Today I am sharing a guest post from Joanne at Upper Rubber Boot Books. The kickstarter campaign for their two anthologies of woman’s fiction starts today and if you get on board at the very beginning there will be some early bird rewards to gain too. Joanne Merriam has started this campaign to ensure that all 57 of the ladies that worked on these books gets paid and to hopefully fuel more projects like this in the future. I will share some details about the books, the authors and the campaign and then I will share a guest post. Please visit the kickstarter page here, give it a read and support these ladies if you can. I am amazed by how rewarding it is to be involved with a kickstarter project and I have my $10 (or £7.42 for me :D) donation ready to go when this goes live on 5pm CST (about 11pm in the UK) on June 1st 2018.
About Woman Up To No Good
The Women Up To No Good series are anthologies of dark fiction by marginalized voices—primarily women and authors of marginalized sex and gender identities, and we additionally strive for diversity in race, national origin, sexual orientation, and ability.
Our contributors include a wide range of up-and-coming and established horror and speculative fiction writers, including L. Timmel Duchamp, Chikodili Emelumadu, Nisi Shawl, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Catherynne M. Valente, and Alyssa Wong.
Our writers also span the globe, based in or hailing from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, and all over the United States. We also include two stories in translation, one by Argentine author Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría and the other by Galician writer and poet Estíbaliz Espinosa.
Between them, they have won the Aeronautilus, Andre Norton, Encouragement, Eugie Foster Memorial, Fresh Voices, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Mythopoeic, Nebula, Prix Imaginales, Rhysling, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards, and been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker, Ignotus, and Shirley Jackson Awards as well as numerous others!
About Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good
Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good are edited by Joanne Merriam and Octavia Cade respectively. Broad Knowledgeexamines the difference between information and wisdom, and Sharp & Sugar Toothexplores consumption and being consumed. Both anthologies seek to find ways out of horror, abuse, and self-doubt, and to learn to fight and to make friends in the dark.
The first in this series, Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, was praised as “a welcome antidote to the conventional world of women’s fiction” by Best New Fiction and “a stellar collection of high caliber writing” by InDigest, and was nominated for a This Is Horror Award.
We’re raising money to be able to pay the authors in Broad Knowledge and Sharp & Sugar Tooth professional rates, and to properly promote the anthologies so they get the attention they deserve! Our hope is to get the series on a solid enough footing that sales of the books will support future anthologies.
Details of the Kickstarter Campaign
There are many different donation options on the kickstarter page. Pledges start from $1 and go all the way up to $500 for various content packages and accolades. You will get an acknowledgement of your donation and the money gained will pay the 57 authors for their work and the rest will be used for advertisement costs and momentum for more work in future projects. The early bird offer stands at a $10 donation for copies of all three books and a spot on the acknowledgements page of the two new instalments, very nice! The link to the page is here, go visit and see what you think. I have never been involved with a kickstarter campaign before but I can say that is definitely a unique and exciting experience.
Guest Post: Women Up To No Good! by Joanne Merriam
The Women Up To No Good series started with Heather Nelson reaching out to me in 2014. In the wake of the VIDA Count, which quantified the low numbers of female authors in major markets, she wanted to “stick a big middle finger up at the male-normative setup” of publishing, and I loved the stories she had selected, so I agreed to co-edit the anthology with her, and Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good was born. It turned out to be a lot of fun, with dark stories of robot superheroes, consultant supervillains, post-apocalyptic heroines, women turning into their dead brothers, other women turning into hyenas, forced dieting, ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, and extreme performance art.
At the time, I was thinking of it as a single anthology, not as the first in a series, but I enjoyed it so much that in 2017 I decided to keep it going. Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good features dark speculative fiction around the idea of knowledge, and how what you know can limit or expand your options. We’ve got a great line-up, including a scientific paper set in H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional Innsmouth, a suicide foiled by an elocution student of Appollo’s, killer dolls, murderous art-appreciating aliens, inspiring turtles, and a woman quarantined from the public to prevent her ideas from toppling the status quo.
Around the same time, Octavia Cade pitched a food-and-horror anthology to me, which became Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good. She found some amazing stories, including a girl who experiences her ancestral past by drinking WWII rations, a team of astronauts battling an invasive biome, war conducted via poison, spun-sugar clowns, magical fish, post-apocalyptic food runners, and Alice in Wonderland grown up. Octavia has a lot of experience with food writing, having written a series of columns on food and horror, which became Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings (Book Smugglers, 2017).
To pay professional rates to the writers, we’re offering people opportunities to pre-order the books (or even get their own personalized covers!) at our Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1431077765/135809732?ref=489967&token=55a135c1). Our hope is to set ourselves up so that non-Kickstarter sales of the books fund future anthologies!
Thank you for stopping by to check out a brand new kickstarter project that is happening on the 1st of June. These dark speculative fiction anthologies sound brilliant and I have two e-copies at the ready to read very soon. I am glad I took this post on because up until now I have never really looked into Kickstarter Campaigns but I am ready to donate my money to this cause and I will make more of an effort to support authors via KS in the future. Please check out the books, give a little if you can and let me know what you thought of the Kickstarter page in the comments. Thanks again everyone!
Always Trust In Books 