Last year, my wife and I published an anthology entitled Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith. We have been working on this project for over a year: reading submissions and selecting the stories, editing for content, copy editing, layout, cover design, printing, and selling. It was, as you can imagine, a lot of work. I wrote about some of the process here at Back Gate: calling for submissions, using math on submissions, and presenting the table of contents.

After all that, we were very happy with the result. We felt that we had achieved our goal of publishing stories that dealt with the Christian faith in an authentic way, stories which don’t fit comfortably into either religious or mainstream markets, which ask hard questions and refuse to settle for easy answers. In other words, stories that explored the mysteries of the faith.

We got a few nice reviews as well, at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Cemetery Dance, and Tangent Online.

So now that we’ve had a chance to rest up, would we do it again?

Well, if you read the title of this post, you can probably guess the answer.

Yes. Yes, we are planning to do a Mysterion 2.

Well, probably.

Before we actually start taking submissions, we’re first running a Kickstarter. It turns out that publishing is expensive. We already knew this, intellectually, but you don’t really appreciate how expensive until you actually do it and add up every little expense. It’s not costly enough to bankrupt us, but it is costly enough that we hesitate to do it again without raising some cash up front.

Our goal is to raise enough money to pay the authors. It’s important to us to pay professional rates of 6 cents per word–both because we want to able to attract the best stories, and because we believe it’s important that authors get paid a fair rate, while most markets for Christian-themed speculative fiction pay token rates at best.

So have we rediscovered the mysteries of crowdfunding yet? I guess we’ll find out. You can find our Kickstarter here. If you know of anyone who might be interested in the project, feel free to send them our way.

The first volume of Mysterion is available on Amazon for $9.99 as an ebook, and $13.59 as a paperback.

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Donald S. Crankshaw’s work first appeared in Black Gate in October 2012, in the short novel “A Phoenix in Darkness,” and he and his wife have recently published the anthology Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith. Donald lives online at www.donaldscrankshaw.com.