Welcome to the website for the Manchester Anthology 2011. This is the official collection of new fiction from the 2011 graduates of the Manchester University MA in creative writing.
Called 'one of the highest-profile creative writing courses in the English-speaking world' by The Independent, the 2011 MA course is being taught by Martin Amis, Geoff Ryman, MY Hyland and Ian McGuire, and right now, around halfway through, it's already produced a decidedly snazzy collection of writers and writing. No, really, we're awesome. Buy us.
When the 2011 students (er, that's the year, not how many of us there are. That would be a scary classroom) turned up the only thing the course lacked was its own anthology, so we thought the quickest way to fix this would be to make one. And rather than just hurl a briefcase full of text files and money at a self-publishing company, we decided to do it ourselves.
So this blog has emerged not as a place to pimp our stuff (although it's that, too, obviously. Did I mention that we're all amazing and you should offer us publishing deals?) but as an account of the faintly terrifying process of building a book from scratch, then printing it, selling it, and trying not to get too many angry letters from the bank along the way.
Over the next few months there'll be posts dealing with planning, design, layout, proofreading, printing, funding, e-books, treebooks, events, sales, and everything else that a small publisher might have to get up to, possibly including the bit where I curl up under my desk with a bottle of whisky and mumble about typesetting until I pass out.
Oh, and writing, too. Lots and lots of writing.
So hang around if any of this sounds interesting. I'm attempting some kind of Twitter thing too, but damnit, I work in publishing: I'm not cut out for all this futuristic internet stuff.
