Cirsova 10 [Digital] Going Out to Subscribers Today

If you are a subscriber, the link is on the latest Kickstarter post.

Hardcovers are entered into fulfillment and should all arrive before Christmas.

Softcovers generally arrive sooner, but…

…Due to how Amazon has changed their POD system, we can’t enter softcover fulfillment until the book is live on Amazon. Before, the books were on a secret hidden Createspace page, and we’d get them all mailed then flip a switch to make the books show up on Amazon. With Createspace gone, we can’t do that anymore.

So, Issue 10 will be available on Amazon before we’re able to mail them out to subscribers. We’re very sorry that this will be the case, and even though you’ll have saved a few bucks by backing via the Kickstarter, we know this can be annoying to some people. Regrettably, it’s out of our control.

We hope that you enjoy our exciting new issue and find it a thrilling close to the year.

We’ve already made some of the first acquisitions for 2019 and have many other pieces still under consideration. We guarantee that there’s some great stuff in store for you in the future!

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Just another quick submissions update

• Total Subs: 156
  • Read: 136
    • Acquired or under consideration for acquisition: 36
    • No longer under consideration: 100
  • Unread: 20

Everything we’ve read, we’ve contacted people about.

If we haven’t contacted you, we probably haven’t read you.

It’s taking a little longer than we expected to get through our stack because in the last three days, we received about 40 more stories.

Even with all of the culling we’ve done, we’re still looking at just shy of 40 top-notch “maybes”, and it’s gonna be really tough on us.

We’ve got 20 stories left to read.

If we told you “Maybe” and you haven’t heard back from us again yet, your “Maybe” still stands–we’ll get back to you with our final decision as soon as we can.

We were hoping to be able to get all of our offers out before the end of the month, but early December is more likely with how things currently stand.

Due to some insurance related stuff, I’ve got a few big expenses which I will be reimbursed for but, until I’m reimbursed, I’m out of pocket and I want to make sure Issue 10 is out the door before I start cutting more checks.

Update on Amazon Issues!

While Amazon refused to act as an intermediary regarding Gifts Delight’s use of our name in a product listing, after reaching out directly to Gifts Delight, they promptly responded, confirming that the content was created by bots, and addressed the issue.

We would like to thank Gifts Delight for their quick and courteous resolution to this situation.

A Porn Company is Using Cirsova’s Name and Amazon Refuses to Act

A company that primarily sells posters of pornographic images and cars on Amazon is selling a poster of a Caspar David Fredriech painting that we posted once years ago and is using the name “Cirsova” in the listing.

Cirsova is a unique word that was not used for anything prior to the existence of this blog, the publishing company and the magazine it publishes.

Amazon’s IP protection department, however, refuses to act, claiming first that we failed to make proper “identification of the intellectual property right asserted” and later claiming that our rights were unenforceable.

All we want is the name “Cirsova” taken out of the product listing; the company can sell their posters and their porn–we just do not want our company and magazine’s name associated with them!

Issue 10 Update!

All of the files for issue 10 have been uploaded and are ready to go!

We’ll be fulfilling hardcovers very soon and making digital copies available to subscribers.

We’re crossing our fingers that the change to our fulfillment workflow won’t be too brutal now that Amazon has shut down Createspace. We’ll probably start fulfilling before Thanksgiving.

The last couple months have been a nightmare, between my car getting wrecked, being buried at work, getting more submissions than we could’ve imagined (not a bad thing in itself), and all sorts of other craziness. For instance, we’re trying to get Amazon to take down a listing by a screen-scraping bot that’s using our name to sell a poster of a painting we once blogged on an ‘art’ day. And markup text doesn’t work on Amazon descriptions anymore. Go figure.

We’re trying as hard as we can to put our submission period to bed. We’ve gotten to under 40 stories left to read and nearly 20 rejection letters to write (plus whatever gets cut from those unread stories). It’s exhausting! Not to mention emotionally draining.

If you want to help alleviate some of our stress and misery, you can do so at the cost of nothing more than a few moments of your time by leaving a review of an issue of Cirsova that you’ve read!

Or, if you want to drop a little coin on us, you can pre-order an eBook of Issue 10.Or, if you want to drop a little coin on us, you can pre-order an eBook of Issue 10.

Happy Halloween! (Subs Closing, Hardcover Sale, & more)

It’s technically the last day of submissions, and anything that we are sent WILL be considered, but all stories are now competing to bump off one or more A-tier maybes.

DMR Books is open now, and Broadswords & Blasters will be accepting submissions starting tomorrow, so if you have a story you’re thinking about sending at the last second to us, you might be better off sending it to one of them instead. We’ll try to get rejections out in time for people who might be interested in resubmitting there to get in before they fill up, too.

Our Hardcovers are on sale today only with promo-code “TWENTY18” for 20% off. You can snag one here, and don’t forget, hardcover is the only way to get our /v/Anon Carter of Mars Ku Kuru Yo variant of Issue 2.

I’ll probably start making offers in the second week of November. Back in September, somebody hit my car, so I need to plan for covering the deductible before the other guy’s insurance comes through and have a contingency for if the body shop decides to fix pre-existing damage even though I told them not to.

Finally, have something spoopy for Halloween:

Final Day of Submissions…

THB, this submission period would be a lot less stressful if we were buying for 4 issues instead of 2. Gonna have to make some deep and painful cuts into the list of “Maybes”.

Already, we’ve narrowed down from ~250k words of fiction that if we had all the money in the world we’d make offers on to ~150k.

There’s a chance, albeit a small one, that one of the next 50 stories we read will bump something we’ve been holding onto off the bubble.

Honestly, I would recommend NOT sending us anything tomorrow. But if you do, IT WILL BE CONSIDERED. We’ll be reading everything we receive so that we can genuinely feel bad when we tell you that we can’t afford to acquire your awesome story this year.

There’s been a LOT of great submissions, and we thank everyone who has sent something to us! Without authors out there writing great fiction, we could not exist!