m. c. de marco

Clarkesworld Magazine announced that they’ll be accepting submissions up to 8,000 words in 2010, although they still prefer 4,000.

SFScope reported on the fourth annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest, being co-sponsored by the National Space Society. Submissions should be positive, near-future space exploration stories of less than 8,000 words, due April 1st.

Locus has an obituary up for Charles Brown.

Brown co-founded Locus with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf as a one-sheet news fanzine in 1968, originally created to help the Boston Science Fiction Group win its Worldcon bid. Brown enjoyed editing Locus so much that he continued the magazine far beyond its original planned one-year run.

Via SFScope: Warren Lapine, former publisher of genre magazines including Weird Tales and Absolute Magnitude, is back in the business.

Lapine is starting a new genre publishing company, to be called Tir Na Nog Press. He’ll be giving DNA shareholders stock in the new company, at a rate of one-for-one.

Tir Na Nog will be launching a new incarnation of Fantastic Stories as a quarterly magazine, with Lapine as the editor.

Via a mailing list: SFScope reports that Realms of Fantasy will be shutting down after their April 2009 issue, apparently due to slow newsstand sales. With the recent news that The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is cutting back to bimonthly publication, the market for short fantasy fiction is looking down.

Via del.icio.us sf: Warren Ellis reports on declining subscriptions to print science fiction and fantasy magazines.

A few weeks ago, I received the new YEAR’S BEST SF volume as edited by Gardner Dozois. As ever, its indispensable “Summation” preamble contains the best available figures for the annual sales of the major sf magazines.

Via a mailing list: MagCloud is a new print-on-demand magazine publisher. You can browse magazines during the beta or beg for a publisher account.

MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.

Via Roy F. Moore: Time is running out to protest postal rate hikes affecting small publishers. FreePress.net has a letter-writing campaign you can join.