Not really. The Christmas anthology has been cancelled for this year. The process of loading all the new authors for the Halloween anthology is under way and it’s a slow process indeed. There are so many!

The Halloween anthology is a real Monster this time. So many new authors! It weighs in at over 400 pages so it’s more expensive than the previous ones – but then it’s three times bigger than average. It was a tough job, the deadline was set, as usual, expecting to deal with 10 or fewer stories. Well, this time we’ve really been noticed and 39 stories made it into the book. This did result in some sleepless nights but we got it done – then Amazon decided to flag it as being copied from elsewhere. Took a couple of days to sort that out but it finally made it into print and Kindle.

It’s not on Smashwords yet, that’s going to need some consideration. Smashwords want all the author names on the cover so the cover would be just a list of names. The image would be obliterated. It’s also necessary to create a ‘ghost’ account for every author and that will take some time too.

So, since we now have a goal of getting three of the novels in our backlog out in time for Christmas, the Smashwords edition of Monster might not appear until the New Year. Adding new authors to the website will also be done in batches, in between other work.

It really would not have been possible to work on a Christmas anthology this year, especially if it proved as popular as the Halloween edition.

Underdog Anthology 25 will be the Spring 2025 edition, and deadlines will be set earlier in the future.