T-minus 7 Days

Coming Friday, 02/02/18: Stupefying Stories #20 Cover story: “Zombie Like Me,” by Clancy Weeks Cover artist: Keith Rosson Plus: “Their Nostalgia Will Be Very Much Like Our Nostalgia,” by Eric Cline “How to Build a Train,” by Brandon Kempner “Endeavor to Dream on Broken Wings,” by AJ Finley “Piles of Dust and Berries,” by Sadie Bruce “Alien Whispering,” by Bo Balder “Lucky...

Read More

There’s always one more typo

As soon as sales of issue #19 took off, the old familiar fear returned. This one takes the form of a really stupid, egregious, and embarrassing typo, that I’d somehow managed not to see all the way through the production process, but that would leap off the page and slap me in the face the moment I downloaded the finished book from Amazon and looked at it on my own Kindle. No...

Read More

Stupefying Stories Authors on the Move!

When we first launched Stupefying Stories, the whole point of the thing was to help writers launch their careers. We lose sight of that objective from time to time, but I have to tell you, the best thing about this job is seeing the name of someone who you were the first (or one of the first) to publish show up years later, on the shortlist for some major literary award, on the cover of one of the major pro-market magazines, or in a book release...

Read More

Book Release | Free eBook Friday: After Action Report

By the time yesterday’s Free eBook Friday promotion was finished in the West Coast time zone, people had downloaded an astonishing 1,905 copies of Stupefying Stories #19 and Stupefying Stories #12. For a while, issue #19 was the #1 bestseller in both the Science Fiction Anthologies and Fantasy Anthologies categories, while issue #12 was right behind it in the #2 spot in both categories. Wow. I was hoping we’d get some attention with this book release....

Read More

Book Release / Free eBook Friday

STUPEFYING STORIES #19 ESCAPES! To celebrate the release of STUPEFYING STORIES #19, we’re giving away the Kindle editions of both our latest book (issue #19) and our oldest book that’s still on Amazon (issue #12) FREE for the cost of a click—but for today only. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell people you know who aren’t such good friends but still like to get...

Read More

Talking Shop

Op-ed • “Dear Time Traveler,” by L. Joseph Shosty On December 21, 2017, Bruce wrote an op-ed titled “It’s Amazon’s World, We Just Rent Space in It.” In it, a friend of Bruce’s asks (paraphrasing and perhaps embellishing a little), when the market is glutted with small presses, self-pubbers, and ancient reprints hoping to capture evergreen status in this new frontier, how...

Read More

Today on SHOWCASE

Fiction • “Quality of Life,” by Alexandra Renwick Good afternoon, Mr. Jones. First let me thank you for coming peacefully when our field agents brought you in. I’m sure it was inconvenient to have been interrupted at dinner, and at such an elegant, expensive restaurant, too. A date, was it? Well, I’m certain our agents apologized to your lady friend on your behalf, but...

Read More

“600 Years Ago, Today” • by Michael W. Lucht

By 2134, every memory chip had been networked. Otherwise CRUD, the Commission for the Removal of Unremarkable Data, could not have existed. As things stood, no backup copy was safe from their high-level iterative deletion algorithms. Unless, like Hinckley, one had managed to obtain a rare vintage memory card without integrated wireless access. Hinckley slotted this highly...

Read More

Media Relations

Podcast • Storypunks Interview • I did an interview with Cindy Grigg at Storypunks.world a few weeks back. It’s now up on YouTube, iTunes, and wherever else it is that podcasts go to reach the world. Personally, I’m afraid to watch it—I have a painful “second guess” reflex, and whenever I watch or listen to a recording of myself later, I’m always hearing all the things I should or shouldn’t have said—but you may find it interesting. Here’s the...

Read More

Talking Shop

Op-ed • “2018: Where We Stand,” by Bruce Bethke • We began with a Kindle. That sounds much better than, “We began with a series of expensive blunders, some of which continue to this day.” A decade ago, when we first incorporated Rampant Loon Media LLC, I really had no interest in becoming an SF/F fiction publisher. At that time I’d already spent about 30 years in the...

Read More