Crossed Genres close to becoming a PROzine

Below is an update from publisher Bart Leib of Crossed Genres (posted to the Outer Alliance list earlier) about their Kickstarter campaign to raise sufficient funds to elevate their wonderful magazine as a SFWA pro-rates-paying market for fiction. If you can help out at all, please do so. They are offering some nice incentives, and it would be terrific to see CG at pro-paying level. I've always had a lot of liking for that zine and for Bart and Kay personally. Like M-Brane SF, their zine ran on a monthly schedule in electronic and print formats, and also managed some very cool stand-alone book projects, and we had a lot in common as far as the kind of stories we liked, including an openness to and desire for socially progressive material. Our ToCs over our overlapping period of publication included a lot of the same writers, which always made me happy. Also, I was very proud to have one of my own stories published in CG about two years ago, an item that I wrote to fit that issue's theme. I was very happy with the story, but  I wasn't sure it was going to find a home elsewhere if it didn't work for CG, so I was thrilled when it was accepted and I showed it off far and wide when it went live not just because it was my story but because it was my story in a zine that I was a big fan of.


Hi all,

I apologize for multiple posts on this. But we're down to the wire and we need a last, big push! After saving Crossed Genres from extinction, we're trying to raise funds so that CG Magazine can pay SFWA-level pro rates for fiction! We've managed to get our Kickstarter up to $11,361 - that's over 80% of our stretch goal! Butwe still need $2,639 more, and we have only 55 hours left!

No matter what, CG Magazine will continue to encourage and publish progressive, inclusive fiction. We want to be able to compensate authors better than token payments for their excellent work! 

Also, as a market that always wants to support and help develop new/emerging authors, if we reach our goal we intend to implement a "Spotlight" feature, where each month a new author gets their first pro sale, as well as an interview and hopefully some extra promotion as well.

More info about WHY we're pursuing pro rates is in this post: http://dft.ba/-2NUa

There are some great pledge rewards: you can preorder ebooks of everything we publish through 2013 for just $25, or add all our current titles (7) to that for $45! There are t-shirts and photo prints (including the well-loved cover of our LGBTQ issue by Julie Dillon), signed or OOP books, even one or two short story critiques still available! And ANY pledge of $25 or more gets ebooks of the 2013 year of CG Magazine FREE!

Please support our efforts with a pledge, or help spread the word with a blog post, FaceBook Like, tweet, or sharing via word of mouth. We have until 5pm Eastern time on Friday!

Kickstarter main page: http://kck.st/LdGatJ

Thanks!
-Bart

Quarterly #4 is out (finally)

I finally managed the long-delayed publication of the M-Brane SF Quarterly #4, compiling in print form the fiction from the last of the electronic issues of M-Brane SF. It's a really nice book with a lot of interesting entries from a lot of really fine creators. It's up now on Amazon and should appear shortly on B&N, and it marks the conclusion of the zine's regular operations. Details still to come on future projects for M-Brane Press.

Speaking of B&N, I just noticed that a number of back-issues of the zine have materialized there as Nook ebooks, which struck me as quite odd since I had never created Nook versions of them. But evidently some of the print versions that I made available from Lulu back in the day were converted by Lulu. I vaguely recall being aware of them doing this some time ago and not responding one way or another on whether I wanted this done. I guess it explains why I still periodically receive very tiny little royalty payments from Lulu even though I haven't used their print-on-demand service for M-Brane projects in a very long time. I have no idea what these issues might look like or behave like in Nook form, but they are there.

Hopefully nobody would mind too much if I returned to this site periodically to just point out things or issue updates on stuff that is interesting or stuff that I am reading, like I used to do back in the day. In recent times, I have felt kind of isolated because I have so busy with my work life, and I miss saying stuff here and in my Live Journal. But things are calming down a bit at work, and I have no regular publication deadlines for a while, and I am doing a little bit of writing again, so I think I'd feel more "normal" if I posted stuff once in a while. So I'll try to do that more often.