The State of the Loon • 14 March 2021

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With STUPEFYING STORIES 23 released and selling—not exactly rocketing up the charts with a bullet, but selling all the same—

Sorry, that “with a bullet” bit is an old BILLBOARD “Hot 100” reference. Does anyone in this century even get it anymore?

Never mind. With SS#23 released and selling, and then updated and re-released (“Now with fewer typos!”), we’re moving ahead with new work. The first thing on the stack is to select the stories for STUPEFYING STORIES 24. I’m not ready to do a cover reveal or start announcing what’s in the TOC yet, but I will say that this thing is coming together much faster than expected. In fact, we have so many good candidates in the stack for SS#24, we’re actually a fair way along the road towards SS#25. Weird as this seems to me, our process has become something very akin to putting together a fantasy football team. E.g.,

“Well, this story is too much like that story, so we can’t use them both in the same issue. And we can’t use both this author and that author in the same issue, because [reasons]. But this story and that story really do complement each other, so we must use them back-to-back.”

I’ve always compared putting together an issue of a magazine to putting together a playlist or a concert program. My wife compares it to putting together a patchwork quilt. I suspect that in different ways, we’re both right. The object remains to create a coherent whole that is greater than the mere sum of its parts.

As for a release date: initially, I was targeting April 1. However, having learned from SS#23 that we really need to build an extra week into the schedule after the thing is nominally finished in order to allow sufficient time for proofreading and making corrections, I’m now targeting SS#24 for release on April 9, with SS#25 targeted for May 1. 

Those are our goals. Now let’s see what we can actually do. 

Meanwhile, after having wasted a lot of time behind the scenes trying to redesign the Stupefying Stories web site, we’ve come to the conclusion that the blogspot engine just can’t do what we need it to do. The biggest single problem is that every newer site template we’ve tried ends up losing or hiding the sales links in the right column, and thus, our entire raison d'être: to sell books.

That’s what we’re trying to do here, you know: sell books. We have a lot of books out there right now, but when they’re not mentioned in the top six or eight posts on this site, sales taper off. For example, Henry Vogel’s Matt & Michelle series has done very well for us, selling thousands of copies on Kindle, in print, and in audio book format, and getting great reviews.

But it sells only when we’re pushing it. If I go a few weeks without plugging it here, sales dwindle.

So rather than turn StupefyingStories.com into the sort of site that is constantly in your face, shouting BUY THIS! BUY THIS! ALSO BUY THIS!, and rather than migrate to another platform and thus lose the ten years of accumulated content we have here, our current thinking is that it’s time to reboot the Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE site. SHOWCASE runs on WordPress, and from the start, it was designed to be a weekly SF/F webzine. 

The site needs a refresh. The template is dated. Now that I look at it, the ads on it are way outdated. But Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE is the kind of site that I was hoping to turn this site into but can’t, because of the limitations of the blogspot engine. If you have some time to spare this afternoon, why don’t you pop over to SHOWCASE, give it a look, and tell me if you think this seems like a reasonable idea or a dilution of effort. There are close to 200 stories sitting out there on the SHOWCASE site, all free to read, and if those stories could speak they would tell you that they would just love to get a little attention.

For example, this story: “Bully,” by Peter Wood. Why don’t you give it a look right now?

—Bruce Bethke