So things are starting to come together for our plan for Year 3. Spoiler alert: it’s a Kickstarter! The plan right now is to launch it the first week of March. We have have a very cool lineup of invited writers, an improved submissions policy, and a new strategy to expand Fireside’s reach into the world.

We were hoping to not have to go after the big lump of money again, and we have a path to a more ongoing fundraising model, but we need another year for it to come together.

That said, we are still looking to shake things up some next year. Here’s a look:

One thing we are considering is making Fireside’s website free. I am a big believer in paid content, but one thing I have found over the past 7 months with Fireside is that it is very hard to draw new people in when they have to pay up front. I’ve been hashing around ideas with people, and one idea keeps coming up: putting Fireside out there for free to draw in new readers, and then asking people who enjoy it to support it. There are a lot of ways to do this, and we’ll be experimenting with that during Year 3.

Fireside needs money, of course. The bulk of our budget goes to paying our writers, 12.5 cents a word. Giving the website away for free is risky, but we think a core group of people will enjoy our stories enough, and support our mission of fair pay for writers and artists enough, that they will want to help keep us going. The first step toward that is getting the Kickstarter funded.

Access to ebooks will continue to be available only to paying supporters, either through the Kickstarter or later through our website. We’re also planning some rewards that will make sure all our Kickstarter backers will get something no one else gets.

As we were getting our feet under us, we decided to do single submission periods in which we snatched up a year’s worth of stories. Now that we have a handle on things, we want to start doing quarterly submissions periods, starting in June.

Our plan for Year 3 is similar to Year 2: each issue will have two pieces of flash fiction, a short story, and an episode of a serial. We do hope to expand that with at least one more short story a month once our finances are up to it.

We have a half-dozen invited short story writers lined up for Year 3, and we have a very cool serial coming. We’re still hammering out some details on that, but we’ll have an announcement soon.

We can say, however, that the wonderful Galen Dara will be returning as our illustrator in Year 3!

If you’re new to Fireside, we’ve made Issue 4 free so you can get a taste of what we’re about. Issue 4 includes the first episode of Chuck Wendig’s serial “The Forever Endeavor,” a short story by Delilah S. Dawson, and flash fiction from Keffy R. M. Kehrli and Krystal Claxton.

Have any thoughts or suggestions or anything else about all this? We’d love to hear from you. You can shoot us an email at .