The No Stairway Anthology

Overview

This is only an overview and an introduction with some insight into specific processes. More detailed information is available in the sidebar links, and also on the Submission Guidelines pages. Still to come are the names of all the people involved in the project and the positions they hold. Since we are still working with our large group of volunteers in both informing them of the details and determining what level of involvement they can comfortably offer, that information is also not ready to be released to the fan community.

We can only assure you that everything from the steps of how to submit a work to the guidelines for editors and screeners, to the templates we use to inform authors of the progress of their submission, will be publicly viewable. We want people to participate in this project and support it and we don't want there to be any surprises, but for now, let us introduce ourselves...

What We Offer

The No Stairway Anthology is a collection of fiction, posted in digests of ten stories, presented in full by pre-posted publishing dates. The goal of the Anthology is to showcase fan works that are considered solid, appealing, original in theme or execution, re-readable, literary, and well executed. We accept Gen, Het, Slash and RPF/RPS works of between 1,000 and 10,000 words. Works previously published online or in 'Zines are welcome, as are new works.

The Anthology as a whole is intended for adults, and as such our Livejournal community is marked as adult content under LiveJournal's policy. Special Anthology volumes may be produced, including volumes containing longer works or works of a specific theme.

All submitted works are subject to a three-step acceptance process, which includes both a screening process for technical issues, and an editorial review process by a blind panel of three reviewers. The editorial review process relies on a large pool of people who are tasked with both approving works for publication and offering what we hope is useful feedback to authors.

The Anthology does not claim to appeal to everyone in every instance, nor does it claim to have the best of Supernatural fan work. Rather, like a published anthology or fanzine, the Anthology aims to offer readers a grouping of work that we think will make people happy to read and reread in months and years to come.

Editorial Integrity

The No Stairway Anthology strives for a high standard of editorial integrity, and its processes were developed with that goal firmly in mind. The editorial panel reviews and approves works that will appeal to a wide audience based on the Anthology's overarching goal. The editorial panel will try to provide a wide range of themes and genres across the spectrum of fan-produced fiction.

This goal formed the submission process. The only works considered for the Anthology are those submitted by author. Since some editorial input is part of the whole idea, authors cannot be recced or nominated. This, however, doesn't constrain our staff or even other fans from encouraging authors to submit their work for consideration -- in fact, we are hoping you will.

Every effort will be made to keep egos out of the process on both sides. That's not always possible, but editors are monitored by the Anthology's administrator for patterns of behaviour that may indicate they are looking for specific kinds of stories that appeal to them, as opposed to stories that would appeal to the audience of the Anthology. An editor who consistently differs from her fellows may be asked to explain or justify their response. They may be asked to step aside, take on a screening role, or be stepped up to the oversight panel.

We at No Stairway have tried to construct a process that is both transparent and anonymous. Only the administrator knows which authors submit work and to which three review panellists that work goes to. It's not a perfect system, but we have tried to make it as much about the work as we can, rather than about the people or their egos -- either author egos or editorial egos.

Positions & Structure

There are five levels of structure for the Anthology: Technical, Administrative, the Screening Team, the Editorial Review Team, and the Editorial Oversight Board.

  1. Technical - The technical staff provides layout, design, and maintenance of both the livejournal "front door" of No Stairway and of this website, where the actual anthology issues are housed. People on the technical staff may also serve on some other level of staffing, since the areas of involvement don't overlap in ways that could present bias.

    No Stairway currently has two specialized staff in this area. Our Acquisitions Manager is responsible for the care and feeding of our staff, and encouraging talented new authors to participate in the Anthology. Our Production Manager oversees our layout, style guide and presentation. They are both moderators of the LiveJournal community and help format and maintain the Anthology digests. They have no input into the editorial process, but rather keep things running smoothly so that the editorial review team can focus on the stories.

    Current Acquisitions Manager: Winterlive
    Current Production Manager: Traveller


  2. Administrative - The Administrator (and any designated co-admins) handles the front end and public part of the Anthology. The administrator accepts, acknowledges, and assigns submissions to the editorial staff, tracks the outcome, and notifies authors of the disposition and status of their submissions. The Administrator has no input into the actual review process via comment or vote. The administrator is tasked with providing the necessary anonymity of the process, with summarizing the comment process for authors (as they desire), and handles communication both internal and external with the staff.

    Current administrator: Maygra

  3. Screening - the screening process and the screeners assess and review all submissions for strictly technical details such as spelling, formatting, egregious tense or POV issues, and basic readability of a submitted text. Screeners do not get to vote or provide comment to the review process, nor are they tasked with the actual line-editing of a text. They will, as reviewers do, summarize any issues or problems of a technical, grammatical or spelling nature and return those comments to the administrator to be returned to the author. Having a text rejected at the screening level does not in anyway bar the author or the text from being resubmitted and the editorial review panel will not know if the text was rejected once or three times for technical issues, they will only know it got through the screening process and is ready for them to review. Texts can be submitted up to three times with no comment from the administrator, however, a text that is repeatedly returned for the same issues will not be promoted to the next step in the process.

    Screeners cannot be on the editorial review staff and the editorial review staff does not participate in the screening process.

  4. Editorial Review - The Editorial Review panelists are the heart of No Stairway's mission. Basic knowledge of what constitutes a solid, compelling, if not well- executed story is a requirement, as is the ability to apply and articulate that knowledge in a useful and objective manner. The Review staff receives the texts blind, with no identifying information. Assignments are made on a progressive rotation of three panelists, the actual distribution of which will be made as public as possible. Neither the Reviewers nor the authors will know who looked at what, and the administrative staff takes keeping that information private very seriously. Reviewers are allowed a simple yay or nay vote with rationale either way. No Stairway has put out a best effort in making the Editorial Review panel as diverse as possible, and has set up a series of checks and balances to ensure that no individual reviewer is either too broad or too narrow in their aggregate votes.

    In order for the process to work, there needs to be a minimum of seven people on the editorial review panel both for artistic and procedural integrity of the process. The process is best served when there are more panelists rather than fewer.

  5. Editorial Oversight Board - The Editorial Oversight Board has two prime functions:

    1. The actual selection and arrangement of any approved fiction into a volume of the anthology -- they may be working on more than one volume at a time.
    2. Oversight and redress for both the Screening and Editorial Review staffs.

    The board will consist of at least three and no more than five members (with one alternative should a member need to recuse themselves for conflict of interest) of the staff at large and/or people entirely outside of the whole process. The editorial review board has no input into the actual approval process for stories. They serve an internal function as a kind of overall managing editor, personnel director, and problem resolution body. Members of the board may rotate on and off and serve other duties and areas of the project.
All staff positions will be publicly identified.

Being a member of the staff does not bar an individual from submitting their own work to the anthology -- but neither does it guarantee acceptance.

A 3-step Shuffle

Administrative oversight:

The administrator(s) has no vote in the approval or rejection process. The administrator's sole set of functions is to process submissions, to administrate the community, and to provide oversight to the editorial process. The administrator facilitates the submission process, coordinates the screeners, maintains the tracking sheet for each Anthology issue, provides oversight and tracking of the editor responses, and summarizes the comments for the submitting author.

Everything submitted will be processed. Submissions are done via email by attached file and on receipt the adminstrator checks for the viability of the file itself and that it contains the required information.

Once a file is checked, the admin will send a receipt of file message to the author. If there are problems with the file itself, the author will be informed and asked to send a new copy or can work with the admin to get a usable file.

The file will then be converted to a nameless, authorless, review document.

  1. The file will be logged on a tracking sheet with the title, author, and contact info. Additional info such as genre, pairings, rating, if evident, will be noted.
  2. The file properties will be checked to make sure the information is not embedded in the file and could be revealed by converting to text or by revealing tracked changes.
  3. The identifying information (title, author, contact info) will be removed and the file saved as a new document and given a tracking identifier (i.e. Probably a date and number such as NS20080125_01) and that info will be entered into the tracking sheet.
  4. The original file will be marked with the tracking number in the text and saved.
  5. The altered file will be saved in a different folder ready for queuing.


The Queued file will be sent to the screeners for a general overview.

Screening:

The submission is screened for basic readability: typos, spelling. If there are issues, it will be returned to the author with the issues and they can choose to fix or not.

The screening board does not get a vote in the final Anthology selections, nor are they betas or line editors. Any changes or corrections deemed necessary to the text to proceed in the process must be done by the author. Once resubmitted, it will be re-screened, to a maximum of three submissions.

Screeners are looking for typos, spelling, formatting issues, obvious tense shifts or POV issues. Screeners do not read for content, context, characterization, or concept. It is strictly a technical review. Screeners have no input into the actual review process.

Screeners will not provide a line edit for an author. What they will do is summarize any actual grammar, spelling, or punctuation issues within the file.

If the file is judged to have too many errors, or needs a good spell check, the author will be contacted and informed of those issues first, and given an opportunity to correct them within a reasonable time, and resubmit a corrected or cleaned file.

That file then goes back to the screeners for a second review. If it's clean, it will be ready for the editorial panel. If it still needs work, the author will be informed of the remaining issues and asked to correct them.

The Review Process:

Once past screening, the work is sent to a randomly rotating panel of three editors, separately, whose job it is to read, review, and, comment. This is not a beta process, only review. Panelists may accept or reject the work, but they have to be able to be able to articulate their reasoning either way.

The editorial staff does not discuss a work amongst themselves. This is an individual review, independent of other review comments or discussion.

The names/handles of all the editorial staff are available on the Anthology comm profile. The names of the editors who reviewed and approved/rejected a given work will never be publicly connected with that work.

Majority rules: two or more votes, either way, decide if it will be accepted.

If the work is accepted, the author is notified, the work is prepared for formatting within a specific Anthology issue. Commenting notes may be included in the foreword or afterword, as well as any author notes.

If a work is rejected, it is returned to the author.

Comments by the editorial panel will be stripped of their commenter's identities and summarized, regardless of the acceptance or rejection of the story. The only person who knows both the identity of the author and the panelists until the process is complete, is the administrator. If the work is accepted, obviously the editorial board will finally know whose work they were reviewing, but the individual commenters will never be revealed.

Authors are not required to receive or act on the comments of the Editorial Reviewers, regardless of the status of acceptance. We encourage authors to accept those comments because we think they could be useful, but they are as much for the determination that an editor's vote was thoughtful and considered, as opposed to a subjective assessment of the editor's own preferences.

In works that are likely to be widely recognized, the editorial panel may be expanded.

Summary

No Stairway is a part online fanzine and part recommended reading. We hesitate to call it a fanzine, since the vast majority of the works we intend to consider have been published online and may well be favorites of readers already. We also hesitate to call it a rec list, because there's a bit more to this than providing interested readers a list of works which we, as individuals, like and enjoy and think our friends and flists should read.

The whole project depends heavily on the willingness of authors to submit their work rather than hoping someone will notice it and recommend it. Since we are requiring some editorial and technical standards in both execution and presentation, there may be some trepidation on the part of those authors to submit their work for consideration, and an equal reluctance to be perceived as promoting themselves and their work as either better than average or somehow more worthy than the work of other people.

We don't really have any viable way of countering those concerns save this: the entire No Stairway Staff are first and foremost Supernatural fans and/or fans of fanfiction. We are the exact same people who write, read, and post meta and squee in the fandom. We are sitting in our homes on Thursday nights warning Dean to look out and Sam to keep his head down, rolling our eyes at the monster of the week, and saying, "Oh, Dean! Oh, Sam!" right along with you.

We like to read. We like stories that make us happy, make us think, or just remind of us of how much we love our show and our fandom. Our opinion on what we read is no better than anyone else's, and in this case, that opinion isn't just one person saying, this is the best in all of fandom. Instead, it's a group of people who share common baselines and a wide variety of interests who are all saying, we think these are a few good stories. Not all the good ones, just some.

We think your writing may be exactly what we're looking for.

The No Stairway Anthology Staff

Submissions are currently closed.

An announcement will be made here and at our LiveJournal community nostairway.livejournal.com when they reopen. For more information, please check out our submission guidelines!