I have exciting news, peeps. Well, exciting for me, at any rate
(extra white space for dramatic effect)
I'm starting up a zine.
This is something i've wanted to do for a while, but up until a couple days ago it'd just been simmering away on a low heat in the back of my brain.
But now it's hit bubble-over proportions and i have to do something with it. I've calculated my expenses (budgeting for the worst), and have discovered it's within my financial reach. I've looked at my available time and other responsibilities and i've never been in a better position than i am now to make a go of this.
Here's a quick breakdown:
Short fiction and poetry.
SF, mystery, western, action-adventure, historical.
Word limit of 5,000 (10,000 for mystery).
$10 flat for poetry and flash fiction (1-1,000)
.01 per word above that.
Quarterly schedule, of sorts. Full zine will be available at the beginning of each quarter (for a small fee--yet to be decided on), with content released for free weekly after that over the duration of the quarter.
Typical issue composition: 10 shorts, 5 poems/flash per issue.
One piece of cover art per issue and to be used on the website all quarter. $50 flat fee.
All payments to be made by PayPal.
All contributors for each issue paid on publication (when the quarterly issue is released).
Fairly standard contract terms: first electronic rights, exclusive for six months, non-exclusive indefinitely. Non-exclusive world anthology rights. If not published within 18 months of signing contract rights revert back to author.
The planned launch date is Jan 1, 2012, but i hope to be accepting subs within a month of now.
I have one fairly important thing i still need to do: Name the thing!
Once a name has been gotten, i'll purchase a domain, slap up a submissions page and appropriate email addresses and start working on the website.
For the first two issues at least, this will be a solo affair. After that i should have an idea of the actual workload and consider getting on volunteer slushies and department editors accordingly.
As you might be able to tell, i'm excited. It will mean i'll have to step back a bit from our various challenges, though i'll still cheerlead and participate as much as i'm able.
At this stage, the plan is to run the zine for a year. Of course, hopefully i'd be able to continue it past then, but a year/4 issues seems like a good thing to aim for initially.
But the name! The difficulty, as i'm seeing it, is that the zine will straddle several different genres, so it needs a name that reflects that.
I'm open to suggestions, of course