I’ve heard from a lot of people since last Saturday’s announcement that we’re going to be striking the tent and closing the circus. The first thing to remember is…
Oh, I bet you can guess.
To reiterate: if you have a story under contract with us, we will publish it, unless you choose to withdraw it.
The exact nature of that publication may vary. Some of the stories we originally bought for the SHOWCASE web site will be sliding over into books. We plan to stay in the book business.
Our original novels sell.
Well, most do. I still can’t figure out why we’re having such a hard time generating interest in EMERALD OF EARTH.
Henry Vogel’s latest novel, THE PRINCESS SCOUT, is a finalist for the Imadjinn Award.
Matthew Castleman’s PRIVATEERS OF MARS continues to sell in batches. (It’s odd. We’ll sell a bunch of copies in two days, and then nothing for weeks.)
Eric Dontigney’s novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, hasn’t sold many copies lately, but it’s turning big KENP numbers on Kindle Unlimited.
But as for Stupefying Stories, the magazine…
Have a Kindle? Find out what you’ve been missing!
Buy the four latest issues with just one click!
(Or buy just one, if that’s what you’d really prefer.)
Even with it being FREE on Kindle Unlimited, we can’t seem to give the thing away. So it’s time for me to do something else.
I’m more than a bit saddened by this. We’ve poured a lot of time, money, and energy into it over the past fifteen years. For personal reasons I was really hoping Stupefying Stories would make it to issue #30.
But in the past 15 years it’s gone from being a chaotic effort produced by a collective of eager volunteers (hence my onetime job title, “Executive Cat-herder in Chief”), to being a mom-and-pop operation run by me and my wife with a rotating cast of helpers and first readers, to being a grandma-and-grandpa boutique operation…
I really appreciate all the kind comments I’ve received in the past few days from people who have found a sense of community here, but I can’t continue to run this thing as a one-man band.
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We—meaning me and my financial backers—considered a lot of options. We talked about putting the fiction content behind a paywall, or moving the site over to substack or something like that. Until a few weeks ago the plan was to cut over to a new web site at the end of this month, and to rebrand as StupefyingSF.
But for some reason the spambots took that name to mean we were about to open a new restaurant in San Francisco—seriously—and all the email addresses associated with that domain were spam-bombed into rubble by people trying to sell us restaurant fixtures and kitchen supplies. Then the schedule for moving over to the new site was thrown into complete chaos by The Remodeling Project That Would Not End, And Still Hasn’t…
So the good news is, we’ve abandoned the plan to move to a new web site anytime soon. This web site, https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/, will continue to exist well into summer. This will let us finish publishing most of the stories we have accepted for SHOWCASE.
(“Most of?” someone asked. The rest will go into new books. I’ll explain in a minute.)
Over the past few years we have published hundreds of stories in SHOWCASE. Since we’re going to be keeping this web site going for a few more months, we’ve decided to go spelunking through the archives and resurface what we’re calling The Best of Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE.
Some will be stories you probably have read before, as they drew thousands of readers. Others will be stories that were unfairly overlooked. All will be stories united by one common characteristic: they’re the stories that I think represent the best of what we’ve published online.
I hope that in the months ahead, you’ll join me on this journey of exploration.
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Finally—no, not really finally, I’ve lots more questions in the mailbag but have run out of time to answer them today—the burning question on many people’s minds: What about The Pete Wood Challenge?
The quick answer is that Pete and I are in discussions on the subject, and there will be a THE LAST PETE WOOD CHALLENGE, but the specifics are not yet settled. Stay tuned.
More to follow, bye for now, and remember: BUY SOME OF OUR DAMN BOOKS, OKAY?
3 comments:
Thanks Bruce for giving me the website equivalent of a MCU post credit teaser scene. Leave my adoring public wanting more.
I really enjoyed The Privateers of Mars. Is there a place where we can find all of the Rampant Loon books? There's nothing under the "Books" tab on the website.
Are all of the books listed on Amazon under Rampant Loon Press?
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