One of the joys of being a published author is getting to do good with my words. One route to accomplish that is a charity anthology, where a group of us donate short fiction, with the profits going to a charitable cause.

I’ve done several of those, from 2014’s Another Place in Time – an anthology to benefit All Out that I was honored to be invited to along with such historical fiction luminaries as KJ Charles and Tamara Allen – to my most recent: Love & Hope: A Benefit Anthology which will release Feb 14th as encouragement and support for author HM Wolfe, facing medical issues and the associated costs.

I’m proud of the financial support my stories, in harness with those of other excellent and generous authors, have raised for good causes.

It’s always a bit of a question, of course. Will the story raise more than the money I spent on its edits and the time lost to other work? Would I have been better off just handing over the cash? Will people read it, or contribute by buying and then never open the anthology? (I admit, I have done this as a reader.) Are these really valuable?

I do think the answer is yes, at least provisionally. Financially, one recent anthology I was in passed along over $5000 to its charity. 48 authors in that one, (it was huge) still means over $100 per author of charity, so more than my short story edits cost.

But also, in non-monetary terms. One of the joys of the M/M community is how interconnected we are. Pitching in for a cause together, writers and readers, helps bond us into a stronger force. LGBTQ poeple, and even fictional representations of them, are under siege today around the world. From Florida to Russia, folks in the LGBTQ community are scapegoated and trodden down for political purposes. Chipping in to work together supporting each other and the LGBTQ causes we hold dear is another way to demonstrate the strength and resilience of our M/M community.

So I expect when I’m asked again, you’ll see more of my stories. The coming Love & Hope story is a sweet, fluffy 5500-word Hidden Wolves stand-alone short. And while yes, I put up short stories on my Facebook Group every week, I hope that an edited, polished, more deliberate piece may still help make the anthology worth spending money on, even beyond the good cause.

And I expect I will continue to buy other such anthologies to read, when they cross my wish list. Not just for the good cause, but because in short fiction I do sometimes find a new favorite to run after backlist on.

Do you enjoy the charity anthologies? Do you buy them? Read them? I’m interested in your thoughts on this way our community shows support.

– Kaje Harper

Jan 2024