Red Pennies and Excitement

I know, I’ve been a bad blogger again. BUT! I’ve been a very busy little bee getting some awesome stuff in line for The Red Penny Papers. Now we’ve pulled of a full year (and more!) of fiction both short and serial, I’m starting to get a feel for how much we can reasonably do. I will admit that a lot of this is also a money thing, as the RPP has always been about free web fiction — but authors should get paid. Katey Hawthorne doesn’t make a lot, but over the last few months she’s proven that she can at least support RPP in the manner to which it has grown accustomed. And so we forge ahead!

(And yes, I just talked about myself in third person. I think Namor is rubbing off on me. I’ll stop that now.)

What it adds up to is a few new experiments and a few continuations of current experiments. Things we have planned for the near future…

1. Moar, longer-lasting eBooks. Alan Baxter, author of our upcoming winter serial, The Darkest Shade of Grey, has kindly offered to be the first victim  trial of our plan to make our serial novellas into eBooks — and keep them there. This is not something authors will have to agree to in order to be published with us as a serial, but it’s an option I’ve wanted to offer for some time, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun. So after the serial runs, a collected edition will be made available for a small amount of cash, which will go both to the author and to RPP’s cost of producing the edition.

The serial will always remain free in the archives, but we’ve had loads of requests for eBook versions from people who wouldn’t mind dropping a few bucks for a good pulpy read on their Kindle. Should be good fun!

We may also change our contracts to allow for longer-lasting quarterly issues. Currently the eBook versions expire when a new one is published, and until we can afford to pay authors more (in order to keep the right to make their story available in our issues for longer), that will stay the same. But it’s a goal.

2. Plans for a print/ebook anthology. John and I have been talking about doing a Red Penny antho for months and months now, and the time feels right. The plan is that we’ll come up with a new theme annually and invite the authors who’ve been with us between fall-summer of that publishing year to submit stories.

We’re really committed to the writers we work with and love having them back for other issues, so this seems like a great way to celebrate that spirit of… well, good pulpy togetherness. The only difference is that, given the cost of producing such a thing, we can’t afford to give it away. But we think it’ll be worth it.

We’re hoping to have the first one sorted out in time for our second anniversary this fall. More on that later!

3. More staff. We already outsource our eBook creation (thanks, Aaron!), and since John has come on as a slush wrangler, my life has been much simpler. There are some tasks I really want, need, insist on doing myself, but there are just some that I will put off til the end of time. The best way to focus on the stuff I like doing, then, would seem to be to outsource more. We hope to get the staff roster updated shortly.

Because of all this stuff going on, we’re not going to have another open reading period until June 1, 2012. But that will be worth it, too. We’ll be open for serials and shorts at the same time, which we didn’t do last time and made us a little bit sad.

So, um, there’s my maniacal plan for world domination or whatever — and the reason I’ve been a bad blogger. But so much goodness!