11/01/2014 By Cameron Ashley
Hi There Dear Reader,
If you’ve come here to put your eyeballs on CF15, it’s more than likely that you’ve noticed things are a little different. Your formerly free PDF download now will cost you $1.99. Your kindle edition also now costs $1.99. Your print has gone up to $8.99. You’re possibly thinking, what the hell guys?
Well, here it is:
Every dollar CF has made has gone straight back into CF. This has allowed us to print books like our anthologies and our Single Shot novella line. It’s also left we who run this thing to pick up tabs time and time again. This is not a complaint – we’ve been happy to do so – but so many freebies have slowed down our profits, which, in turn has slowed down us being able to pay the authors of these books their deserved slices.
In an effort to hopefully speed up the expansion of our book lines and be able to more speedily get these writers something for their hard work and trust in CF as a publishing entity (which we now can on Fierce Bitches, for example), everything has now been monetised. Y’know, like a proper publisher and stuff…
We are still doing things as cheaply as we can. We decided that $2.00 for either a kindle or a PDF was still a very fair price. We hope you’ll agree and unless you’re that lady who reviewed CF12 poorly because it has articles and interviews as well as fiction (weirdest criticism ever) you probably will. The Createspace print price hike up to $8.99 actually has nothing to do with us. The increase is built into an option to expand distribution (to, say, thebookdepository.com). We need to expand, thus we have no choice here. We are turned off by donation buttons and, in the interests of credibility, advertising seems inappropriate for us. This is really the only way to go, unless you want pop-ups for Russian Brides or James Patterson novels.
No thanks.
Unfortunately, contributors to CF magazine will still not be paid (for now). As mentioned, the magazine functions as a way for us to fund our books, hopefully now they will be funded faster. They will however, get both .mobi and PDF files emailed through to them and hopefully they will feel even fuzzier knowing they’ve done their bit for indie publishing.
Another difference is that while we still have all content up at Amazon, you can also now purchase your PDF and .mobi files directly from us. This is our preferred method of purchase as, obviously, we make 100% of the profits, as opposed to Amazon taking their slice. However you want to do it is cool with us, though, we just thought we’d mention it.
We have a typically busy year ahead. We’ll have Pink Factory (our smut/porn/erotica special) good to go next month and it has some weeeeeeeird stuff in it. We also have our third entry in the Single Shot novella line, done, dusted and ready to hit the printers. We have another anthology (to be co-edited with Adrian McKinty) on the boil and ready for planning and much, much more. We would love to be able to publish a novel in 2015, so if you support new, interesting, potentially obscure and uncommercial genre works, please stick with us. We are trying, seriously, to put out as much of the coolest, most eclectic material we can, still as cheaply as we can do it.
Thank you for helping us get this far, it’s kind of crazy we’re at the point that I have to write this. We didn’t think we’d actually get this far. We hope you’ll stick with us as we keep getting better, stronger, stranger.
Happy New Year,
Cameron Ashley.