 / 0) #9 Thu Feb 22, 2007 at 09:21:54 AM EST
STEEL CAGE MATCH!

Seriously: cool. I have tremendous respect for compositors. Tougher job than most people think and they never get on the acknowledgments page.

--
"If a tree is impetuous in the woods, does it make a sound?" -- aethucyn
[ Parent ]

i agree with everything you just said by fleece (4.00 / 1) #7 Thu Feb 22, 2007 at 06:19:21 AM EST




Cool by hulver (2.00 / 0) #10 Mon Feb 26, 2007 at 05:18:42 PM EST
I think we should host the pdf file here on HuSi as well.

What about links to the postmortems? We could put a single page together with links to them all, and stick the url of that in the book. That way there's a short link to the content (hulver.com/wfcbook or something) without pages of urls.

Also, one of my stories gets in. Yey.



And yay by Kellnerin (2.00 / 0) #11 Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 10:01:14 AM EST
One page for the postmortems would be cool. That way we can just stick a note in there like "If you just can't get enough WFC wankery, then go to www.hulver.com/wfcbook to read more online, like God intended."

And thanks for offering to host the PDF on Husi. I think Lulu will host PDFs for free, but in case there are other digital formats, maybe they could all go on the WFC book page. Cool.

--
"If a tree is impetuous in the woods, does it make a sound?" -- aethucyn
[ Parent ]

WFC Book Follow-Up | 11 comments (11 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback