Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 16th January

1 Comment

It’s Friday once again, and Friday is Free Fiction time here at Futurismic… a somewhat smaller batch this week, but still plenty to keep your eyeballs busy.

***

A couple of novels at Manybooks:

***

A lonesome short classic at Feedbooks:

***

Polu Texni presents “Very Truly Yours, Part I” by Seth Gordon

***

Strange Horizons presents “Greetings from Kampala” by Angela Ambroz

***

Tor.com presents “Errata” by Jeff VanderMeer

***

Jeff VanderMeer himself has a fictional snippet from his Ambergris world: “Zamilon in Waiting”

***

Via Jim Steel:

Blood, Blade & Thruster is pulling the plug on itself on January 19. If you haven’t done so yet, go and download the pdfs of the magazines before it’s too late.

***

Here’s Memory #31 by Jayme Lynn Blaschke

***

And now for our regular collection of stuff that SF Signal‘s all-hearing ear caught the rumblings of. First off, they’ve got a round-up of the latest additions to the Free Speculative Fiction site , which is probably big enough to keep you reading until summer arrives.

Then there’s an assortment of stuff they linked to through the week just gone:

***

And finally some Friday Flash Fiction:

***

And that’s about all we’ve got this week. Keep your plugs, tip-offs and recommendations coming in; deadline is 1800 GMT every Friday. Have a great weekend!

Blog

How to Communicate More Effectively, Part 6 – Generate Action

[How to Communicate More Effectively is a series of guest posts from Gareth L Powell. In case you missed ’em, here’s part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.]

Having got your audience wanting to subscribe to your magazine, read your blog post, or sign up to your email newsletter, you simply have to close the deal.

You have to tell the reader what you want them to do. Would you like them to contact you? Would you like them to support your cause or buy your book? Or simply check out the other posts on your blog? In order to get them to act, you have to tell them exactly what you want them to do, and how to go about doing it. Keep it simple, direct and to-the-point. You’ve got them wanting your product; all you have to do now is to tell them how to get it.

In addition, you should make sure that what you tell them to do is easy and straightforward. It’s no good asking them to fill out an eight page online questionnaire in order to access your site, because they’re unlikely to bother. Instead, make your download available with one click. Allow them to subscribe online to your magazine. If necessary, give them a phone number and an email address for queries. Make it easy for them to contact you (or take the action you want them to) and they will.

For example:

  • Order online by March 1st
  • Download the new issue FREE by clicking here
  • Send your completed order form to this address
  • Follow this link to buy “A Guide To Space Monsters” on Amazon
Blog

Will Obama usher in the age of Digg democracy?

inauguration site construction notice, Washington DCOne of the more interesting sections of the Change.gov website built by the incoming Obama administration is the Citizen’s Briefing Book. It’s essentially a kind of Digg-like system where registered users can pick policies and issues to vote upwards or downwards on an ordered list, the idea being that the matters that matter the most will rise to the top, presumably to have attention paid to them by policy makers. [image by ajagendorf25]

It’s an intriguing idea, very typical of the Obama crew, and a tentative step toward a more atomised and participatory form of democracy that might effectively engage those who, traditionally, have been least engaged by politics in recent times. The downswing being, of course, that it’s effectively a crude kind of popularity contest, as Steven Johnson pointed out at BoingBoing:

Right now, the top three most popular proposals are: 1) Ending Marijuana Prohibition, 2) Bullet Trains and Light Rail, and 3) An End To Government Sponsored School Abstinence Programs. In other words, what the people want are stoned kids having sex on bullet trains. Sounds about right to me!

To be totally clear, those are three policies that – were I an American citizen – I would certainly support; it’s just that given the current state of the world in general and the US in particular, I don’t think they are really the hot-button issues that most need to be addressed…

Of course, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is only a type of polling mechanism rather than a direct lever on the policy machine. I only hope for the sake of all Americans it doesn’t become as farcical an echo-chamber of petty idiots as the Downing Street Petitions site. Or Digg, for that matter.

Blog

Seth Godin asks what we’ll miss about printed newspapers

4 Comments

newspapersWhen newspapers are gone, what will you miss? asks Seth Godin. His answer? Not a great deal. He takes the opposite view to the journalists who tell us that the ‘proper’ investigative journalism will be killed off by the migration to the web:

… if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.

The obvious response here, especially from anyone in journalism, is going to be “well, what the hell does Godin know about running a newspaper?” I can’t answer that question, but I do know that Godin understands marketing, economics and human nature pretty well, and I have to say there’s something very logical about what he’s saying.

Or am I just being sold the story I want to hear? [image by drb62]

Blog

Clarkesworld reopens to fiction submissions

2 Comments

Cover art for Clarkesworld Magazine #28Via their newly-hired non-fiction editor Cheryl Morgan comes news that the consistently excellent Clarkesworld Magazine is once again open to fiction submissions.

If you don’t read Clarkesworld already, you really should do; it’s one of the sites that I hold up as an exemplar of quality fiction on the web, and they set a high bar to measure up against. And all at no cost to you, the reader – so drop in a donation or buy a physical copy while you’re there, why don’t ya?