D. Thomas Minton

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m eligible for the Campbell Award.  I’m one of many Campbell-eligible writers.  With so many of us, I have been wondering how nominators/voters even know who we all are?

M. David Blake, an assistant editor at Stupefying Stories and a fellow member of the Codex Writing group, has come up with an idea to help.  Stupefying Stories issued a call for an anthology that will feature the qualifying story of any Campbell-eligible writer.  Their goal is to publish as many of these in a single place as possible, and make that volume available to any and all who will be nominating and voting for the Campbell Award.  As Mr. Blake says in the guidelines: “Awards (and nominations) are a lot more meaningful when selected from a broad spectrum, than from a restricted palette.” 

This will be unpaid, reprint anthology.  It has a projected release date of February 1, 2013, which will allow word to get around to qualified participants, and still allow over five weeks for people to read it before ballots would be due.  Check out the guidelines for complete details, including the submission deadline.  If you know anyone who qualifies, please pass along the information.

While I don’t have serious Campbell aspirations (there’s simply too many good new writers out there), I have submitted my work in for the anthology and would be interested in reading it.  If nothing else, this looks like an excellent way to get my work before more readers, and my thanks go out to Mr. Blake and Stupefying Stories for putting it together.

Duotrope is an excellent online market search engine and submission tracker.  As a free service that operated on user donations, it couldn’t be beat.  It’s been an important tool for me since about 2009. 

Starting on January 1st, Duotrope will move from a free system to a subscription-based one.  There have been rumblings for a while that this was going happen, but it still comes as a bit of a shock, a $50-a-year shock.  My knee-jerk reaction to that price is to walk away, but as fellow a Hopefull Monster pointed out, I spend more than $50 a year on snacks—which I must admit is true.  (I’m not sure this argument is the best one, however, because snacks don’t come out of my writing business budget, but Duotrope would and my writing needs to pay for itself.)

As a market search engine, Duotrope is simple to use and includes thousands of markets.  For tracking submissions, it’s easier than an Excel spreadsheet.  So I have no problems paying for the service, and in a way, I already do because I have donated annually to help keep it running for the last few years.

Where I have a problem is that it’s never been clear to me how much Duotrope cost to run or what will happen to their market data by going to this paid model.  Duotrope is notoriously evasive about its finances (and even who runs it).  They’ve not said how much money they actually need to operate, and they’ve not revealed what other funding approaches they’ve considered or tried (e.g., an annual Kickstarter).  It’s unclear what will happen to their market reporting statistics if/when they lose a large proportion of their users.  They exist on user-generated data, and they stand to lose as much as 90% of their users.  Finally, new markets listed themselves on Duotrope because they could get their fledgling publications in front of a large number of writers.  Will new publishers still do that if Duotrope has 90% fewer writers? 

I guess only time will tell if Duotrope survives this change.  If it does, I wonder what it will look like.  Given all this, I’m not sure yet if I will subscribe come January 1.  I may wait a few months to see if I can survive without it.  That would also give me a chance to see what happens to Duotrope.

Sometime I just need a good laugh….

I have no idea if it’s a legitimate publication, but The Journal of Exuberantly Bad Fiction is something I’d like to read…at least one issue of it.  With the slogan “If your eyeballs aren’t bleeding, I’m not doing my job,” it promises to print stuff “that makes Eye of Argon look like Literature with a capital f—ing L.”  As one commenter at their website said: “How completely dreadful.  I can’t wait for your first issue.”

Sure it’s writer’s humor, but their guidelines had me laughing our loud.  If this is the only thing they publish, they’ll have been successful as far as I’m concerned.