Brian J. White's Blog

Hey everyone!

So meh news/good news. The meh news is that we have to push back the Year 3 launch date to Sept. 29. We’ve had a few illnesses and other setbacks the past month and realized that we were really going to be pushing it to hit Sept. 1. The extra couple weeks will let us make sure everything is in the best shape it can be, and have an uninterrupted year.

The good news is that our contracts are all in, and we can announce the stories we bought during our June submissions period! We received 817 stories from June 1 to 30, and we bought 17: 10 flash and 7 short stories. Genre-wise, there are 6 fantasy stories, 6 horror, 4 sci-fi, and 1 non-genre. We read all our submissions blind, so it wasn’t until I was looking up names to make offers that I discovered that most of the writers were women! Very cool.

Here’s the full list:

All Manner of Men and Monsters by Rebecca M. Latimer
Better Girls From Broken Parts by Nino Cipri
The Boy by Eric Francis
The Cutting Yield by HIllary Jacques
Death’s Garden by Day Al-Mohamed
Mr. Reilly’s Tattoo by Hope Erica Schultz
My Name is Ronald by the Way by Thord Daniel Hedengren
Nobody’s Goddess by Amber D. Sistla
She Waits by Laurel Halbany
Shoelace by Laura Lovic-Lindsay
Testimony by Jennifer Mason-Black
To Fall, and Pause, and Fall by Lisa Nohealani Morton
Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroker by Megan Grey
Twenty Parsecs East of the Earth Bypass, Closed on Sundays by Robert Lowell Russell
Who We Were Once, Who We Will Never Be by Brent Baldwin
The Work by Alexandre Stone
Zanders the Magnificent by Annie Neugebauer

We’ll be opening again to submissions on October 1. We’re mostly full up on short stories for now, so while we’ll still be accepting those to fill the final couple slots for Year 3, we’re really eager to see lots of flash.

Thanks as always!

So for the past couple years, the Fireside Fiction Company has been working hard to find and publish great short stories in all genres. Today we’re happy to announce that we’re expanding our scope into books!

 

In Spring 2015, Fireside will be publishing the novel Revision by Andrea Phillips, who you may remember as one of our invited writers for Year 3! We’ve been talking about doing this for the past year or so, and we’re very excited to announce it today, on Andrea’s birthday! We’ll be posting news here about Revision as it comes up. If you’d like to really stay informed, you can sign up for the Revision newsletter.

 

Sign up to receive email updates about Revision

About Revision
Mira is a trust fund baby playing at making it on her own as a Brooklyn barista. When Benji, her tech startup boyfriend, dumps her out of the blue, she decides a little revenge vandalism is in order. Mira updates his entry on Verity, Benji’s Wikipedia-style news aggregator, to say the two have become engaged. Hours later, he shows up at her place with an engagement ring. Chalk it up to coincidence, right?

 

Soon after, Benji’s long-vanished co-founder Chandra shows up asking for Mira’s help. She claims Verity can nudge unlikely events into really happening — even change someone’s mind. And Chandra insists that Verity — and Mira’s newly minted fiance — can’t be trusted.
About Andrea

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer, and author of A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. Her work includes The Maester’s Path for HBO’s Game of Thrones with Campfire Media, America 2049 with human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, and the independent commercial ARG Perplex City. Her independent work includes the Kickstarted serial pirate adventure The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart and the forthcoming transmedia project The Attachment Study. She has cleared all of the levels of Candy Crush.



Andrea’s website

Andrea on Twitter: @andrhia.

Just a quick note, if you’re not a Year 2 subscriber, we’re having a 50% off sale through Saturday June 14! For just $12 you get 11 issues right away (plus the final issue of the year next month). Each issue has flash fiction, at least one short story, a chapter in Chuck Wendig’s serial “The Forever Endeavor,” and artwork by Galen Dara.

Subscribe now!

 

And Year 3 is funded. Thanks to everyone! We wrap things up here.

With just a few days left to get Fireside funded, it’s looking like another barn-burner, and I wanted to talk a little about why we still use Kickstarter.

So last week, at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, there was a panel on hybrid publishing that got into a conversation about Kickstarter. Year 3 writer Sofia Samatar was at the panel and tweeted that a few people on the panel who had run one said it was so stressful they might never do it again. And then my name came up (I’m @takwordy on Twitter). Sofia tweeted, “Lol ppl asking why @talkwordy keeps killing himself w/ kickstarter.”

My reply: “haha. I have only done FIVE Kickstarters I can stop anytime I want.”

But man, yeah, I guess that is a lot. So why do I do it?

There are a lot of reasons, but it all boils down to this: It’s still the best way to gather the money and fans needed to keep newer magazines like Fireside or the revived Crossed Genres going. We’ve been doing Fireside for more than two years now, and I have everything I need to keep the magazine going — time, experience, and my skills as an editor and organizer — everything except the money.

We’ve been working hard to move toward more of a subscriber model, but we’re not there yet. A big stumbling block for Fireside was that right after the first issue funded, Amazon closed their ebook subscription service to new publications, and that had been one of the best ways for fiction magazines to build and keep a regular subscription base, because Amazon is familiar and easy. We could have tried a standalone subscription drive, but really, that’s what the Kickstarter amounts too: a subscription drive that guarantees the health of Fireside, without the risk that we will raise only part of what we need and have a diminished magazine as a result. (With the added bonus of rewards!)

There are starting to be some interesting options, like Patreon and cheaper ways to create magazine apps, that we are exploring as a way to shift to a more ongoing subscription model. We think we can get to that point over the next year, but in the meantime, Kickstarter is the only way we have to bridge that gap, guarantee continuity for the Fireside, and keep paying writers 12.5 cents a word.

Fireside has always been an experiment, with fair pay for great storytelling at its core. We’re not going to back away from that. We want this Kickstarter to be our last, and we will take your faith in us and turn it into publication that will be around for a long time.

We’ve got three days left. We’ve always made Fireside happen at the last minute, and we will do it again, with your help.

Thank you.

Hey everyone! We’ve had a good few days and are almost at $8,500 as we enter Week 3 of the Kickstarter. If how have a moment to spread the word, we really appreciate it. This week is all about pushing forward to set up the big final push next week.

Also, we’ve done a couple rounds of #1Pledge1Story now, where I have written one-tweet stories for each pledge or pledge increase we received. If you’re not on Twitter, or didn’t catch them, I compiled them in a Storify here.

Finally, we’re going to be posting Q&A’s with some of the Year 3 writers this week. First up is Sofia Samatar!

Our pledge-matching challenge from @bekkiwrites was a big success, and we raised the full $625 goal she set for us. With her match, we raised $1,250, enough to pay our writers for 10,000 words of fiction.

Thanks to Bekki, and to everyone who pledged and spread the word! We really do live and die by word of mouth.

The Year 3 Kickstarter has moved a bit past $8,000 this morning, and we are aiming to hit $8,500 this weekend. So for the rest of the weekend, I’ll be doing something I did earlier this week,#1pledge1story. For every pledge or pledge increase we get this weekend, I will write a 1-tweet story. You can click the hashtag above to see some earlier ones.

Thank you, as always.

Our pledge-matching challenge from @bekkiwrites was a big success, and we raised the full $625 goal she set for us. With her match, we raised $1,250, enough to pay our writers for 10,000 words of fiction.

Thanks to Bekki, and to everyone who pledged and spread the word! We really do live and die by word of mouth.

The Year 3 Kickstarter has moved a bit past $8,000 this morning, and we are aiming to hit $8,500 this weekend. So for the rest of the weekend, I’ll be doing something I did earlier this week,#1pledge1story. For every pledge or pledge increase we get this weekend, I will write a 1-tweet story. You can click the hashtag above to see some earlier ones.

Thank you, as always.

Last year during our Kickstarter campaign, friend of Fireside @bekkiwrites generously matched pledges for an hour, and combined we raised nearly $1,000. She’s back again this year, but with a cool 24-hour twist on the idea:

I want to see them make it.  I want to see a market, and an audience, that supports paying writers a livable wage.  So I’m offering to match donations made in the next 24 hours. I did this last year, with a $500 cap.  Together, we raised $922.

This year, I’m raising the cap to $625.  If we hit it, that’s $1250, or 10,000 words.  10,000 words funds 10 pieces of flash fiction, or 2-3 short stories.  10,000 words is almost enough to pay the writers for an entire issue of Fireside.

The match challenge is only running till Saturday the 15th at 2pm Eastern. We’re promoting the matching on Twitter with the hashtag #10000words. If you’ve been thinking about jumping in on Year 3, this is a great chance to have your impact doubled.

Thanks as always!

The Year 3 Kickstarter is live! If you’re a longtime follower of my personal Twitter account (@talkwordy) I highly recommend watching the video.