It...Is...Alive!

A lot has happened since I last posted here, as you might expect with nearly two months going by between postings. The big news is, there is now a website. You can find it at www.speculativefictionstories.com. I know, it's a long name, the next project is to register a shorter secondary domain name for initial typing. Fortunately, direct links are easy to do at Blogger so you don't actually have to type the domain in.

It may well be asked why I chose such a behemoth of a domain. The answer is search engine optimization. The magazine is full of speculative fiction stories, so I felt that the domain name should include that. It's long but it's not that hard to remember, I don't think, and it connects directly to what the site is all about, so that seemed a worth goal to aspire to.

The first issue of the magazine is also out. It weighed in at a little over 300 pages, contains 30 stories and poems, and was a challenge to get together. I've learned quite a bit about how to build a magazine using Open Office that I hope I will be able to put to use for issue two, due out at the end of the month.

Gathering the stories was not difficult, in fact, I had more than I needed, and thus have some in reserve for next month, which will make life easier for me. The problems were in formatting the whole thing. First off, I neglected to consider that my computer, despite the English operating system, is still a Korean machine, and hence tends to default to Korean standards, such as A4 rather than letter sized pages. Since I want people to be able to print these things out if they wish, that wasn't going to work, so I had to change the paper size mid-edition and then go back and fix it everywhere. This proved easier than it sounds due to the Styles formatting options, since a change to one page of a style automatically resulted in changes to all other pages in the same style. Next time, I'm going to set the styles up first, get the section openers, which I place some graphics on, done up and then put the stories in as a plainer style, but make sure to keep all the page sizes and margins the same.

Never the less, the issue is done and has been sent to the contributors and is available for purchase as a single issue or as part of a subscription.

And that leads to another thought I had. I'm publishing serialized fiction in these magazines, so anyone starting a subscription after the first will probably find some part 2s or 3s or so on at the end of the edition. I'm thinking that in order to reduce the cost of getting the whole story if they so desire, I'm going to change the subscription options to allow people to buy continuous groups of past issues as a bundle. So if you buy a 12 month subscription knowing the first issue will have part 4 of a story you want, you can set the starting month for the subscription to three months ago, and get the whole thing. If you just subscribe and find part 4 of a story, and really want the first three, you can go back and purchase the previous three issues at the 3 month subscription price and get a bit of a price break. It's probably tough to do this with a print magazine, but with electronic publication and distribution, it's fairly easy.

So, that's all for now. More news as issue two gets slowly assembled.