Anthology of FridayFlash

Over on his blog Mad Utopia, Jon Strother is hosting a discussion about an anthology of #FridayFlash he's considering.

First, I think it's terrific that Jon is thinking about the #FridayFlash community, and is ready to think big. I'd considered putting together an e.book anthology of my own work at some point, but it was a post-it note idea for the future. Realistically, you need to write around 100 stories in order to get 30 that would be worth anthologizing, of which maybe 5 or 10 would be real keepers.

Second, the way he's going about this is worthy of accolade as well. He could have undertaken this as a purely solo act. If he had just scraped his listings of all the #FridayFlash stories to date, identified some stories and authors that he liked, asked those authors to submit to the anthology, that would have been perfectly in keeping with standard publishing methods. Even opening it up a bit and accepting open submissions for a third of the slots (balancing the two-thirds which were invitation-only) would have been seen as pretty good.

Approaching this as a way to spread the wealth around and foster a community of writers is a wise and far-sighted move. Good work, Jon!