Release day! (For real this time)
Originally published at Genre Splicing: Blog Entry. You can comment here or there.
What a day. The release of a new issue makes us kind of giddy. Somehow, we managed to be productive at the same time.
Besides the new issue, our big news today was the announcement that we’re accepting submissions for novel-length (40,000-100,000 word) stories and “pitches” for webcomics to be published serially on the new, upcoming website exclusively for subscribers! This is a major addition to our content and we’re incredibly excited about it. We’ve already started receiving submissions!
Speaking of the new website, I spent a good 3 hours in Chat today with our webguru Matt, working through some things with the new site. There’s some complicated structure we’re working on setting up, but once that stuff is sorted it’ll be mainly cosmetic fixes left.
Even better, it looks like we’re going to be able to integrate everything into the new site: the Subscribers Area, our Store, subscription purchasing, everything. This is big: Wordpress is going to enable new subscribers to enter their info on our site, be taken briefly to Paypal to pay, and have Paypal automatically create a username and password for the person which will work for access to the Subscribers Area. Since WP also will enable automatic digital downloads upon purchase, We’ll be able to completely eliminate the separate program (CubeCart) that we’re currently using for the store. The only parts of CG not integrated with our own site will be the print editions (sold through CreateSpace and Amazon) and the Kindle editions.
Sorry to go on, I’m just really excited at how connected everything is going to be. It’ll make using the site a million times easier for all of you, and it’ll make updating the site a million times easier for us. Win-Win!
Today I contacted some of the larger Market Listing sites (Ralan, Duotrope) with updates on our status: primarily that we’re accepting novel-length fiction submissions. Usually it takes a few days to see the updates made, but Duotrope’s got the new info up already! Wow! I also posted in a few online communities about the new issue and our new submissions.
I somehow forgot to email our subscribers’ list the PDF of issue 6 late last night. Um, whoops. I did it later today, though.
As I mentioned, we’ve already started receiving a few submissions for serials; we’ve also gotten some queries about the webcomics, and some more general questions. The first Fiction submissions for Issue 8 (Anthropomorphism) came in today, too. I’m hoping this means that some people saw Anthro in the Upcoming Genres list, got their stories ready and were just waiting for the month to start.
We’ve also just about finished reading through the last of the Issue 7 submissions. When we’re done we’ll sit down and talk about which to accept. It’s a collaborative process; just one person shouldn’t get to make all those decisions.
-Bart