Thank you, next.

Hey everyone! Sorry about the prolonged silence. We’ve had some obnoxious, stressful behind-the-scenes problems that needed to be resolved. Now that all the fires have been put out, we have an update for you! (This one will be long, but the important parts are in bold, so it’s scroll-friendly.)

First, we broke up with KDP. It’s a very, very long story about Terms and Conditions, glaring omissions, and a corporation’s refusal to respond to questions about any of it—and it’s a story we’re telling to reporters. You can read it here, if you’d like. TL;DR: I’ve pulled all of our titles from Amazon’s system and am moving them to Ingram. Reading T&Cs, EULAs, and Privacy Policies is more important than it has ever been.

I wouldn’t recommend self-publishing through KDP until they’ve published a Data Processing Addendum specifically stating that they won’t use uploaded manuscripts to train their ChatGPT competitors. I would also advise writers to think twice before submitting work to publications that use KDP’s print-on-demand services until we know whether submitted manuscripts are being fed into their systems for training purposes.

We broke up with the Submission Grinder, too. This is an even longer story than the KDP thing, and I’d rather not talk about it in detail. In the end, we requested that our listing be removed entirely from the Submission Grinder. You can find us on Chillsubs, though! (You can follow me there too, if you’d like.)

We also divorced Elon. This likely isn’t news to anyone who is active in our Discord, but we’re officially (finally) done with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. I have always preferred communicating directly and semi-privately with our friends via email newsletters, Patreon/Ko-fi updates, and Discord. We’ll be continuing to do that.

I just received our first order from Ingram, and the issues are beautiful. The paper feels thinner, but it’s noticeably softer. The cover is hands-down better than anything we’ve ever received from KDP. The colors are crisp and more saturated. I'm just in love with it.

If any of you are curious, the title configuration process was about as straightforward as KDP’s. It seems to have improved quite a bit since the last time I tested it out, but I have a lot of formatting experience, so YMMV depending on your skill level. It’s not exactly beginner-friendly, but if you’ve produced a few titles on KDP, you’ll likely find the learning curve pretty flat.

You may have noticed our subscriptions aren’t set up to auto-renew. There are a few reasons for that—one being that it’s kind of a gross thing to do without first requiring a user to opt-in. The other is that we’re closing the magazine to focus on other projects in 2024. We’re a very small team of volunteers. The perpetually open reading periods, quarterly publication schedule, and increasingly burdensome costs have stretched me far too thin to handle simultaneous projects, so our final issue (for now) will be 3.4, which ships January 1st of next year, when all remaining subscriptions are set to expire.

That doesn’t mean we’re done publishing, though! Around mid-year, we will open to novella submissions. We’ll be looking for futuristic, dark speculative fiction. Our plans for the novella project(s) go far beyond publishing long-ish stories in standard formats, so follow us on Tumblr and Chillsubs to be notified when we make that announcement.

Next year is going to be massive for us. My co-author Kanishk Tantia and I are preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Plane, a solo journaling game we’ve been developing for the last year. You can learn more about the game and read my weekly devlog here.

This is the biggest project we have ever attempted, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it. (It’s killing me that I can’t really say or show anything yet! …I’m going to throw some screenshots into this update. Nobody tell Kanishk.)