Overview

Final Girl Press celebrated, explored and published horror (and other dark tales) by female-identifying authors. As a digitally focused press, the website played an integral role to the organization.

Web features & details

The site was the central hub for all Final Girl operations. It showcased free stories, took in fiction submissions and email subscribers, and transparently displayed owner equity & the roadmap. We used WordPress for the CMS (modified CSSIgniter Berliner theme), Elementor for custom pages, and Airtable for submission handling.

Story showcase

Stories were the core product, so there were many ways to access them. The homepage featured the latest publications, and each story had its own responsive landing page. The story itself was a simple page with text.

Submissions intake

The other critical operation was receiving and reviewing author submissions. Rather than having people email us stuff, we used Airtable to manage a more sophisticated system. Authors used a detailed Airtable form to submit their work. This populated an internal facing Airtable database and sent an alert to the editors. As we reviewed the piece, we could update the status of the submission from either desktop or smartphone.

One of the most nerve wracking things for authors is not knowing the fate of their submission once it’s sent off. Using Airtable, we were able to display a redacted version of our internal database on a public page so that authors could see selected statuses (e.g. they could see if we were currently reviewing, if there was a delay, or if we had made a decision to accept or reject).

Email intake

Email list growth was a top priority for Final Girl. Our list was managed by Mailchimp, and we had intake forms on many areas of the site. Our champion page for this function was the “Campfire Circle” landing page:

Equity management

We used a thematically adapted version of Mike Moyer’s Slicing Pie system to compensate all contributors in sweat equity. This was also managed with Airtable, with the splits updated on a quarterly basis at a minimum. Using the same technique as the submission queue, we displayed a redacted, public version of our ownership.

Cover art & site art

Occasionally authors supply their own cover art, but for the majority of cases we used stock photography to create the cover. Webpage page hero images were also done in-house.