My eyes beheld an eerie sight
Getting anxious for Halloween. Halloween means our Halloween/Issue 12 party, and the day after, Release Day. Oh yeah.
We actually have more to do to prepare for the party then we do for the Release! I’ve been doing some little tweaks to the website here and there, but we’re really ready.
We’ve been working mostly on other projects the past couple of days. Kay’s editing the novel we’re going to be serializing, A Festival of Skeletons; she’s also dealing with cover art for various things. And reading Issue 13 stories along with me.
I dealt with contracts and payments today… and let me tell you, it was no small thing coordinating checks, Paypal and lots and lots of paperwork for 17 people. (That’s right, Issue 12 has 17 different contributors.) Plus it hurts the bank account. I’ve mentioned it before, but we ended up spending just over three times what we’d spend on one of our regular issues. We’ve… got a lot riding on this issue, put it that way.
Tomorrow I’ve actually cleared my schedule of everything except the interview questions I’ve had waiting for weeks, since they keep on getting shunted aside for things with higher priorities. Fortunately I’ve still got a week left, but I want to have them finished before Release Day. Then the rest of the month will pretty much be cleaning the house (we have a 3-year-old, remember), reading issue 13 submissions, and nervously twitching while we wait for Saturday.
In all seriousness, will you do me a favor? Go read Issue 11, and leave a comment or two for the authors/artists. You have no idea how appreciative they’ll be, really.
And don’t forget: Only FOUR days left to submit to the Action/Adventure issue!
One final thing: I was updating a spreadsheet I keep of traffic to our site today - I hadn’t done so in about a month. And I discovered that about 2 1/2 weeks ago, the CG website surpassed 100,000 pageviews since the day Issue 1 was released (in about 10 1/2 months). When we first started CG, we looked at some available numbers for small-ish SFF magazines (admittedly scarce), and decided that if we could reach 80,000 pageviews in our first year, we’d consider ourselves pretty lucky. So you can imagine how lucky we feel now.
Even better, as time has gone on, visitors to the site have been staying for longer and viewing a larger number of pages per visit. Hopefully this is an indication of the quality of content we’ve been publishing. All the hard work we’ve put in over the past year-plus seems to be pleasing you folks out there, and hey, that’s the point.
Originally published at Crossed Genres. You can comment here or there.