The Return To Editing

What an amazing 24 hours.  Dean Wesley Smith and I posted our Kickstarter project, Fiction River, on Sunday night, and we received 80+ percent of the funding we initially asked for by Monday night. As I write this, we’re at 90 percent. Kickstarter’s staff has also helped with the project by making Fiction River one of the staff picks.

We always hoped that Fiction River would exceed our funding goals; we didn’t expect to do so this quickly. Thank you to everyone who has already participated.

If you haven’t yet, you haven’t missed the party. It just started. We have extra rewards that we will announce this afternoon, and of course, there is the project itself.

What is Fiction River? It’s a bimonthly anthology series that Dean and I have started. We will be the executive editors on the project. Guest editors will edit some of the anthologies.  Dean and I will edit others. But Dean and I will oversee all of the anthologies to make certain the quality level is very high.

Dean and I have won a lot of awards for our editing. The stories we published in our magazines and books have won some of the most prestigious awards in science fiction and mystery, as well as blanketing the year’s best anthologies during those years. You can see more about our editing history here.

Those of you who have followed my blog and/or my career know that I have often said that I’ve retired from editing, that I was done with it. As long as publishing remained the same, that was true. I still receive job offers to edit book lines; I turn those down. I edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for Mercury Press, which I did not have a stake in, and after I left, I vowed that I would never edit for anyone else again.

That left me two options. I could try to sell anthologies into traditional publishing–which was a dicey proposition (and I might still have ended up with someone “overseeing” my work)–or I could start up another company. Dean and I had started Pulphouse Publishing in the late 1980s, and it required a massive amount of work, partly because of the technology involved in book publishing.

Now that technology has changed. It’s relatively easy to get anthologies onto the market and into the hands of readers. Suddenly, editing is no longer a daunting prospect.

Neither Dean nor I want to edit full-time. We have major writing careers and a lot of writing projects to finish. But we both miss editing. We always have. As I say in my Recommended Reading lists, I love sharing great fiction with you guys. Fiction River will provide another way to do so.

I know some of you will ask if the series is open to submissions; at the moment, it is not. Nor can you subscribe outside of Kickstarter–at the moment. When the Kickstarter side of this project is done, then we’ll have a subscriptions form you can fill out if you would like.

I’ll be honest, though. Continuing the funding through Kickstarter will help us the most. We initially asked for $6,000. We’re close. We are now looking at $10,000, which will cover editors and writers for the second anthology in the Fiction River series. Ideally, we would like to fund all six books through Kickstarter.

I’m also hoping that we’ll be able to fully fund the first Fiction River special. It’s not one of the six anthologies. Instead, it’s a large anthology that I will edit. Primarily a mystery volume, it will be (in reality) a mixed-genre anthology (like Pulphouse) of stories with mystery elements. It won’t matter if the stories are sf or romance, so long as they have a crime in their core. This project is my baby, and I’m looking forward to it as much as the six issues of Fiction River itself.

We set our initial goal at the level that would–as the website says–kick-start our project. If we can actually fund the entire project (and the mystery volume), though, we would be the happiest two writers (and returning editors) you’ve ever seen.

So click on this link to see what we’re doing. Even if you don’t want to add your financial support, watch our goofy video. We had fun making it. And we’re going to have fun with Fiction River.  We hope you come along for the ride.