Year’s Bests info site

It seems like every year we SH editors frantically scurry around to all sorts of websites and journals and things, and send a bunch of email, to figure out when and where to send SH stories to all the various year's-best science fiction and fantasy reprint anthologies for consideration. It used to be that there were just four such volumes that we were paying attention to, but there's been an explosion of them in the past couple years. And then later there's a lot of scurrying around to blogs and forums to try to find the final ToCs, to find out which (if any) of our stories were picked up by any given volume.

So a couple weeks ago, after rediscovering Sean Wallace's list of year's bests from last year, I decided to create a new centralized place for keeping track of all that stuff. The result is my new Year's Bests info site.

It's unfortunately rather late for this year's crop of year's bests, but there are a few that are still reading for 2007 volumes, and the site'll be all set to go for the 2008 volumes.

A couple of notes:

  • This site is specifically aimed at editors (of magazines, original anthologies, chapbooks, etc) who want to submit material to year's bests; the info may also be of interest to writers and readers, but I consider that to be incidental.
  • I'm not posting anything publicly that isn't already public, or that I haven't been given explicit permission to post.
  • The site is unfortunately ugly. Some day I'll ask someone with some design sense to help me make it prettier.

It's now database-driven, so the table will automatically mark anthologies as "closed" when their deadline passes. At some point I'll improve that--deadlines are sometimes a little flexible, so it should probably show the deadline even if it's passed, and I should probably color-code the deadline boxes to make soon-approaching deadlines more prominent. But all that can come later.

Apologies to those of you who are editors for not getting this in place earlier in the year. But there's always next year. And apologies for the info not being complete yet; I'm hoping to add more guidelines links and deadlines over time.

If you have questions or comments, check the various other pages on the site (follow links from the left-hand navbar) to see if they provide useful answers; if not, drop me a note (or post a comment here).

2 Responses to “Year’s Bests info site”

  1. Niall

    Speaking as a reader, I still think it’s nifty. Thanks for setting it up.

    reply
  2. Jay Lake

    Thank you for doing that.

    reply

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