Updating contact info

URGENT UPDATE!
Because this old post from 7/12/2021 keeps bubbling back to the top, it's necessary to update this update. In 2022 our ISP unilaterally decided to move all our email accounts to Microsoft Exchange, which had the unintended consequence of rendering all our @rampantloonmedia email accounts unreliable at best and also accidentally erased several thousand archived email messages. Going forward our preferred email address to use is stupefyingstories@gmail.com. Email sent to the old submissions@rampantloonmedia or brb@rampantloonmedia email addresses may get through, but all other @rampantloonmedia email accounts should be presumed to be defunct.

The Facebook and Twitter links remain viable. No, I am not going to add a TikTok account.

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Some weird things have been popping up in the various RLP mailboxes lately, so this seems like an opportune time to update our contact info.

Submissions and queries about submissions:
     » submissions@rampantloonmedia.com
     (although we’re not open to new unsolicited submissions right now)

Feedback not related directly to a specific submission:
     » feedback@rampantloonmedia.com

Queries about novella- or longer-length submissions:
     » queries@rampantloonmedia.com
     (although we’re not looking at taking on any new long-format projects right now)

Contact me directly:
     » brb@rampantloonmedia.com
     (although I reserve the right to lock this account down if it gets spam-bombed
     into rubble again, like my last publicized “direct” email address did) 

Stupefying Stories on Facebook:
     » https://www.facebook.com/StupefyingStories/

Bruce Bethke on Facebook:
     » https://www.facebook.com/Bruce.Bethke
     (see above comment about my direct email address)

Stupefying Stories on Twitter:
     » https://twitter.com/StupefyingSF | @StupefyingSF
     (follow us on Twitter and we’ll follow you)

Along with giving up on my long-standing resistance to Twitter, I’ve also given up on my long-standing resistance to having a tip jar. If you support what we’re doing here but already have all the books and magazines you’ll ever be able to read in this life, please consider throwing a buck or two in the tip jar to show your appreciation and help to support our mission.

Thank you,
~brb

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The State of the Loon • 17 May 2021

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Spring returns to the North Country. I know I’ve written this line several times before, but this time it seems to be for real. At least, the weather service assures us that last week’s frost was an unseasonably late anomaly and this time it really is safe to replace all those garden plants that froze to death last week.

I suppose the uncertainty of the arrival of spring here is why I feel such a strong affinity for “Finding Spring” by Sipora Coffelt, which if you have not read it yet you will find in SHOWCASE #1. If you have not read it, please give it a look. The book is only $0.99 to buy or free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

If you have given SHOWCASE a look and liked it, please give it a rating. Ratings and reviews help sell books. If you like and support what we’re trying to do here, please, help us sell books.

¤

Spring here in the North Country is the time for rebirth, renewal, rediscovery, and finding new directions. For example, that columbine in the garden. Discovering it prompted a short conversation, amounting to, “Where the heck did that come from? Did you plant it? I don’t remember planting it.” Nonetheless, the bees seem to like it, so it’s going to stay. We’re very big on bees around here.

Spring also brings cows, frolicking in the pasture. I know it’s kind of frightening to think of animals that large frolicking, but they do. Cows can be quite playful, actually. Think about that the next time you’re eating a cheeseburger. 

¤

SHOWCASE is much on my mind this morning because I’ve been spending a lot of time researching and reevaluating how we go to market. The deeper I delve into it, the more bottomless the rabbit hole seems. There has been a tremendous amount written about how to sell books successfully on Amazon; so much so that I’m beginning to think the real secret is to write a book on how to make big money selling books on Amazon. There certainly seems to be a bigger market for those kinds of self-help books than for actual original novels, much less for short fiction.

Lately we’ve also been taking a long, hard look at Kindle Vella, which if you're not aware of it is something you should be, as Amazon will be putting a lot of promotional muscle behind it in the coming months. Vella essentially is a new platform for delivering serialized work in small chunks and collecting micropayments. At first we were hoping we could use it as a vehicle for continuing SHOWCASE in a new and preferably non-money-losing way, but the deeper we dug into it, the clearer it became that it would not serve that need. 

We will be using Vella to serialize THE HOSTAGE IN HIDING, the latest novel in Henry Vogel’s Fugitive Heir series—oh yeah, and here’s a sneak preview of the cover art—but we have some reservations. Amazon seems to be going out of their way to make it difficult to connect “the Vella experience” to any existing novels that are already available on Amazon. They will be making it very difficult to release the completed novel as a normal book once it has been serialized on Vella. And in case you were going to ask, they have absolutely forbidden serializing any novel that has already been published in any other form.

So much for my dreams of getting some value from Headcrash while I’m going through the painfully slow process of converting it to ebook.

¤

Finally for today, a number of people have written to ask if or when we are going to reopen to submissions, or if we have already opened for submissions without announcing it.

We are not open for unsolicited submissions at this time. The confusion stems from my giving both Pete Wood and Guy Stewart permission to run contests, the winners of which are to receive token payments and publication on the Stupefying Stories web sites. We already have the first batch of winners, from a flash fiction contest that Pete ran on a writer’s site that he belongs to, and some of these people have reported their wins as sales on various submission tracking sites.

So to reiterate: we are not open to unsolicited submissions at this time. We have not decided whether we will have an open reading period this year. At the moment, my focus is mostly on taking care of the writers who have signed publication contracts with us and who have been waiting patiently for us to publish their stories, concurrent with figuring out how to do a much better job of selling what we publish.     

After all, there isn’t much point in publishing fiction if it doesn’t get into the hands of people who want to read it.

—Bruce Bethke

P.S. And check out and maybe read some of our books, wouldja?

 

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Submissions and Slush Pile Update #3

Six weeks into our 2019 reading period, we’ve settled down to a pretty consistent average of seven new submissions daily. Of these—

• 60% are first-round no-comment rejects, for any of a number of reasons.

• 10% are set aside waiting for me to write a personal rejection, because the story deserves more than just a “Thanks, but we can’t use this story at this time.”

• 5% are sitting in the Probably Accept bin, but we haven’t made the final final final decisions yet.

At some point I’ll start writing about the 60% and the 10%, because there’s much to be said about these stories and why we chose not to accept them that might be of value to other writers. Until there’s time to do that, though, here’s one quick hint: we reject stories, not writers. Just because one story you sent us got a quick form rejection, that doesn’t mean the next story you send us might not be exactly what we’re looking for.

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Submissions and Slush Pile Update #2

Three weeks into our 2019 reading period, things seem to be progressing nicely. Submissions slowed for a few days but then returned to their normal pace, and we’re still on-track to receive between 200 and 250 new stories this month. I’m pleased to report that thus far we’ve been getting every new submission received into the hands of a first reader within 48 hours, and getting through first-round reads and first-round decisions within seven days.

For about 65% of the stories we receive, the first-round is as far as they go. For a multitude of reasons these stories just aren’t what we’re looking for right now, so we’ll thank the authors kindly for giving us the opportunity to consider their story and wish them good luck placing it elsewhere. I’d love to be able to send each and every author a detailed explanation as to why we aren’t holding their story over for further consideration, but there simply isn’t the time.

The point I want to stress, though, is that every story submitted to us does get at least one full reading, and generally a first read and then a second skim as we discuss them in first-round triage. We have not yet succumbed to the temptation to reject a story based solely on the author’s cover letter alone—though there have been some close calls...

Thus far we have a small handful of clear BUYs in the hopper, a very few RFWs (requests for rewrites) pending, and a fair number of stories we’re holding over for a second or third re-read. We should begin sending out acceptances this weekend, and if all goes well the new SHOWCASE site should also go live this coming Saturday.

Stay tuned,
~brb

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Submissions and Slush Pile Update #1

Two weeks into our 2019 reading period, things are going about as expected. At the present daily rate we should receive between 250 and 300 new submissions this month. Of these stories, statistically, we’ll be able to buy and publish about 15. These aren’t hard numbers, mind you. They don’t take into account story length, and in fiction publishing, word count is a minor god who must be served.

Hmm. That would be an interesting metric, but we don’t begin to track story length until we get to third-round reads, when we’re starting to evaluate stories in light of how they would jigsaw together into an issue. I wonder if Katherine would revolt if I added word count to the submissions tracking system and asked her to start logging it for each new submission received?

Never mind that now. My point is that speaking statistically, every story that comes in here has a roughly one-in-twenty chance of making it all the way through to being accepted, and most will receive a no-comment form rejection. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the way the numbers work out.

How can you improve your odds? For us, reading slush is always an enlightening experience, somewhat akin to taking the pulse of writers as a collective. About fifty-percent of the stories that show up in our inbox are dead on arrival, usually because the writer failed to read our submission guidelines and sent us something we simply couldn’t use, no matter how objectively good it might be. For example, we are seeing a lot of horror—far more than we could ever possibly publish even if we were to stay in business for another twenty years.

...Out of time, more to follow tomorrow... 

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Re Submissions

Here’s one more thing we’ll be adding to the Submission Guidelines ASAP:

Please do not send email with HUGE (multi-megabyte) attachments to our submissions email inbox. Such submissions just overflow the inbox, clog up the pipes, and end up being deleted unread. If we want to see your author’s photo in all its glorious 16MB hi-res beauty, we will ask for it after we’ve accepted your story and put it under contract, and then you’ll be directed to send it to a different mailbox.

In the meantime, if you’ve tried to send us a submission in the past 48 hours and gotten a “mailbox full” bounce-back message, be advised that we’ve located the source of the problem, plunged the pipes, and everything should be flowing freely again. 

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Letters to the Editor

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Quentin Walker writes:

“I am a writer in my free time and an avaricious reader [...]”

(Good opening. We like writers, and always need more readers. And if you’re a writer who writes without also reading, you’re probably going to be a lousy writer. I think you meant voracious, though, not avaricious.)

“When submitting short stories, do you accept anything with horror Lovecraftian themes? Or do you just like straight science fiction and fantasy?”

First off, if you want to know what we like to see in submissions, our Submission Guidelines are always a good place to start. If you take a quick look at them, the first thing you’ll notice is that we are CLOSED to unsolicited submissions right now. At the moment we’re in the last stages of cleaning up after our 2018 open submissions period, deeply into contracts & copy-editing mode, and down to the last two acceptances and six rejections I need to write and send.

But as for Lovecraftian horror in particular

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Status Update 10/1/18

Our 2018 open reading period is now over.  

Stupefying Stories is now closed to unsolicited short story submissions until April 2019. For more information about Stupefying Stories, including new book releases, editorial changes, thought-provoking articles, and of course, great free fiction every Saturday in SHOWCASE, follow this web page (there’s a convenient link in the left column, down the page a bit), follow us on facebook, or better yet, do both.

And now if you’ll excuse me, we’ve got to get back to sending acceptance letters and contracts and finishing up all the books we have in the queue for Fall and Winter release.

Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke
editor, Stupefying Stories | Rampant Loon Press

http://stupefyingstories.com/
https://www.facebook.com/StupefyingStories/

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Status Update

Meanwhile, in the offices of Stupefying Stories...

Just a few quick notes here to let you know what’s going on. First and foremost, STUPEFYING STORIES #21 releases this coming Friday, August 3. We’re still undecided as to whether we’re going to launch it with another Free e-Book Friday, but we’re leaning in the direction of doing so. Stay tuned for more details.

Next, we’re rolling out some new changes to our Submission Guidelines, effective August 1. If you’ve been watching, you know that we’ve been tweaking and refining our guidelines all along, and if you haven’t been watching—well, that explains some of the stories that have turned up in our Inbox. The most important change we’re making is that we’ve decided to go back to our 6-months-on / 6-months-off reading schedule, to clear time for new book production. Therefore, effective 9/30/18, we will be closed to unsolicited submissions until 4/1/19.

It’s fun reading everything that comes in, but the sheer volume of submissions we’re receiving is getting in the way of releasing books, y’know?

Speaking of releasing books: STUPEFYING STORIES #22 is scheduled for release on August 31, #23 on September 28, and #24 on October 26. We can’t decide whether to release #25 on November 23 or 30, but we have time to decide, and #26 is slated for December 28. The key consideration here is that issues #22 and #23 are already full-up, and #24 is pretty close to filled, so you can stop sending us horror stories now. We already have all the horror stories we’re going to need for the rest of this year.

Finally, the Saturday SHOWCASE feature resumes this coming Saturday, August 4, with “The Moshe 12000,” a story I either need to brag about or apologize for, I’m not sure which. After that we’ll be running new SHOWCASE stories every Saturday, from now until either writers stop writing or The End of the Universe, whichever happens first.

Cheers,
~brb

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Are you a Stupefying storyteller?

If you look at the left column this morning, you’ll notice that we’ve cleaned out some old cruft, but more importantly, we’ve added the one new thing that a lot of writers have been asking to see:

The 2018 Stupefying Stories Submission Guidelines

Yes, we are open for submissions, but please, before you send us a story, read our guidelines. Better yet, read our guidelines, and then click on the SHOWCASE link in the left column and read a good sampling of the stories you’ll find there. What we’ve published in the past is not necessarily a precise guide to what we’d like to publish in the future, but in the four years that SHOWCASE was operating as a quasi-independent free webzine we published more than 170 stories, so browsing around that site should give you a fairly good idea of what we like to see.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to working on issue #21, which will be released later this week.

Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke, editor
Stupefying Stories 

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