It’s been 7 years since I started work on the idea to create a website that will help publishers with the drudgery of putting together a short-story anthology. Our team had discovered the pain points of trying to manage dozens of submissions, figuring out which ones were good, tracking which story belonged with which author, who had we received signed contracts from with our first big anthology, Domesticated Velociraptors.
After seeing the difficulty of email I started to search for anything that could help us out. We even tried to use some WordPress plugins to manage the submissions for the next project, but while that solved a few headaches, it created others, and still was not as easy to manage as I would have liked.
What else is an amateur software developer supposed to do when they run into a problem they need a solution for?
This was the birth of Anthology Gateway. I wanted to create a robust application that could manage as many of the headaches that come with publishing as I could. Anthology Gateway was a great product that served our team well during the Welcome to the Alpacalypse anthology. It handled everything from the slush pile, all the way to signing contracts with the authors, and gave us a great platform to handle communications with everyone involved.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to market the app. I got a few people interested and some promised to use Anthology Gateway for their next project, but sadly, that never happened. Work got extremely crazy around the same time so I just dropped the project.
I regret that decision. Anthology Gateway had so much potential to help others in the writing community, and I just let it fade away.
But it is time, after 4 years of slumber, for Anthology Gateway to rise from the ashes!
Unfortunately, the framework I built the original on is so far out of date that I can’t even make updates on it. I will have to rebuild the app from the ground up which of course means it will take time, but it shouldn’t take too long.
My initial plans are to have Anthology Gateway 2 ready to create projects and accept submissions before June, 2024. I will be making regular updates on the blog, and on X, so be sure to follow us there.
If by chance you need to gain access to the original Anthology Gateway site, contact us on X and we will give you temporary access. When 2.0 launches this summer all existing projects and authors will be migrated over.
See you soon!
Jon is a published author under the name J.L. Zenor, an anthology editor with the Midnight Writers Society, and a long time software developer.