It's always good when life just hands you a wacky blog title post out of nowhere.
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| Don't go through the scary door. |
In this case, I had an e-mail earlier this week from John Joseph Adams, who you may or may not - but probably
have - heard of as editor (and as of recently, publisher) of professional web magazines
Lightspeed and
Fantasy, not to mention any number of anthologies - one of which,
The Living Dead, provided my first big short fiction break. Turns out that John is looking towards completing his genre publishing empire by adding a little horror to that line-up, in the form of a new webzine to be known as
Nightmare.
Obviously, this is very good news - because there just aren't that many pro horror markets, and John is a terrific editor, both in the sense that he puts out some fine fiction* and in the sense that he manages to achieve commercial successes in a field that people are constantly trying to declare unprofitable, unfeasible or downright dead.
Both of those points are particularly relevant here, because the reason John got in touch was that he's planning to fund the initial getting-off-the-ground of Nightmare using
Kickstarter. For anyone unfamiliar, Kickstarter is basically a method of funding creative projects, which lets people pledge potential investments, in return for rewards should the project go ahead. In this case, the rewards are things like issues and subscriptions, or if you really have some serious cash to throw around, unique print editions and samples of John's blood and toe nail clippings**.
Basically then, the idea is that you get to read an issue of or subscribe to what will inevitably be one of the best horror magazines around, based on the facts that John knows his stuff, is already editing excellent fantasy and sci-fi magazines and has some top fiction cued up for issue one.
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| A completely and utterly irrelevant picture I found somewhere. |
This makes an emminent amount of sense to me, so I have no problem with promoting it in whatever limited fashion I can - even though other people who were quicker off the mark than me have already helped John kickstart the crap out of his target. Still, all that means is that if you choose to chuck a bit of money at
Nightmare now, you know for sure that you'll be getting an issue / subscription / unique genetic sample.***
Anyway, here again is the official
Nightmare Kickstarter link, which explains everything at least nineteen times more coherently than I just did.
* In my ridiculously biased opinion, obviously, since John also took my story
Jenny's Sick for
Lightspeed.
** An obvious lie on my part.
*** Still a lie.
