Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

Several folks have reached out to me this week to ask why this year’s UFO Kickstarter campaign has not been launched. In the past several years I ran the campaign in March and followed it with an open submission window in April. First of all, thank you for the concern! Please do not worry, UFO7 will be published on schedule and we’ll open to submissions on April 1 as promised. However, I’ve decided to run the campaign after the submissions close, probably starting around mid-May this year. There are several reasons for this:

• Late last year I ran a (much smaller) campaign to fund my second collection, The Golem of Deneb Seven and Other Stories. While I doubt many people would mind, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable asking friends and fans for more money before I deliver that book. Golem should be ready in about a month, but not in time for an early March campaign.
• Running a crowdfunding campaign is really hard work, and I hope that some additional signal boosting from 20+ authors will make reaching our goal a bit easier. To be clear, no one is expected to help promote the campaign. This will be purely voluntary.
• Due to various other projects and business obligations, this March is an especially tough month for me to run the campaign in.

This is a bit of a risk for me. I will accept stories and pay ten cents per word, just like last years, assuming the campaign will fund. If it does not, I will pay everyone out of my own pocket. I may look for ways to lower the upfront costs a bit (such as printing the anthology via Print on Demand instead of an offset run) but none of those measures will jeopardize the quality of the stories, the layout, and all the other things you might care about as a reader. At the end of the day, I feel reasonably confident that there are enough people out there who want to read the books and for the series to continue and that the campaign will fund.

In any case, you have a month or so to get those stories ready. My team and I can’t wait to get reading!

#SFWAPro

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2018 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.