First news: I’ve shut down our crowd-funding campaign.
Or rather, I’m trying to. While I’ve emailed everyone on our (pathetically short) list of supporters, some folks still have monthly automatic credit card payments set up. To them I say, thank you for your continued support, but going forward I’m going to refund your automatic payments anyway, so you may as well shut them off now.
Our attempt at doing crowd-funding has been a failure. We have never come even close to raising the amount of support needed in order to meet the continuing monthly operating expenses of SHOWCASE.
Understand: I don’t really need the money. In terms of raw cash, it was a paltry amount. But it was also a very good indicator of the level of commitment of our readers, and if fewer than 5% of our readers feel Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE is worth throwing the equivalent of a dollar a week in the tip jar…
Well, then we are not providing a service people value, and it’s time for us to do something else.
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Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories will continue. Our original novels continue to do well, although not as well as we might like. Eric Dontigney’s paranormal thriller, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, for example, continues to draw new readers daily, although they’re mostly Kindle Unlimited readers, not e-book or print book buyers.
Henry Vogel’s two main series, THE FUGITIVE HEIR—
And SCOUT’S HONOR—
Continue to sell in e-book and paperback, and to find new readers on Kindle Unlimited. (Henry’s latest book, HEART OF DORKNESS, is so new I don’t even have a banner ad for it yet. You’ll just have to click the link.)
However, we do have a really nice banner ad for—
I continue to hear from people who’ve read PRIVATEERS OF MARS and want to tell me how much they love it, and ask when the next book in the series is coming out.
Don’t tell me how much you love it. Give it a rating or a review on Amazon or Goodreads!
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In sum: our books do well (mostly).
Publishing free online fiction doesn’t. It draws very little reader support, and it’s a constant struggle to keep our readership numbers up. Worse, the entire raison d'être for Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE was to try to draw in new readers to this website, in hopes that while they’re here, they might also decide to take a look at some of our other books.
That’s not happening. There is no detectable link between SHOWCASE readership and book sales, or even Kindle Unlimited page reads. Readers aren’t even crossing over to take a cursory glance at the e-book edition of SHOWCASE, which is free on Kindle Unlimited.
Therefore…
I’ve become reluctant to posit deadlines. Perhaps it’s the result of spending the last two months living in the midst of this “minimally invasive, three days tops” house repair and remodeling project that is still only “mostly” done. But the plan d’jour is to wind down Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE gracefully, running out the remainder of the content we already have in-hand and under contract through March, and then to cut over to our new website on or about April 1st.
Our new website will be focused on selling books. That’s why Rampant Loon Media LLC exists: to publish and sell books.
As for Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE: I’m sorry to say that it no longer helps us do that, if it ever did. So now it’s time for us to do something else.
Any questions? You know how to reach me.
Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke
Executive Cat-herder in Chief
Rampant Loon Media LLC
3 comments:
Let's all raise a glass and toast the Pete Wood Challenge. We saw some great stories iver the years. It will be missed. Now, Bruce can get to work on the book version where we can leisurely thumb through the dozens and dozens of quirky and serious and thought provoking and funny and poetic (add your adjective of choice here) gems.
I'd buy that book. So would you.
Sorry to hear this! Loved the variety of content. I’m sure if you upgraded your website to something that improved the navigation and viewing on phones, like using squarespace, readership would jump up.
Sorry to hear this, but I totally understand. Short fiction really is a challenge these days, for reasons I still don't quite understand. I think, as a genre, it might be going the way of poetry.
Hear hear to the Pete Wood Challenge! I've been really happy with the stories it drew out of me, and I've loved others' stories as well!
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