This anthology I'm helping Chris Hall put together, I expected us to be snowed under with submissions. The publisher, Dybbuk, is putting up a $50 advance for each writer, which is not an amazing compensation for hours of toil, but it is pretty generous by small press standards. It's a reasonable carrot . . . and look, no stick!
We are getting, on average, two queries a week. And sadly, most of the stories I've looked at so far are woeful. I read a lot of unpublished work in Critters and, it has to be said, the standard of writing in that online workshop is far higher than that of those in the submissions we've been getting for Badass Horror. So even if I wasn't already convinced of the merits of joining a writers' workshop, I would be now.
Another problem, I feel, is Chris's chosen theme - Crime horror. While there are a lot of people writing horror, not many of them really explore the criminal side of it. Having someone murdered does not give a horror story a criminal element. Murder and death are almost a prerequisite in horror fiction, but we don't automatically label all horror crime. There is a distinction here that most submitters are choosing to overlook. The book is listed at Ralan.com, the first port of call for most genre writers looking for a market. Maybe we'd have more success if we could reach crime writers? I suspect crime writers would find it easier to cross the border into horror than vice versa.
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