Just read Gaia's Children (~35min) - a great piece. I actually listened to it in the car on the way to work using iOS's text-to-speech, which was very good quality.
Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#42The PNG is pretty large. I compressed it with tinypng to a quarter the size.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#43This is a very interesting project. Are you self financing the entire operation? The "about us" page has some info on your review process. It seems those are volunteers or are you also paying them? I love the free+payment optional model and not relying on ads.
What's your bigger fear, lack of quality entries or lack of subscribers?
6c/words seems pretty solid so that's nice. SFWA rights is a good choice as well, seems like you are pretty author friendly :) How are you handling authors payments btw. (not an author but curious)?
Sustaining >550 paying customers to break even seems like no small task.
I have looked for similar online magazines with good rights in another domain (horror) before and your site seems to be ahead of the curve with regards to seeming professional and transparent, kudos.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#44I thought the default look of the site was a bit hard to read, so I made two themes for Stylebot. If you have Stylebot installed you can go to the site, click the Stylebot icon and load either of them from "Stylebot Social".
Stylebot is only available for Chrome though; does anyone know an alternative to Stylebot which is as user-friendly as Stylebot but also available on a broad range of browsers?
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#45I thought the default look of the site was a bit hard to read, so I made two themes for Stylebot. If you have Stylebot installed you can go to the site, click the Stylebot icon and load either of them from "Stylebot Social". Stylebot is only available for Chrome though; does anyone know an alternative to Stylebot which is as user-friendly as Stylebot but also available on a broad range of browsers?
Nice! I appreciate the effort. Based on feedback here I'll be changing styles tonight.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#46This is a very interesting project. Are you self financing the entire operation? The "about us" page has some info on your review process. It seems those are volunteers or are you also paying them? I love the free+payment optional model and not relying on ads. What's your bigger fear, lack of quality entries or lack of subscribers? 6c/words seems pretty solid so that's nice. SFWA rights is a good choice as well, seem…
Yes, I'm currently self financing everything. All the individuals on the 'about' page are volunteers. You can see a little bit of a finance breakdown on the 'subscribe' tab (http://compellingsciencefiction.com/subscribe.html).
I'm paying authors the old-fashioned way, with checks! Since it's only 5 checks/month, this doesn't seem like something I need to optimize right away.
I appreciate your kind words -- it will be tough to get enough paying supporters, but hopefully people find the content worthwhile.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#47Quick nitpick: Could you add a RSS feed? I think it would be a nice alternative to the mailing list.
I will certainly look in to this.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#48Interesting stories. Better copy editing would make them easier to read. "Ed had shouted on them like this" "No real kidnapper hauls around a struggling, scream-seeking captive" "I see I need to show the adolescent asshole affecting to be me " Broken sentences like these make the stories a bit of a chore to read.
Thanks for the feedback! We hired a professional copy editor, but we will work harder in this area going forward.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#49Just read Gaia's Children (~35min) - a great piece. I actually listened to it in the car on the way to work using iOS's text-to-speech, which was very good quality.
Awesome! We also have plans to record podcasts down the road. I'm glad text-to-speech worked well.
Re: Show HN: The first issue of Compelling Science Fiction
#50hey, why not allow people to supply a Kindle email address so you can push straight to them? they need to whitelist you as a sender of course..
This is a great idea, and we're currently working on a system that will accomplish this.