The Blog at GateTree

Building an online science fiction magazine
- I’ve been submitting my science fiction stories for quite a while now, and I’ve become familiar with process.
- During the controversy among scifi people a couple of months ago over low-paying mags/sites (free/$5 a story) vs. pro-paying mags/sites (5 cents/word) I realized that there are less than two dozen professional-paying science fiction short story magazines/sites recognized by the Science Fiction (and Fantasy) Writers of America (there are more and more one-time anthologies, however).
- Some of the sites/mags only publish one story a month and some publish flash fiction.
- In addition to submitting a lot, I listen to a lot of sf stories while I workout and have started acquiring a lot of anthologies and have tried to become familiar with the short science fiction field.
- I decided, at my gal’s encouragement, to set up a website magazine that would pay a professional rate and publish every other month.
- I bought http://www.redstonesciencefiction.com for $10/year & $5/month.
- I setup a twitter feed: http://twitter.com/RedstoneSF and a facebook page.
- When I told my friend P.C. about it he said he’d join in and we’d publish a story every month & split expenses.
- We decided on a 4000-word story at 5 cents/word.
- I set up WordPress, which I’ve done a couple of times, and went through hundreds of layouts & arrived at a simple, clean one.
- I set up a gmail mail server and we can have 50 different gmail accounts at our domain like submissions@redstonesciencefiction.com and mikeray@redstonesciencefiction.com
- I sent out an invite on facebook to my vast geek network to submit stories.
- I’ve gotten the site listed at the top online submission tracker: Duotrope’s Digest
- P.C. has established us as a business, established accounts & is setting up a paypal, and we’ll soon be an LLC – Redstone Publishing. (We even have an ‘in-house’ accountant).
- We have a contract template and I have posted guidelines – http://redstonesciencefiction.com/guidelines/
- We are also going to interview scientists, both biological & space (we know NASA people & medical experts), and scifi people.
- Tobermory has cranked out graphics and is doing more.
- We’ll do reviews on fringe movies and older scifi
- We’vw set up a CafePress store: http://www.cafepress.com/redstonesf
- We’ll probably publish some much older public domain stuff as well.
- We are considering reprints and flash fiction as well.
- We will probably do some reviews or discussions of scifi stuff we like.
- Also, I plan on doing an audio version of the stories we publish as well.
- We’ve talked to a well-known internet artist about doing some covers.
- We’ve had contact with a couple of professional writers as well.
- We start taking submissions a week from Monday and plan to put up the first story June 1.
- We may actually be building a little momentum.