Did the taxes for the business last night.
Cirsova had ~$12,500 in revenues and ~$15,500 in expenses.
~$9k of our expenses went to paying our authors and artists.
A little under $2k went to advertisements and sponsorships.
The rest of our expenses were things like fulfillment and miscellany.
Help us close the gap and consider taking out an advertisement for 2020 in Cirsova Magazine!
I’ll be on the Superversive Sunday Podcast with Ben Wheeler this Sunday talking about the future of the Magazine and the current state of indie publishing and short fiction.
Be sure to subscribe to their channel to receive a notification when it goes up!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC930fdAO0vNHlHNMfouDPcg
We should have the cover art soon for Spring, and we’re in the process of lining up some other cover art from some guest artists; with some of the projects we have going on, we may be keeping Anton too busy to do covers for all five of this year’s issues of Cirsova. But I can promise you we’ll have some really cool artists filling in on a few covers!
Also, I’ll be able to announce them as soon as we’ve got the payments sent, but we’ll be attending a few local conventions this year to try to get the word out locally. It’s strange to think that our magazine has such global reach and even includes works by some local legends but is relatively unknown in our home town. So, we’re hoping we’ll change that in 2020.
We’re still looking for sponsors for this year! If you’re interested in being one of our sponsors, let us know! Our rates are posted here. These, more than anything else, will help us to defray our costs and keep bringing you excellent fiction year after year!
Some pretty amusing insights into the current [and at this point, long-standing] state of cover design philosophy.
Looking at the Amazon best sellers is always a good way to waste spend the time, and it proves that thing about everything having to change for everything to stay the same. If you blink even for a moment, books, authors, or even entire new genres that once seemed ready to become the new hot thing are suddenly gone, yet, at the same time, the new thing looks surprisingly similar to what they replaced.
You would be hard-pressed to find a more strightforward example of creative unoriginality and lack of imagination than today’s book covers, although the same could be said concerning their titles and perhaps even their themes and style of writing. But covers are easier to analyze—and funnier.
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The cusp of the new year has me feeling like that moment right when one is about to reach the summit of a roller coaster–it’s going to be wild, the anticipation is building along with a sense of dread and excitement. When it’s all over, I’ll wonder how the hell I did it and got through it, knowing that it was momentum that did most of the work–I just had to hang on. But right now, it’s tense!
Spring is in the capable hands of Xavier; once I get it back and work in those changes, it’s off to Mark–then I bury Mark under the Summer special. The Spring issue is slated for mid-March. I feel like I’m behind, but I know it’s more that there are so many other things that must be done in addition to having the Spring issue ready.
Anton is hard at work on the cover for Spring, which will showcase an all-new Mongoose & Meerkat adventure, The Golden Pearl, by Jim Breyfogle!
Cirsova Publishing is also working with Jim to bring you guys an illustrated anthology of the first five Mongoose & Meerkat stories, plus an all new fantasy novella. We’ll have more details on that soon; we’re just hammering out a few things with our artist(s).
I won’t go into details, but December and the start of January have been ROUGH financially; we really need to get on the ball as far as advertisements go and doing a better job of maintaining our advertiser relationships. But suffice to say that advertisements help us A LOT, and we have space for advertisements in Spring that we need to try to fill by the end of this month.
Finally, you may have noticed that there are no more Short Reviews or Retro Fandom Fridays going up; this is because we’ve exhausted the queue of content from the three years I spent blogging at Castalia House. I don’t know when I’ll be able to catch up, and I unfortunately wasn’t able to build up a buffer during the six months I wasn’t writing any. But I still plan on resuming at some point, because creating a library of reviews of pulp stories, even if my reviews are mediocre at times, is probably one of the most valuable things I’ve managed to do to help point people interested in checking out the pulps in the right directions.
Cirsova Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense is a semi-pro publication that, in 2019, paid .0125 per word for original fiction. In addition to its flagship magazine, Cirsova Publishing has released original fiction in Misha Burnett and Louise Sorensen’s Duel Visions and the 35th Anniversary Editions of Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars.
Cirsova has published 38 eligible works of fiction in 2019.
[Bold works are Tangent Recommended; * indicates Ursa Major Award eligibility]
Novel
Novella
Novelette
Short Stories
Covers for the Spring and Fall issues + Wild Stars Omnibus were done by Anton Oxenuk.
Cover for the Summer Special and art for our Illustrated Stark were by StarTwo.
Covers for the 35th Anniversary Editions of Wild Stars were by Mark Wheatley.
Duel Visions’ cover was by Susan Bolhafner.
I was recently interviewed by Aaron of Iara of Effective Nerd.
In the meantime, we’re rapidly moving towards having the spring issue ready.
We still have some advertising space available, so drop a line if you’d like a piece of it!
The Duel Visions Christmas Sale is running from today through New Years!
The Duel Visions ebook is only .99 on Amazon.
Also worth noting that the paperback has a pretty deep discount right now, too!
Be sure to check out this great anthology of weird horror and macabre fiction from Misha Burnett and Louise Sorensen!
