Learn how to make an anthology It can help you a lot, if you are a lover of literature and want to compile a selection of works to share with the public and bring to light your favorite works.
At present anthologies are one of the most popular artistic media, we find this type of selections in different literary genres such as poetry,short stories, essays, and there are even quite a few about academic writing.
We can also find some music or film anthologies, but the term is generally related to the literary field.
If you are thinking of creating your own selection of works, today we want to show you how to make an anthology from scratch.
An anthology is a compilation of literary works that share something in common such as literary genre, a certain period, a theme, or in general, a field determined by the compiler.
The word Anthology comes from the Greek and means "selection of flowers." This is a beautiful way of referring to what the compilers of the time did, who called the best artistic pieces flowers. In Latin there is a variation of this word that is just as beautiful: "Florilegio"
After knowing the meaning and origin of this beautiful word, it's time to tell you how to make an anthology from start to finish.
The first thing you should do to start your anthology is think about the genre you are going to collect. You can choose between poetry, short story, essay or micro-story. Within the genres and subgenres you have a wide range of options.
When you have this delimited, it is time to think about a topic or the spectrum in which you want to place the works.
For this you can choose some selection criteria such as the country or region, specific time, age range of the participants, gender of the authors, or choose a common theme such as: Short story, Erotic poetry, XXI century essays, stories fantasy, stories based on real events ...
Another idea is to combine several of these characteristics, for example: Spanish female poetry of the year 2020.
After being clear about what genre and what characteristics your anthology will have, you must define some selection criteria that will help you to collect the works that best suit what you are looking for.
In this part you can guide yourself, by the length of the texts, the age of the participants, the number of texts that will be included by each author, the type of people that can be presented to the call or the common characteristics that the authors must have what are you going to select.
It is important that these selection criteria go hand in hand with the previous point.
To undertake the collection of the material, you can open a call on social networks or in literary media so that authors interested in participating in your anthology can present themselves and share their artistic works.
In the event that you do not want to create a call, but make a personal selection with your favorite authors, you must obtain the editorial permissions of the works that you plan to include in the anthology.
Regardless of whether you opened a call, or if you made a personal selection, the next step to make your anthology is to select the material received.
At this point, it would be great if you had the help of someone else to see that the works meet the required requirements, and choose those that best suit the central objective of the anthology.
If you do not have someone else, this will be an arduous time for you because you will not have anyone to talk about the findings with or who will help you choose if you have much more material than you had predicted for publication.
Now that you have all the works that will be part of your anthology, it is time to start the editorial process. The first thing you should do is an orthographic revision of the selected texts.
Then you must choose the order in which you will include the works, and place them in this way. Then you will have to decide if the photographs and reviews of the authors will also enter, the latter I think is super important because it gives a very professional plus to the anthology and helps the authors become much more known to the public.
The next thing is to make the entire graphic part of the anthology as indexes, margins, illustrations, cover and other elements that you want to include to make a book that catches the readers' attention.
At this point it is vital that you use all your creativity and organizational skills..
Finally, it is time to take your text to a place of printing, a lithography or editorial where the books are published and assembled..
It is highly recommended that you check the prices and quantities to know how many copies you will get and what benefits they offer you, it is ideal to have several options so that you can choose the one that best suits your needs..
Although we put this step at the end, the ideal is that from the moment you begin to compile the texts, simultaneously you begin to get contacts of printing places where you can carry out the printing process to see that the format adapts to the characteristics selected.
You can also take the anthology to a publisher, although it should be noted that publishers usually open calls for this, or they create their own anthologies..
Something else that you must bear in mind is that it is not enough just to know how to make an anthology, but the ideal is to have a critical attitude when selecting the texts to conquer the public.
Choose designs that attract the attention of the public. We know that the important thing is the content, but it is also true that everything enters through the eyes and a reader is conquered from the cover.
You can also apply this knowledge about how to make an anthology, in literary workshops, to help others create their own ventures.
We hope that with this article you have understood the basics about how to make an anthology and what are the steps you must follow to make it a successful process.
As you can see, creating an anthology is an expensive job but with it you will be contributing greatly to culture, because there is no better way to transform society than to share its artistic manifestations..
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