Answer: Busy. Really, really busy.
Rather than chatter, then, let’s get right to the agenda.
Item #1: REMINDER: You have five days left in which to recommend your favorite stories for inclusion in The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge. You’ll find the (mostly) complete list of PWC stories here.
Nominate your favorites either by commenting on this post or in an email message to stupefyingstories @ gmail [dot] com.
ANOTHER REMINDER: Do not bother to comment in the comments sections of the stories themselves. Because of aggressive spambot activity, we’ve had to lock down commenting on old posts. Comments or recommendations made on older posts, as well as on social media, very likely will be overlooked.
Item #2: HENRY VOGEL just won an Imadjinn Award for Best Graphic Novel, for The Complete X-Thieves. Sadly, his most recent RLP novel, The Princess Scout, was only a finalist and didn’t win in its category. Henry writes good books, most of which we’ve published. You should check them out.
I sometimes complain that people only seem to care about stories and books I wrote thirty years ago. Henry is finally starting to get awards and recognition for comic books he scripted in the 1980s. In some perverse way, this makes me feel better.
Item #3: ALLAN DYEN-SHAPIRO’s novelette, The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds, is at last out in paperback on Barnes & Noble. There are slight differences between the Amazon and Barnes & Noble (Ingram) editions, mostly in that Ingram did a much better job of printing the cover art, used a better grade of paper for the interior, and made the binding tighter and more durable. I don’t care which version you buy: we make more money off the Amazon edition, but the Ingram edition is a better book. Just, take a look at the thing, will you?
Note that the e-book is available on pretty much every e-reader platform there is, and the Ingram print edition is slowly trickling out to stores and e-commerce sites. This is what we’ll be doing going forward: releasing our e-books on every platform we can reach. This makes some difference in how we deal with Amazon, most notably in that we will no longer be putting new releases on Kindle Unlimited. KU sells novels—THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, by Eric Dontigney, is doing particularly well on KU—but KU totally cannibalizes sales of short story collections. So we’re going to stop using it.
Item #4: in the meantime, Stupefying Stories issues #23, #24, #25, and #26 remain available FREE to read on Kindle Unlimited.
If you have any interest at all in what we’re doing here, beyond how much we pay and when we’re going to reopen to submissions, please, please, please take a look at any or all of these four books. You’re sure to find something you like in them. Maybe even something you think worth mentioning to your friends. And you can’t beat the price.
Item #5: I recently rejoined SFWA. It was an eye-opening experience.
Mind you, I did this not for my own benefit, but in hopes of learning some things about the SF/F market as it exists today, so that I might better promote the writers whose work I am publishing. Instead, what I learned was… disheartening.
First off, I was sad to see a lot of names I recognized on the In Memoriam page. Some of these people were good friends, back in the day. Some were even people whose work I’ve published. In particular, finding Zoe Kaplan’s name there was heart-breaking. She was too young to be gone already.
Second, I was shocked to see how SFWA has had to adjust their admission requirements downward. When I first joined—
No, never mind. That was then. This is now. But as a reflection of the general health of the SF/F market, it was disturbing to see. And the deeper I looked, the more disturbed I became, and perhaps I’ll have more to say about that another time. But right now I want to move on to—
Item #6: Getting back to The Very Best of The Pete Wood Challenge:
We’ve already found that two of the candidates for that book can’t be republished, because the authors have since died and left no contact information.
Perhaps I’m just morose because of what I learned when I rejoined SFWA, but this is an important point. As an author, you own your copyrights, and they might someday have some value. I know it’s no fun to think about this, but you really do need to plan for someone to be responsible for your literary estate after you’re gone. Otherwise all your works will go to The Land of Orphaned Copyrights…
And then Google* will find a way to make money off them. You don’t want that to happen, do you?
~brb* Probably under the well-known legal principle, “The dead can’t sue.” Someday I’m going to find a way to slip that line into a story. I just need to come up with a character loathsome enough to say it.
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