What's going on, you ask?  Plenty!  We're expecting the printer to ship us 200 beautiful copies of Issue 0 on Monday or Tuesday.  Sue will begin shipping them out shortly after that.  We've got a teaser PDF that you've already seen, but now we've also got teasers for the material we didn't manage to fit into the PDF--note the link to the current "published" Issue in the top of the menu now.  We're playing around with advertising and we're doing a lot of marketing.

So, one question for our loyal (if silent) readers--where have you seen us?  Where have you seen other magazines, that actually made you interested in seeing more?

We've run a series of web ads, and managed to get a windfall through our server reseller to do more than originally budgeted--we got $100 credit towards adwords, and a $200 credit towards microsoft's offering.  We're not getting the best returns on those, but hopefully we're getting more in the public eye.

We've run one print ad, so far, and I've talked with at least one person who's seen it--a one-inch image in the classifieds section of F&SF.

Then there's the myspace "advertising" I've been doing.  Friending all sorts of people with assorted book interests--fantasy and science fiction, literature; then more specifically, folks who mentioned the books Grimus, Baudolino, Iron and Silk, Imago, Dhalgren, Shockwave Rider...  And for good measure we listed a number of authors on our profile, including Peter S. Beagle, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borge, Albert Camus, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, ...  Our efforts have us at over 1700 friends, without using any of those crazy friend-spam sites (or trains, whathaveyou).  I've been chatting with folks via comments and bulletins, trying to build brand, build friends, and it's had some success.  We may have even scored a radio interview out of it, and a lot of other, much crazier stuff (like being in the credits of a horror flick, "with special thanks").

So what else can we do?  We've started sending out Advance Review Copies to possible reviewers, and just "industry insiders" who will hopefully happen to mention us by word of mouth, to friends and associates.  We plan to send out a lot more ARCs--we have a couple crazy ideas, who knows what will pay off, there?  And so it goes--there are a lot of unknowns.  We're even looking into a radio spot, though expect we can't afford it.

Any thoughts are appreciated, of course.  [[ and as a sidenote, if we're lucky, this post will automatically show up on MySpace as well. ]]

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