One of the great things about my multigenre fiction magazine, Fireside, has been watching a community grow up around it as we have spent the past year funding it through Kickstarters.
By using crowdfunding to create a magazine, we have — inevitably, in retrospect — created a crowd around it. It is pretty awesome.
We see things like people who are collecting the coasters my wife makes that we have offered for rewards. People who have been drawn into illustrations in each issue. And then there’s Anthony, the only backer whose name has been used in a story in every issue. It’s really fun having these common threads running through Fireside, like seeing family every time you get together.
We’re hoping to keep this community together as we move into our next phase: relaunching Fireside as a monthly website and ebook. We’re running a Kickstarter now to fund the entire year at once, as opposed to the three issues we funded one at a time last year. It’s been a lot of fun doing it that way, but it’s time to create some stability and certainty in this experiment in publishing great fiction and in paying writers well.
Our plan for each issue in our second year is to have two flash-length stories, two short stories, and an episode of a serial experiment by Chuck Wendig. We have a terrific slate writers for the short stories: M. Bennardo, Jennifer Campbell-Hicks, Karina Cooper, Jonas David, Delilah S. Dawson, A.E. Decker, Steven J. Dines, Adam P. Knave, Ken Liu, James McGee, Jason Ridler , and Lilith Saintcrow. We already have eight of their short stories in, and they cover a wide array of genres. They are also awesome.
It will all be offered on a website being designed by Pablo Defendini, with a focus on simplicity and on readability on screens of any size. There will be ebooks too, for those who prefer to read e-ink and not a glowing screen.
If we do fund successfully by our deadline of March 5, we will be opening to flash fiction submissions on March 15. We will be re-opening to short story submissions as well in the future, sometime after we get Year Two going on July 1.
Our hope is to use this Kickstarter to give us the bridge to start moving to subscriptions as our main source of revenue, but I hope our community stays close and excited as we continue to create art together. It’s been so gratifying that people believe in us. They are the spark that brought Fireside to life.
What Brian didn’t mention is that as of this posting, there’s still a little over $15,000 in pledges to raise in 12 days. Here’s the link to the Kickstarter campaign. Help us get this thing funded, so there are more chances for me to see characters named after me!