Some Great Prizes

Fiction River, the anthology series I've written for a few times, is doing one of it's bi-annual Kickstarter subscription drives, and as always they have a lot of great prizes for supporters.

There's the usual Fiction River subscriptions, small or large, but the one that caught my eye had to do with classes. Kris and Dean teach some really great online classes, one of which I'm taking right now, and getting a lot out of. I'd already planned to take two more classes, so the husband and I had budgeted $600 ($300 each for two six-week classes) for the near future. But one of the Kickstarter rewards is an online class, for support at the $250 level. And you can get as many $250 classes as you want. That's a $100 savings all together for classes I was planning to take anyway, so I trotted over and pledged $500, yay! The husband was very pleased by the savings, which is another yay. :)

The stretch goals are fun too. They have stretch goals every $2500 after the base amount, and they're adding free books all along the way. If the Kickstarter goes to $50,000 (I think they passed $35,000 last time) they're giving everyone who pledges at least $15 twenty-five extra e-books. That's a lot of reading material for $15. And it's not an all-or-nothing thing, either; even if they make a lower amount (they've already hit the first stretch goal) they're still adding a lot of extra books.

My favorites, though, are the $40,000 and $45,000 stretch goals -- they're going to open up Fiction River submissions, one volume per goal level. :D Seriously, this'll be great. Dean and Kris have both edited open-submission markets before (Kris won a Hugo for editing F&SF back in the 90s) and I've heard them both say any number of times that they'd never-ever-ever read slush again, amen! I'm really hoping we get at least one of these stretch goals, because I expect the resulting rants after the fact will be entertaining for years. :D

In all seriousness, though, this'd be a great opportunity for short story writers. Fiction River has been invitation-only since its inception, so there's been a relatively closed(-ish) pool of writers contributing. They pay six cents per word, their contracts are author-friendly, and they're easy to work with. I got a reprint request from John Joseph Adams for one of my Fiction River stories, and a writer friend named Dave Hendrickson won a Derringer Award for a story he published in Fiction River last year. This is good stuff, folks.

If they do the open call for a volume, they'll be announcing the theme and opening the submission window for only one week. This is unusual for open-submission anthologies, but it's the same writing window that workshop attendees, who write most of Fiction River's stories, get. It does work, I promise. And everyone who supports the Kickstarter (no minimum amount mentioned) will get an announcement with guidelines two days early. I wouldn't know what to do with Nine Whole Days!! to write a Fiction River story, heh, but for folks not used to the tight deadline, the extra two days would be some nice padding. I think it'd be worth a few dollars to get that advance notice. If you write short stories, think about signing up for this.

Oh, and Fiction River publishes some really great stories, so subscribing is a good deal if you like short fiction.

Check it out, and consider supporting the campaign. It's going on until the 17th of this month.

Angie