I love working with small presses. Right now I am working with @cirsova to get Endless Summer ready for the kickstarter, but earlier this year I put together Dark Fantasies with @StoryHackMag and before that I did Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts with @BooksLagrange

And before that, of course, I did Duel Visions with @louise3anne , also for @cirsova. There's an energy and a... vision, I guess, that comes with working with another person on a book project that I never got from self-publishing.

I think a lot of the discussions regarding self-publishing miss that aspect. As an author, I don't really get the full impact of my work until I see it reflected back to me from a reader, and a good editor is first and foremost a good reader.

Small publishers in particular are in it for the love of the art. When I pitch a project I am mindful of the business end, and I think it's very important to have the details solidly worked out, to prevent any problems later on--

but that's not what motivates either of us. I have an idea, something that I want to create, and that moment when someone else says to me, "Yeah, let's do this thing!" is pretty damned magnificent.

I've worked with a lot of editors since I started concentrating on short fiction. The good ones--and there are a lot of good indie editors putting together anthologies and magazines--challenge me to do my best work.