I’d intended to use one of my serious business faces for this post, but as I was sorting through the files looking for a good photo of me I found this one instead, and thought, “What the Hell and why not?”
Some status notes:
» Tomorrow’s SHOWCASE story is “Planting the Flag,” by Graham Brand, a wonderfully snarky tale of interplanetary exploration and first planetfall. It’s also something of an experiment for us. Thus far I have been sticking to stories in the 750- to 1,500-word length for SHOWCASE, as that seems to be the outside limit for online readers’ attention spans. Flash fiction (<500 words) appears to work even better. “Planting the Flag” runs a glorious 2,700 words. I would like to run longer stories and even serialized stories in SHOWCASE, but having run into the dreaded “tl;dr” reaction before, I’ll be watching the readership metrics for and comments on this and other upcoming longer stories closely, to gauge where my time and energy is best applied.
» SHOWCASE #1, our one and only attempt at doing an EP-format magazine, goes out of print forever at the end of the month. Buy it now.
» Work proceeds on Stupefying Stories #24. We are still on-track for a March 1st release. More details to slither out as we get closer to March 1st.
» We’re still planning Stupefying Stories #25 for June 1st. As mentioned earlier, #25 is already fully funded. We just need to settle on the TOC. Then, after that…
» I may as well blurt this out now. We’re going to move to a crowd-funded business model. Actual sales of our titles have been way too erratic to support the kind of ongoing operation I want to develop, and I don’t have the time or budget right now for the kind of advertising it would take to get us where we want to go. Running a magazine is a lot like flying a hot-air balloon, except instead of propane, you burn bales of cash to keep the thing in the air.
Not having any surplus bales of cash handy at the moment, we’re going for next option: shamelessly asking for your support.
An issue of Stupefying Stories costs us about $1,000 to produce, assuming my time is worth nothing, which is a belief I encounter frequently. It should cost more—not because my leadership is so awesomely brilliant, but because we should be paying our authors more. The fact that we can put out something as good-looking and full of good stories as Stupefying Stories #23 and only spend a thousand bucks doing so is testimony to the sorry state of the SF/F marketplace right now, at least as it concerns the up-and-coming writers who are trying to break into the big time.
That, as you may have noticed, is our place in the ecosystem: we focus on finding and encouraging the new writers that Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and the rest of the pro magazines will be discovering and publishing in another few years. If you support this objective—if you think it serves a valuable purpose to the larger reading and writing community—once SS#24 is out the door we’re going to be asking not just for your likes and retweets, but for your financial support, as we roll out the campaign to raise the funding for issues #26 (September 1st) and #27 (December 1st). And this time we won’t be trying to raise just $1K per issue but setting an ambitious stretch goal, for the reason that if we can raise more cash, we can pay authors more for their work.
Details to follow, beginning next week. In the meantime, let me leave you with this thought:
Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke
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1 comments:
I’m in
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