It seems a small mistake has been made and Sci Phi isn’t eligible for a Hugo this year, but we will be next year. You need 4 publications in the last 12 months, but that should be no problem for 2015. Still our stories are eligible and Lou Antonelli’s “On a Spiritual Plain” has been put forward as a Sad Puppies suggestion.
I’d also put Josh Young’s Domo as a story suggestion as well. It doesn’t take too many votes to get on the ballot and you get to nominate 5 stories so lets see if we can get 2 Sci Phi originals on the ballot!
More news and pictures tomorrow on Issue #4
Brad Torgersen author of the excellent [easyazon_link asin=”1476736855″ locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”superversivesf-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]The Chaplain’s War[/easyazon_link] has been taking point on organizing Sad Puppies 3 this year, Larry Correia’s ongoing attempt to annoy the politically correct.
What is really exciting is that Sci Phi Journal made the list for suggested Semi Pro Ezine! If you cast Hugo votes please think of us!
Check out the whole list
Meet the 6th Sci Phi contributor Eric Schwizgabel, he contributed the wonderful essay on the Tyrants Headache and he can be found blogging at The Splintered Mind when he isn’t busy teach philosophy to undergrads.
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Cat Leonard has been feeling the Muses and has gone on an illustrating spree for Issue #4. Her work as always is wonderful, check these out! We are working on prints and posters if people want them. And doona covers and pillow cases as well … POD is awesome 🙂
Please meet the 5th Sci Phi Contributor, E.J Shumak. E.J contributed the story Last Stand about a race of aliens wondering what is to happen to them going forth. E.J will be back in Issue #4 with a rather terrifying tale of a small fury bunny. Stay tuned!
I’m still working through the submissions, i’m about a month behind at this point and will strive to keep catching up. Also, after a review of financials, the magazine will be going to an issue every 2 months for the next 3 issues. So if I said your story will be in #5 or #6 then it will be May or July for the Issue, sorry about that. I will reevaluate the publishing rate after Issue #6 and see where things are at. Thank you to everybody who has been reviewing and helping promote the magazine, I can’t thank you enough.
If I got some A3 posters made up, would people be willing to post them at local comic book shops or games shops or cafes or anything that people think interested parties might see them? I’d pay for printing and shipping if people were interested.
Also, maybe I should take these tips for writing replies from professors from England.
Sci Phi got a very nice review from Craig Bernthal over at victorhanson.com. The best part is that Craig is a philosopher and if all goes well you can expect to see him in a future issue.
The shelves of drugstores and news stands used to be crowded with “pulp” science fiction magazines: Fantastic Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantasy and Science Fiction, all of which sold for very little and provided a lot of entertainment. Many of them started in the 1920s and featured wonderfully lurid covers of giant flies attacking battleships or luscious blonds being carted away or molested by robots, green aliens, or perhaps just posing in front of a rocket ship. They shared shelf-space with a similar array of detective, mystery, western, and romance publications. In the twenties or thirties, at the height of their popularity, some of these magazines sold up to a million copies per issue. America and Britain had some great writers who got their start in pulp fiction or wrote it: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudyard Kipling, Elmore Leonard and H. G. Wells, to name a few. Pulp fiction was a national writing workshop, providing an enormous market for new writers, and the product was not just formulaic. A great editor, like John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction provoked wonderful, imaginative stories. This scene has now been replaced by the insipid university MFA writing program, which aims to produce sensitive stories for liberal professors, and pulp has given way to innumerable English Dept. journals. What a bad trade! We no longer see the successors to Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or even Updike and Roth. American fiction has become the Oprah book club.
Given this, I am to happily announce the birth of a new venue for the un-MFA’d story: Sci Phi Journal, edited by Jason Rennie. You can buy Sci Phi on Amazon for $3.99 an issue. It publishes bi-monthly, and the first three issues are out. (The cover art, by the way, is beautiful.) May it start a trend, a rebirth of the popular short story magazine, requiring an on-line drugstore to hold them all.
The premise of Sci Phi Journal is to present science fiction stories and essays about science fiction that are especially aimed at exploring philosophy, which of course includes politics. I was delighted to find so many good stories and essays in the first issues. I’ve never read an anthology in which I thought every entry enjoyable, but I found enough here to keep me happy.
Today is the fouth meet the Sci Phi Contributors with David Kyle Johnson. So far David has contributed an article to each issue of Sci Phi so far.
Dr Johnson’s website at Kings College
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I thought I would take stock of how Sci Phi Journal is going now that the first three issues are out. I’ve got a lot of good feedback and people who read seem to be enjoying it. Thanks to those who left reviews on Amazon and thanks to everybody who helped to promote the magazine, submitted stories and articles, helped with editing and everything else that has made it happen. Three issues was the initial run I committed to doing, to see if the idea was viable and whether it was worth pursing. I did try this once before a number of years ago and it sold all of 10 copies and never got to issue #2, so this time around things are going better than that. The magazine isn’t breaking even yet, but it isn’t doing awfully, getting about a 1/3 of the way to breaking even on each issue.
So where does this leave things? People seem to enjoy the magazine and would like to see it continue, and I would like to see it continue as well. The readership is currently growing, so things are moving in the right direction, but it is expensive to produce each issue and financial issues will eventually kill the magazine if it doesn’t continue to get closer to breaking even. I’d love to be independently wealthy and be able to do the magazine as a hobby and sell it cheaply but unfortunately I can’t afford too and it will need to break even if it is to survive.
So what does this all mean if you are one of the people that would like to see it continue? I’m not going to beg for donations or anything like that. If you would like to donate to the magazine to help underwrite the cost or you would like to sponsor an issue i’d certainly be interested in hearing from you, but ultimately that would only be life support for the magazine and could only ever be a short term strategy to keep things from folding, unless it was quite a large grant (So if anybody does happen to know any eccentric billionaires!).
What the magazine needs is to sell about 1000 copies of each issue in 1 format or another. If it can get to that it will mean the magazine will have reached a point of being able to pay for itself, turning a small profit of a few hundred dollars an issue (Depending on exactly where the issues are sold etc, not all copies generate the same revenue). It currently is selling about a third of that number. You could offer to buy a bunch of issues, and I wont say no, but ultimately what the magazine needs is for news of it to spread and to get more regular readers. So if you like the magazine, and aren’t an eccentric billionaire, if you can promote it on social media, to friends and colleagues, or anything else that can help to move it, then that will insure the magazine will survive. If you have ideas, or there is something I should be doing that I am not, please let me know. I was this to succeed and working together I think it can!
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Today is the third meet the Sci Phi Contributors and we present Cat Leonard. Cat is our cover artist and has done the covers for Sci Phi #2 and #3.
You can find Cat’s painting on facebook at Cat Leonard Art and she will do art on commission. If you need cover art for a book or a portrait she is available.
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This might seem kind of trivial but it has been one of those things banging around in the back of my head for ages.
I have been using a # between sections of stories (where they don’t have chapters or something) in the magazine and I was thinking that I need something better than that. I can you are wondering what am blathering on about, have a look at this Daily Science Fiction.com story. The patterned swirl between the sections, I need to find something like that for Sci Phi.
Any ideas?
Today is the second of our meet the Sci Phi Contributors, and we present Brian Niemeier. Brian is the author of Strange Matter. He blogs regularly at brianniemeier.com.
Brian’s name doesn’t come up on anything in Amazon that I can find, so you will just need to buy more copies of [easyazon_link asin=”B00RENZPMO” locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”superversivesf-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]Sci Phi Journal[/easyazon_link] to read his stuff. 🙂
His author bio says that he is planning to pursue a writing career, so I think we can look forward to reading more from him in the future.
A quick update on the pile of submissions I have. Tank you to everybody who has submitted and I got about half way through the pile over the break and will continue to dig away at it. I’ve sent out a bunch of emails with yes/nos and I believe I sent an update email to everybody who was still in the queue. If you didn’t receive one or the other please let me know, something might have fallen through the cracks.
A note on submissions, the quality has been good. If you are trying to decide between a story or an article, I am very short of articles so those go to the top of the reading list. Also, I have received a number of really sad stories. I have enjoyed them and they have had beautiful ideas and imagery but can somebody please submit some comedy? It looks a little unmanly to be misty eyed on the train!
Issue #4 is coming together and cover artist extraordinaire Cat Leonard has a spectacular portrait for the cover that is coming together. It reminded me of the cover of Time. If you like the Sci Phi covers and would like some of Cat’s work for your own covers let me know and I can put you in touch.
There will be more contributor interviews coming (next one due out later today!). Do you like them?
Someone asked about paper issues of #1 and #2. How many people would be interested in those? It could be arranged but time is limited and I wouldn’t want to delay the next issue. IF you like the idea of paper for Issue #1 and #2 would you be interested in helping proof it? I can be reached as always at editor@sciphijournal.com
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Today we meet Sci Phi Contributor Ben Zwycky. Ben is the author of our ongoing serial “Beyond the Mist” and he blogs regularly at The Zwyckyverse. Apart from blogging and contributing to Sci Phi and SuperversiveSF, Ben also has a novel out Nobility Among Us
Our resident art adept Cat Leonard has done a beautiful illustration to accompany the Story Domo from Issue #1, check it out, and if you would like a larger version of it please shoot me an email editor@sciphijournal.com
If you would like to help promote the magazine please feel free to post this around the place.
A number of people asked about paper copies of Sci Phi and now for Issue #3 that is possible. You can get it right now from Create Space for $7.99 and it will be available from Amazon directly in a few days time. When it is released on Amazon I will make sure to allow the purchase of the Kindle edition via the matching program Amazon have.
So order yours today!
Still available as an Ebook from Amazon (Kindle)
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