Status Update • 17 February 2023

I’d intended to use one of my serious business faces for this post, but as I was sorting through the files looking for a good photo of me I found this one instead, and thought, “What the Hell and why not?”

Some status notes:

» Tomorrow’s SHOWCASE story is “Planting the Flag,” by Graham Brand, a wonderfully snarky tale of interplanetary exploration and first planetfall. It’s also something of an experiment for us. Thus far I have been sticking to stories in the 750- to 1,500-word length for SHOWCASE, as that seems to be the outside limit for online readers’ attention spans. Flash fiction (<500 words) appears to work even better. “Planting the Flag” runs a glorious 2,700 words. I would like to run longer stories and even serialized stories in SHOWCASE, but having run into the dreaded “tl;dr” reaction before, I’ll be watching the readership metrics for and comments on this and other upcoming longer stories closely, to gauge where my time and energy is best applied. 

» SHOWCASE #1, our one and only attempt at doing an EP-format magazine, goes out of print forever at the end of the month. Buy it now.

» Work proceeds on Stupefying Stories #24. We are still on-track for a March 1st release. More details to slither out as we get closer to March 1st.

» We’re still planning Stupefying Stories #25 for June 1st. As mentioned earlier, #25 is already fully funded. We just need to settle on the TOC. Then, after that…

» I may as well blurt this out now. We’re going to move to a crowd-funded business model. Actual sales of our titles have been way too erratic to support the kind of ongoing operation I want to develop, and I don’t have the time or budget right now for the kind of advertising it would take to get us where we want to go. Running a magazine is a lot like flying a hot-air balloon, except instead of propane, you burn bales of cash to keep the thing in the air.

Not having any surplus bales of cash handy at the moment, we’re going for next option: shamelessly asking for your support.

An issue of Stupefying Stories costs us about $1,000 to produce, assuming my time is worth nothing, which is a belief I encounter frequently. It should cost more—not because my leadership is so awesomely brilliant, but because we should be paying our authors more. The fact that we can put out something as good-looking and full of good stories as Stupefying Stories #23 and only spend a thousand bucks doing so is testimony to the sorry state of the SF/F marketplace right now, at least as it concerns the up-and-coming writers who are trying to break into the big time.

That, as you may have noticed, is our place in the ecosystem: we focus on finding and encouraging the new writers that Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and the rest of the pro magazines will be discovering and publishing in another few years. If you support this objective—if you think it serves a valuable purpose to the larger reading and writing community—once SS#24 is out the door we’re going to be asking not just for your likes and retweets, but for your financial support, as we roll out the campaign to raise the funding for issues #26 (September 1st) and #27 (December 1st). And this time we won’t be trying to raise just $1K per issue but setting an ambitious stretch goal, for the reason that if we can raise more cash, we can pay authors more for their work. 

Details to follow, beginning next week. In the meantime, let me leave you with this thought:

Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke

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Status Update • 1 February 2023

This is the cover art for Stupefying Stories #24. It seems a fitting image to capture the essence of where we are as of today: climbing up out of the wreckage and looking around, trying to get our bearings and figure out the direction in which we should go.

One year ago today…

Fortunately, I keep a pretty good calendar. Unfortunately, the past year’s notes make incredibly damned depressing reading. One year ago today, things here seemed to be under control and Rampant Loon Press seemed to be making forward progress. 

A week later, Karen was in the infusion room at the oncology clinic when she had an allergic reaction that put her straight into the ER in critical condition, and then into the ICU for a week. This was how we learned that her cancer had mutated again, the chemotherapy drug she’d been on was no longer effective against her cancer and was in fact now dangerously toxic to her, and the cancer had metastasized into her liver.

The next two months were just one appointment after another, one specialist after another, one hospital outpatient procedure after another. The chemo toxicity had damaged her heart; we needed to determine how badly and whether her lungs were involved as well. In one particularly ghastly turn of events she developed an autoimmune reaction to her implanted chemotherapy port and it began to push up through her skin, and so she needed surgery to have it removed and replaced. They were able to stop the spread of the cancer in her liver, but in April found it had metastasized into her cerebellum and was inoperable, so she needed immediate radiation therapy to keep it from getting larger or spreading.

By the end of April, though, the radiation had been deemed a great success and we seemed to have a new chemotherapy treatment plan that was working, so we made plans to get Stupefying Stories #24 out the door. The stories were copy-edited and approved. The authors were paid. The book was in layout and production, with about two weeks’ work remaining, and we set a release date of June 1st.

I’m not quite sure what happened in late May and June. My notes are sketchy and fragmentary. It appears that in and around various doctor and clinic appointments I spent a lot of time dealing with the fallout from our ISP’s unilateral decision to move our email hosting to Microsoft Exchange, in the process rendering all our various @rampantloonmedia.com email addresses unreliable. 

[Nota bene: if you’re trying to contact me, use stupefyingstories@gmail.com. It’s the one email address that’s most reliable now.]

By July, things were going very wobbly on the rails. In hindsight it’s clear that the events that would lead to Karen’s final medical crisis and death were already in progress, it’s just that no one seemed to have a clear grasp of how all these things that seemed to be minor and easily treatable in and of themselves (and yet were inexplicably unresponsive to treatment) were interrelated. I do wish, though, that when a certain specialist told me Staphylococcus aureus is a relatively benign skin bacteria and Karen couldn’t possibly have an MSSA infection deep inside her pelvic bones, I’d slapped that doctor so hard I’d made her head spin on the top of her spinal column. 

“Look at her chart, you blithering idiot! Look at how many bone biopsies she’s had in that area! What do you think ‘benign skin bacteria’ do when they get carried along down into a patient’s bone marrow by a biopsy needle?!?!?!”

July was bad; August was worse; September was a horror story. In October Karen went into the hospital through the ER again, for what turned out to be for the last time. On November 30th she was discharged to home hospice care, and on December 3rd she passed from this world in the way she’d wanted to leave: peacefully, at home, and surrounded by family.

_______________

It’s been two months now since Karen died. People seem to have trouble understanding that she was not “just” my wife, she was my partner, in just about every way it’s possible for two people to be partners—and that includes in the editorial processes and business activities of Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories. It’s taken me two months just to work through all the urgent and immediate activities that must needs follow someone’s death. I am only now getting time to take stock of RLP and Stupefying Stories and ask myself: what the Hell was I doing before this whole s***storm hit, and what do I want to do now and going forward? 

Well, first on the docket: getting the next few SHOWCASE stories lined up and in the queue to be published. (Seriously. They’re good. You should click on that link and see what you find.)

Secondly, getting Stupefying Stories #24 buttoned up and out the door. The authors have already been paid. The money is spent. No reason not to release the book. I’m looking at a March 1st date for the release, to give me time to ramp up a promotional campaign for it. Following that I’m looking at a June 1st release date for Stupefying Stories #25, as the issue is already fully funded, thanks to the generosity of our donors. Then, after that… we’ll see what happens.

Third, I need to get Guy Stewart’s Emerald of Earth out in book form, and re-sync with Pete Wood regarding all these Pete Wood Challenge stories that are floating in limbo. I’m sure there are other projects hanging fire out there that are not at the front of my mind right now; I’m going to need a little time to remember and get things moving forward again. 

Please be patient with me. As far as RLP goes, I’m trying to replace a business partner who was irreplaceable. This is not going to be easy.

Kind regards,
Bruce Bethke

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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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