Anthology Markets -- Changes

 TL;DR: The anthology posts are moving. Click here to find this month's post.

First, my apologies for not posting anything in July. That was a tough month.

Second, when I came back to do the August post, I found that Blogger had made some changes in their user interface, which made it ridiculously difficult for me to do my anthology posts as I have in the past.

I use a combination of MS Word (as a staging area for antho announcements that will cycle into the monthly listing in the future, and back-up in case the online sites I use blow up), plus direct copy/paste from various web sites where antho guidelines are posted. I have to reformat pretty much everything when it hits here, some more and some less, depending on how flashy the original poster got with their HTML.

I started doing this in 2010, when a lot of systems still had a hard time with anything beyond basic coding. I've been online since the '80s, had been posting a lot on the web since the early '00s, and had gotten into the habit of using minimal HTML -- basically italics, bolding, and links. This made my posts readable to the greatest number of people. This has probably been overly conservative for a few years at least, but I'd settled into a routine, and it worked.

Blogger's change gives two modes of creating posts. You can type directly into a more WYSIWYG-like interface, or you can code full-up HTML, with paragraphs and breaks and the whole nine yards. If you don't put those in, the system puts them in for you, and in my admittedly brief experience, it sucks at figuring out where things go.

Particularly when I pasted things in from other sites, I got whacked-out formatting, often one huge monoblock of text, which meant I had to go through line-by-line, comparing what I had in the Blogger interface with what was on the original site, adding code to space things out properly. And if I passed the post through Word first, it ended up with a bunch of junk code in it (screens and screens of junk code, in multiple places) because Word does that, plus there were always more formatting glitches.

I actually went through and hand-corrected one antho announcement here on Blogger. It took almost half an hour, and it wasn't very long. :/

Multiply that by however many new books I find, then add in the hours I spend actually searching for new books, and this has become untenable. Aside from the aggravation of doing the fiddly, line-by-line work (with the overwhelming likelihood that I'm going to miss some glitches on a fairly regular basis) and I decided to change how I do this.

From now on, I'll be posting the Anthology Listings solely on Patreon. The normal listing for the month -- the two months and a bit that I've been posting here all along -- will be open on Patreon for anyone to read, as it's been for a while. I'll be posting announcements here, with a link to that month's post on Patreon, through the end of the year, but only through the end of the year.

If you have this site bookmarked, please change your bookmark to my Patreon account.

Note that I am NOT doing this to try to pressure more people into supporting my Patreon. Any writer who wants to use the listings is welcome to do so, and always has been. That's not changing. Since I have to format things for Patreon anyway, I'm consolidating to that site. Patreon's just hosting the open version of the listing. If you don't want to or can't afford to support the listing, that's fine. You're welcome to keep using it, and I wish you the best with your submissions.

Bottom line, with the changes Blogger made, I couldn't keep doing this the way I have been. Something had to give, and using Patreon as the sole host for the listing keeps the workload manageable for me, while also keeping the listing open to the public.

Thanks for your understanding. Please check out this month's listings.

Angie