Now that we’ve passed Halloween and turned the corner through Fall on the way into Winter, it’s time to get back to all those questions that have been piling up in my inbox that I was too busy to answer last week. More questions are continuing to come in, so we’ll begin with the first one that was in my inbox this morning.
Q: How did the Stupefying Stories 26 free e-book giveaway turn out?
A: Better than I’d feared it would but not as well as I’d hoped it might. We moved quite a few copies, but only picked up one new rating and no new reviews.
We’ll probably do another free e-book giveaway in the last week of November, possibly of Stupefying Stories 24 but more likely of Stupefying Stories 23, and then take 23 out of print. We need to figure out a more aggressive strategy to promote these things before we do the next one, though.
Q: What’s going on with future books?
A: We’re going to try to get the next book out on December 1st. But before we do that, we need to figure out how to pre-sell the living Hell out of it before we release it! We need a much better marketing campaign. Trying to sell a book after it’s released doesn’t fly in today’s market. You’re trying to sell last week’s stale quantum doughnut against tomorrow’s hot and fresh new product. That doesn’t work.
Q: I thought you had the financial backing for four more books already lined up?
A: I do.
The funny part is, Stupefying Stories has never made a profit. Even in our best years, whenever we made what appeared to be a profit, I plowed everything we made back into publishing more content and paying our authors and artists more. Since we started publishing in 2010, in addition to our original seed capital and the reinvested profits, I’ve poured about $50,000 of my own money into promoting other authors’ works and careers.
When I was a project manager pulling down a six-figure salary, I didn’t worry too much about that. It was still less money that I’d have spent on a good sailboat, and had the added advantage of being fun year-round.
But now that I’m spending our investors’ money, I’ve become strangely parsimonious. I don’t want to waste their money on projects I only hope might produce good results.
Guess this explains why I’ve never wanted to run for Congress.
Q: Speaking of Congress and next week’s election—
A: Please, let’s not. I remember every election back through 1964, and this is the most vicious and polarized one I’ve ever seen. I just want to get through next Tuesday—or Wednesday—or whenever it is that they finally agree on what the results are—and get back to something that approximates “normal,” if that’s possible.
Q: 1964? Just how old are you?
A: Old enough to have seen The Doors play live. Correlate that.
A: My unholy creation is sitting up and taking nourishment. I still have another half-dozen or so modules on backorder. I have the rack-space for them, I just don’t have them yet.
[Music cue: Tin Huey, “I Could Rule The World, If I Could Only Get The Parts”]
I am slightly disappointed by the Behringer 1047. The original ARP 1047 Multimode Filter/Resonator was the module that really gave the 2500 its distinctive character. Behringer got the sound about right, but to make it fit in a 16HP Eurorack module they left off a few inputs. I can work around the limitations of the single audio input—that just requires an outboard mixer, and hey, it’s Eurorack! Need space for more modules? Add another chassis! It doesn’t need to fit into a 2500 cabinet, where module space is at a premium!
But the minimalist number of CV inputs is a problem, especially the lack of a scaled 1V/8va KBD CV input. I’m still working on figuring out a workaround for that, so that I can get the filter to track the keyboard or the sequencer consistently and accurately.
Uh-oh. I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if there are the many eyeballs glazing over out there. Better get on with the next question.
Q: I’ve been reading your editorials, and it sounds like you may stop publishing short fiction and The Pete Wood Challenge altogether. I’ll be sad if this happens, but will understand. Is this true?
A: Not exactly. Pete Wood Challenge #35, “The Off-Season,” starts running on Monday, November 4th, and new stories run all through next week. We even have a new Pete Wood story for you. (Sometimes Pete can’t resist writing a story for his own challenge, even though he’s not allowed to declare himself the winner.)
We have more SHOWCASE stories in the queue and waiting to run, and will continue to run them through November. But we’re just not getting the level of reader support we need to publish new stories daily, so we need to cut back on how many free stories we run on the web site, at least until such time as that condition changes. Essentially, I’m having to ration out the stories we have.
As I said, now that I’m spending our investors’ cash, I’m being a lot more careful with it and trying to stretch it as far as possible.
As I’ve also said, Stupefying Stories magazine is the challenge. Our original novels sell. Selling the magazine is like trying to push overcooked spaghetti uphill against the wind. Until we figure out what’s wrong with our marketing and how to fix it—if it can be fixed—
You get the picture.
Q: Will there ever be print editions of SS#24 and SS#26?
A: Yes. We’d planned to finish those and get them uploaded this week, then found some of the source files were not where we believed them to be. We have everything in hand now and expect to finish up the print books next week.
Q: How exactly do you do your print books?
A: At present, we use Vellum to do our layouts. We do novels through Ingram Spark, because they produce a better quality (but more expensive) book, but we do the magazine through Amazon KDP, because it’s faster and cheaper. By doing the novels through Ingram Spark we also get the capacity to sell printed books through bookstores, although in practice that’s more hypothetical than actual.
Q: Thanks for publishing the Pete Wood Challenge index. I’ve been reading old stories and have tried to comment on some of them, but my comments don’t seem to be going through. Do you moderate comments?
A: Yes and no. Past a certain date, comments are automatically put in the moderation queue and must be approved before they’re posted. We’ve had to do this because of the spambots. It seems to take them a few weeks to find a newly posted story, but once they find one, they never let go. For example, Zoe Kaplan’s story, “Pink Marble,” continues to collect spam comments from companies trying to sell imported Mediterranean tiles and paving blocks.
If you’ve looked at the original SHOWCASE site, spambots are what eventually made the bulletin board, reader’s forum, and feedback email addresses useless. We were spending more time moderating spam comments than publishing fiction. We’ve tried Akismet and other filters, but it’s a never-ending battle against the spambots, and one that keeps escalating.Q: Why do you allow anonymous comments?
A: They enable us to receive useful feedback from people who don’t have a Google/Gmail login.
Then again, sometimes we get feedback from people who have a negative opinion but are too cowardly to stand behind it. Such comments usually reveal more about the personal problems of the person making the comment than anything useful to us.
We do not delete obnoxious comments—unless they’re directed at one of the other guests on our site. Then we drop the 8-lb banhammer on them without hesitation.
Q: You’ve been posting a lot of retrospective content lately. Why?
A: Sometimes you need to know where you’ve been to figure out where you want to go. We’ve had a multitude of web sites over the years, and there’s a ton of old content out there. It’s been strongly recommended to us that we move to a new site in 2025 and put our premium content behind a paywall. Part of what’s held us back from doing so was the sheer mass of old content we have on our existing site.
But if no one is reading any of that old stuff anyway…
Q: In Six Questions for… Robert Russell Lowell, you hinted that you’re planning a reprint anthology?
A: Yes. Several. That’s the other reason why we’re delving into the old content: to identify stories we’d like to collect in reprint anthologies.
The third reason is that I’ve received some invitations to write about writing for other publications, and am trying to figure out just what I have out there that might be salvageable and repurposable for that. I do know how to write fiction, and how to teach others how to do so.
I just don’t have a clue how to market fiction successfully, in a world where the rules for doing so seem to be changing daily.
Q: A few weeks ago you published a really charming picture of a mist-covered pasture. Was that done with A.I.?
A: Nope. That was just a matter of being in the right place, looking in the right direction, at the right time, and having a camera handy.
The ironic part is that a few days ago I was again in that place, at that relative time (a few minutes before sunrise), looking in the same direction, only this time the pasture was covered with white hoarfrost…
But in the meantime, my cell phone had downloaded and installed new camera software with all sorts of A.I. enhancements, and when I tried to frame up the same shot, the A.I. recognized the scene and insisted on trying to change the color balance so that the frost-covered white grass was a proper green. By the time I figured out how to shut off the A.I. enhancements, it was too late. Dawn had broken; the light had changed; the frost was beginning to melt.
The moment was gone.
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