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New Duck Prints Press Social Media Presences: Mastodon and Cohost!

DPP Header and Slogan

With how events at Twitter are unfolding, and the attention that their decline has brought to new platforms, Duck Prints Press has created two new social media accounts, on the Mastodon server The Petting Zoo and cohost! We’re not very active yet on either, but starting within the next week or two we expect to at minimum begin cross-posting our weekly blog features to both platforms. We’re looking at other platforms such as Hive (still down after a server-breach) as well; we’re well aware that cohost and Hive in particular aren’t quite ready for the influx of new users they’ve gotten, and we’re monitoring them and taking extra care with our information there.

Duck Prints Press on Mastodon: https://pettingzoo.co/@duckprintspress

Duck Prints Press on cohost!: https://cohost.org/duckprintspress

These accounts are, of course, in addition to our existing social media accounts! We cross-post posts about our publications and our weekly informational blog posts across all platforms; the main difference in content on each is what we reblog/retweet/share from outside sources. And of course, the form our posts takes depend on the platform – Instagram is image-heavy, Twitter is short posts and links, etc.

WordPress: https://duckprintspress.com/index.php/neve-blog/

Tumblr: https://duckprintspress.tumblr.com/

Pillowfort: https://www.pillowfort.social/duckprintspress

Twitter: https://twitter.com/duckprintspress

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duckprintspress/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/duckprintspress

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/71237377/

Dreamwidth: https://duckprintspress.dreamwidth.org/

Patreon (no backing necessary for many posts!): https://www.patreon.com/duckprintspress?fan_landing=true

ko-fi (no backing necessary for many posts!): https://ko-fi.com/duckprintspress

We also have accounts on Archive of Our Own, Goodreads, Kickstarter, and Redbubble, but those don’t function as social media.

Lastly, if you want to make sure you always hear the latest from Duck Prints Press, sent straight to your e-mail, make sure you sign up for one or more of our mailing lists!

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LAST DAY FOR EERIE ANIMAL KICKSTARTER, and New Release: “The Offered Ones” by A. L. Heard

Today, as we release the last of our four “Eerie Fall” Kickstarter tie-in stories, we also enter the final 24 hours to back our crowdfunding campaign!

Love artwork by Aceriee (Instagram | Tumblr | Twitter)? Love enamel pins? Then don’t miss out on these gorgeous pins featuring Aceriee’s work! There’s currently only two designs unlocked – the Wolf and the Crow – but with a strong final 24 hours, we can unlock two more – the bear and the moose! Support a small business on this awesome Small Business Saturday, and help us reach the goal by checking out the campaign now!

Meanwhile, we have our fourth and final “Eerie Animal” tie in story, a perfect one for exploring the animals in the campaign, because in this story…all these animals are characters!

Title: The Offered Ones

Author: A. L. Heard

Genre: Fantasy

Rating: General Audiences

Trigger Warnings: body horror, harm to children

Relationship: found family

Character Features: animal, animal transformation (involuntary), bird, non-human character

Tags: animal point of view, body modification (involuntary), pov third person limited, sentient animal

Teaser:

There was a girl sleeping in Forest.

Fox didn’t know the girl. She was a human, that much was clear, though he hadn’t seen her kind in ages. They traveled this way and that like they owned the whole world—he had seen many before—but most stayed away from Forest. They were blind, deaf, dumb creatures, unable to perceive what was in front of them. Still, they sensed the magic of Forest, so they stayed away. If they did wander into the dense line of oak and pine, they spoke in hushed voices and didn’t linger.

They certainly didn’t sleep in Forest.

Length: 17 pages/6,400 words

Price: $1.99 US

Get it now!

Can’t get enough Eerie Fall stories? Check out the other three theme stories: “Widow’s Black” by Nina Waters; “Campfire Stories” by Nicola Kapron; and “A Shield For the People” by Puck Malamud.

Love what we do? Sign up for our monthly newsletter and get previews, behind-the-scenes information, coupons, and more!

Want to support the Press and get lots of our stories? Consider backing our Patreon or ko-fi monthly at a level that includes free stories, and read your fill!

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Monthly Storygraph Giveaway: And Seek (Not) to Alter Me

Duck Prints Press returns to the second round of Storygraph giveaways with our second anthology And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Queer Fanworks Inspired by William Shakepeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.

What is Storygraph? The awesome independently owned-and-operated alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads! Working with them as a publisher doing this giveaways has been phenomenal: they’re organized, receptive to feedback, interested in innovative, and responsive. We’re thrilled to continue working with them on giveaways. If you’ve wanted a Goodreads alternative for organizing your reading, posting your reviews, logging your book collections, and more, you should definitely check them out.

What is Duck Prints Press? We’re the indie publisher dedicated to helping creators transition from creating primarily fanworks to creating primarily original works! We especially focus on publishing works featuring LGBTQIA+ characters.

What is And Seek (Not) to Alter Me? In And Seek (Not) to Alter Me, 16 authors and 16 artists have come together to create an exquisite, full-color collection of artwork and stories inspired by William Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. We encouraged contributors to stretch their imaginations, think outside the box, and put their own unique—and queer—twists on Benedick, Beatrice, Hero, Claudio, Don Pedro, and the whole gang! In true Shakespearean fashion, our creators utilize gender, sexuality, romanticism, and a host of costume changes to tell unique artworks and stories—some featuring original characters, some characters from the play—that show Shakespeare’s work in a whole new light.

Want your own copy of this awesome, innovative collection? Enter our giveaway on Storygraph NOW – or, if you don’t want to wait that long and leave it to chance, you can always buy your own copy immediately from our webstore!

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The Duck Prints Press Style Guide

Do you love the nuts and bolts of writing? Have you always been confused by the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash? Do you want an easy-to-use, free resource to help you improve your technical skills related to spelling and grammar?

We are here to help!

After months of work, we’ve polished the Duck Prints Press style guide until it shone and shared it publicly on our website!

This valuable resource includes a ton of information, and we’re expanding it regularly. While it’s especially relevant to people working with us (especially our growing editor staff!), it can also be of general use to the authorly public. That said, though, always make sure that when you submit to a publisher you focus on their style guide, because no two publishers are going to resolve these issues in exactly the same way. And when we say “issues,” we mean “all those areas where the major style guides (we use the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition) don’t offer unambiguous answers,” such as:

  • Oxford commas (we use them)
  • How to handle capitalization around certain punctuation choices, especially in dialogue (…it depends on the circumstance)
  • Which interrobang to use (?! or !?)
  • When to spell out numbers versus when to use numerals (…it’s complicated)
  • Incorporating words that use accents and/or special characters (we always use special characters unless the author suggests we not)
  • Spacing around ellipses and em dashes (…again, it’s complicated)

…and many other incredibly tiny, fiddly editor things that 9 out of 10 readers won’t notice but that that tenth reader has very strong opinions about.

Ultimately, putting a clean, professional-looking manuscript out to the reading public requires that an editorial staff make decisions on all these kinds of issues and many others. It doesn’t so much matter which direction the staff goes (there’s not a huge difference between putting regular spaces versus thin spaces versus hair spaces around em dashes); what matters is that whatever choices are made, they’re implemented consistently. To ensure that consistency, we’ve written and now use this internal, Press-specific style guide.

And now, if you want, you can use that style guide too!

Happy writing, and feel free to let us know if you’ve got questions we haven’t addressed in the guide. Fiddly editory spelling and grammar is our jam!


Want to learn more? Some related posts!


Have a question? Drop us an ask on Tumblr!

Love what we do? Become a monthly backer of our Patreon and ko-fi to get lots of behind-the-scenes content, exclusive access, bonus extras, free stories, and more!

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Now Available: The Problem with Wishes by Annabeth Lynch

From now on, Duck Prints Press will be publishing a new title each week – mostly short stories for now, and there’s loads of great stuff to come! The first of our weekly short story offerings is a delightful urban meet-cute featuring a pixie, a mortal, some delicious baked goods, and a dash of magic…

Title: The Problem with Wishes

Author: Annabeth Lynch

Genre: Modern with Magic

Rating: General Audiences

Relationship: wlw

Tags: british mythology, character is a barista, character is a pixie, character is a satyr, coffee shop setting, creature character, descriptions of eating, descriptions of food, fae and faeryfolk, greek mythology, meet cute, magical mishaps, new york city, past tense, pov third person limited, united states of america

Summary: It’s a day like every other at The Enchanted Cafae—a home-away-from-home and place of safety for the magical and mythological creatures of New York City—until a mortal walks in. Now Kade, part-owner and barista, has to figure out how to handle the intrusion.

Length: 5 pages/2,006 words

Price: 99 cents US

This story is too cute to skip – get your copy and read it now!

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“And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing'” – Now Available in Our Webstore!

Did you miss our crowdfunding campaign for And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Queer Fanworks Inspired by William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”? Was there merch you wanted that you didn’t get? Have you been eagerly awaiting it’s arrival in our webstore (haven’t we all been?)? Well YOUR TIME HAS COME!

In And Seek (Not) to Alter Me, 16 authors and 16 artists have come together to create an exquisite, full-color collection of artwork and stories inspired by William Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. We encouraged contributors to stretch their imaginations, think outside the box, and put their own unique—and queer—twists on Benedick, Beatrice, Hero, Claudio, Don Pedro, and the whole gang! In true Shakespearean fashion, our creators utilize gender, sexuality, romanticism, and a host of costume changes to tell unique artworks and stories—some featuring original characters, some characters from the play—that show Shakespeare’s work in a whole new light.

And now, you can get your very own e-book copy from our webstore! Only $9.99 for 16 phenomenal stories and 20 gorgeous art pieces!

We’ve also listed four merchandise items from the original crowdfunding campaign that we have extras of – if you want ‘um, you’d better grab ‘um, because once these extras are sold out, we will never be making more!

Art Prints of the Front Cover

(featuring the gorgeous artwork by Gio Guimarães in all it’s colorful, queer glory!)


Art Prints of the Back Cover

(featuring even more of Gio Guimarães‘s wonderful work!)


“Taming My Wild Heart to thy Loving Hand” Bookmark

(with artwork by Alicia Matheson and the signatures of our contributors!)


Bard Dux Sticker

(created by Alessa Riel)


Don’t Miss Out! Visit Our Store Today!

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First-Ever Giveaway for One of Our Titles!

Are y’all familiar with Storygraph? It’s the independent alternative to Goodreads, a lovely website that does a lot of what Goodreads does, but without the whole “being owned by Amazon” crap. It’s been running for a while now, and we’ve been on it since the minute we found out about it (and got a paid account as soon as they offered them – $40/year to support such an amazing project? Heck yeah! Not that anyone has to give them $$ to be clear, the site is free to use). They’ve been steadily expanding, adding functionality, unrolling more publisher- and author-oriented features, and generally being awesome. And, with all that in mind, we were thrilled to hear that they were introducing a Giveaways function (which, on Goodreads, is often a great way to get the word out about a book), and we jumped on the chance to offer our debut anthology Add Magic to Taste as part of the very first run of Storygraph giveaways!

But enough about them – what about the book we’re giving away?

For Add Magic to Taste, 20 authors have come together to produce all-new, original short stories uniting four of our absolute favorite themes: queer relationships, fluff, magic, and coffee shops! Our diverse writers have created an even more diverse collection of stories guaranteed to sweeten your coffee and warm your tart.

So, check out Storygraph if you haven’t already, and check out our giveaway and the other awesome titles on offering (such as our own A. L. Heard’s Choose Your Own Adventure story), and enter to win your own copy of Add Magic to Taste!

The giveaway is running until October 18th, 2022, so if you want to throw in your hat for one of the 10 digital copies on offering, this is your moment!

Check it out now!

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Current Projects and Their Statuses

We received the following ask on Tumblr:

Hi, Friendly anon here! I was wondering if y’all had any updates on your projects? I found a reference to a Trello taskboard thing that looked like it might have some but I got waaaaay confused trying to understand it. How goes everything?

And, our answer!

Hey anon!

Yeah, we’ve publicly shared our Trello here but for someone who’s not familiar with how Trello boards are set up I can absolutely see how it could be confusing. So I’m figuring I can answer this Ask two-fold: first with what we’re actually up to right now, and second with a quick how-to that’d hopefully help with understanding the Trello in the future.

Current Projects and Their Statuses:

And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Kickstarter fulfillment is complete except for people who haven’t done their backer surveys. We are planning to release the e-book and some surplus merch on our website on October 1st, so we’ve been doing work related to that: taking pictures, preparing shop listings, working on our controlled vocabulary, etc.

He Bears the Cape of Stars and She Wears the Midnight Crown: we’ve got virtually all the merchandise here and ready to go with a few exceptions; the bath bombs still need to be repackaged, the patches are currently shipping and are slated to arrive on Wednesday, and chocolates we won’t get until it’s time to ship, so they won’t spoil while sitting around waiting. We’re still hard at work on the books themselves and the stories. There are a total of 36 stories in the two collections; as of right now, 19 stories are completely done/edited/ready to go, and 7 more are close (at the final step before completion). The rest are in various stages of editing. We’ve ended up behind our originally (intentionally optimistic) projected schedule for a variety of reasons, but we’re well within the range of our more “pessimistic” projections, which had us fulfilling in March or so. As it is, we expect to be able to complete fulfillment/ship people’s purchases in early November.

Our Next Anthology: we’ve been hard at work on the planning for our second Queer Fanworks Inspired By… anthology. We’ve hammered out all the details, figured out a schedule, got a title, drafted and edited the websites and surveys that include the rules, guidelines, recruitment stuff, etc., and we anticipate launching recruitment (which will mostly be internal) on October 1st.

An Enamel Pin Campaign: we originally intended to launch a campaign featuring only enamel pins in September. We’re still planning to launch it, but we had so many ideas that we’ve struggled to narrow them down, and so odds are we’ll be launching this in October instead. Right now, we’ve narrowed it to a specific theme and right now we’re voting on which specific pins we want within that theme.

General Business Tasks: as we’re getting closer to finishing the stories for He Bears the Cape of Stars and She Wears the Midnight Crown we’ve been tackling a back-log of more general tasks. For example, we’ve opened up opportunities for authors we’ve worked with to publish their solo original works (as in, personal projects by our authors instead of themed anthologies) and we’re in the process of reviewing the interest checks people sent in, gathering more information from the authors, and getting the ball rolling on having more stand-alone/solo projects coming down the pipes. This is an essential step in widening the scope of what we publish, and we are aiming to start getting out roughly a novel a quarter starting this winter. Also, starting in October, we expect to publish a short story per week on our website, though we’re still getting the ducks in a row to make that a reality so consider that tentative, not official. We’ve also also been expanding the resources part of our website, preparing a style guide, an e-book formatting guide, a fandom lexicon, and more. Our resource-related posts have tended to be well-received, and also because the resources are free we consider providing them an important part of our mission of helping fanfiction author publish their works: even someone who never works with DPP can benefit from a public, free, thorough, professional-level guide that helps them format their story for e-book publication without needing any special/expensive software, for example.

That’s…all the basics I think? there’s also a continuous background buzz of Things That We Do – regular blogging, daily monitoring/upkeep on our social media, maintaining our Patreon and ko-fi accounts, accounting, end-of-month and beginning-of-month fiscal activities, etc. – all the day-to-day activities that keep a business (even a business as small and new as this one) running.

How to Navigate the Trello

So, while we’re still hammering out the details on how best to organize the Trello for utility both for us as we organize things and to the public – in particular, I’m going to need to tweak how it’s set up if we’re going to effectively use the built-in calendar functionality – here’s how it’s set up now.

LISTS:

Image

The highest level of organization on a Trello Board is the lists. We’ve currently got a whole bunch of different lists.

At a Glance: this is the “overview” lists. It includes all of our current projects, and all of our regular/general management. Those are organized on Cards – more on that next.

Merchandise: lists all the merchandise we’ve currently got in production/in process, and what their current status is. (it does NOT include merch produced for past campaigns/activities)

After those two, we have a whole bunch of lists that all serve the same function: they indicate what stage of editing we’ve completed for each of a number of stories we’re currently working on.

  • Developmental – Writing in Progress: first draft isn’t done
  • Developmental – Draft Completed: first draft is done, waiting for an editor
  • Concept Editing – First Pass Completed: a concept-edit run has been returned to the author and is pending their review
  • Concept Editing – Second Pass Completed: a second concept-edit run has been returned to the author and is pending their review.
  • Copy – First Edits Completed: a SPAG edit run has been returned to the author and is pending their review.
  • Copy – Second Pass Completed: a second SPAG edit run has been returned to the author and is pending their review.
  • Copy – Final Edits Completed: a final/clean-up SPAG edit run has been returned to the author and is pending their review.
  • Final Edits Approved, Contract Sent and Pending Signature: the author has approved the final edit run and has been sent their contract.
  • Story Completed, Contract Signed, Author Paid, Preliminary Formatting Done: what it says on the tin
  • Typesetting – First Pass: the typesetter has done the first run on formatting the story for print.
  • Typesetting Completed: what it says on the tin.

Not every single story ends up needing every single one of these, and sometimes stories need more concept or SPAG runs than this, but we thought this division reflected the process stories go through most often. We’ve given the stories basic anonymizing so that no author feels “called out,” though more often than not it’s the editing team that’s behind, not the authors.

Long-Term Ideas, Lists, Information We May Need Someday: the last of our lists is what it says on the tin. We keep track of ideas for future anthologies, potential merch, things we’ve thought of and went “we can’t do that now but maybe someday…” etc., and we just toss it all there so that the ideas don’t get lost.

CARDS:

Every List is composed of Cards. Each Card reflects one category of “thing that needs to be done.” There are a lot of ways to actually set up lists and cards (and we may change ours in the future) but currently, we have:

Cards for all our main projects/overarching “areas” in which we’re working. These are on the At a Glance List.

Cards for all currently in-progress Merchandise, on the Merchandise list.

Cards for all stories we have in-progress at the moment, on the appropriate Lists for their current status.

Cards for some over-arching categories of “things for not now,” on the Long-Term Ideas list.

All the Cards on At a Glance have the same basic structure. If you click on the Card, you’ll be able to see sub-tasks/checklists related to the items on that list. For example, here’s the Recurring Tasks Card:

Image

This is one of the most complex of the Cards, as it includes all the activities we engage in daily, weekly, monthly, and annually to keep the business running smoothly. Other “management” related Cards on this list include two related to our weekly management meetings and monthly all-server meetings, and the General Task Card, which lists a whole slew of background activities that we’ve been working on and/or intend to do (divided into separate checklists for each category, cause there are just so many).

Then, below the the general Cards the cards for specific projects. Here’s the one for He Bears the Cape of Stars and She Wears the Midnight Crown.

Image

This, and the other specific project Cards, list all the tasks we currently know of/have thought of that need to be done for the given project. The checklists give a quick idea of what the task is, and indicates the current status of that task. A few also have dates attached to them, though not most cause we don’t tend to treat deadlines as that “hard” internally – we prefer to maintain flexibility considering how many people are involved in these projects and how complex all our lives are and how the world just, ya know, is right now.

As we complete tasks, we move them into the Comments section at the bottom of the Card. Because we only recently implemented this public system (previously, we worked from a private Trello that looked a lot like this but was just a bit messier and not designed to be viewed by outsiders, like, we used a lot of shorthand, that kind of thing) it doesn’t include tasks completed before we implemented this system, but we’ve been doing our best to keep on top of it since we opened the public Trello a couple weeks ago. For example, here’s the completed tasks for our upcoming anthology that we expect to open recruitment for on October 1st:

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So, I think that’s the basic?

Because we want to use the Calendar more, we may end up breaking out more of the individual tasks currently listed on checklists on Cards into their own Cards, since the Calendar mostly functions at the Card-level, not at the checklist-item level. If we do that, we’ll likely make additional Lists for our main active projects, with cards for each task that is currently a checklist item. However, that’s not going to happen immediately just cause there are higher priority things to be done.

If there’s something more specific that you’re finding confusing, I’m happy to put together a tutorial – I tend to figure that if one person has a question and actually tells me they have a question, there are at least a half-dozen other people who had the same question and decided for whatever reason not to ask, and as you likely know, anon and everyone else reading this, we’re committed to transparency, and the Trello is one of the biggest, newest facets of that, so ensuring it’s navigable for new comers is really important to us. It’s hard to create a public-facing system that maintains a certain degree of confidentiality and still serves our needs for managing the business, and also just – we’ve got a lot going on basically all the time (and more and more as we grow), so there’s a lot that has to go on there, which means by necessity it’s kinda complicated. I do worry that if it’s really complex, it’ll serve to create obscurity instead of transparency, but…well, we’re doing our best, and we’ll keep doing our best, and we hope that when questions/issues/concerns/delays/etc. do arise, people will continue to be as patient with us as they have been! <3

Hope that helps, and thanks for sending an ask!! We’re always here to help. <3

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For those who may not have seen…

The crowdfunding campaign for our anthologies She Wears the Midnight Crown and He Bears the Cape of Stars has ended, and we’re funded!

A huge, HUGE thank you to everyone who helped spread the word, all the authors and other contributors, and of course to everyone who backed!! We couldn’t have done it without you.

Wondering what comes next? Well…

…we finish editing!

…we order merch!

…we fulfill all our orders!

…we publish the e-book versions on our website!

…and we keep working on publishing more queer books, queer anthologies, queer art, and more!!

(Missed the chance to back the campaign? Well, the books will be available on our website as e-books in – probably – November or December. And, you can always support us monthly – and get lots of awesome perks for doing so! – by backing us on Patreon or ko-fi! Backers get sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes access, exclusive stories, a say in determining themes for future anthologies, and more.)

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Now Live: Duck Prints Press’s Third Crowd-funding Campaign!

Duck Prints Press LLC is over the moon to share our next to anthologies with you: She Wears the Midnight Crown and He Bears the Cape of Stars!

These two anthologies share a common theme – masquerades – and each features different kinds of relationships. She Wears the Midnight Crown contains 18 wlw stories; He Bears the Cape of Stars contains 18 mlm stories. Both collections tell myriad stories exploring how these characters’ relationships develop, grow, and change while they attend or participate in masquerades!

Our 36 contributors have stretched their imaginations to present innovative stories exploring what a masquerade can be…and, of course, tell rich, engaging tales of wonderful queer folk finding love, companionship, acceptance, the queer platonic relationship of their dreams, or the found family they deserve. The collected works feature characters in all the colors of the Pride rainbow, queer and genderqueer, and these diverse individuals inhabit worlds ranging from science fiction settings where everyone must be masked to breathe, to fantasies where no one wears a literal mask but everyone shows the world a false guise, to iterations of the real world where some people lean into deception.

You’re definitely not going to want to miss it – you can buy one book or both books, some merch, or all merch – we’ve got 8 backer levels to help you get exactly what you want!

We’d love for you to attend the masquerade! Don your mask and read on…

The Seed&Spark Campaign for She Wears the Midnight Crown and He Bears the Cape of Stars runs from now through July 14th, 2022!

Go Forth, and Back It Now!