Earth Day, and a sad note
Apr 21st, 2009 | By metafrantic | Category: CG BlogFirst: in less than an hour (where we are) It’ll be Earth Day! In recognition of this we’re offering an incentive to help keep Crossed Genres afloat and avoid killing trees at the same time: For Wednesday only, get a year’s subscription to the E-Book of Crossed Genres for only $7.50! Twelve issues in environmentally-friendly electronic format for less than the cost of ONE issue in print! Please help us out – for 83 cents an issue, what have you got to lose? Go here to subscribe.
NOTE: Also, lock in this price forever! If you get a subscription at $7.50, your renewal price will be $7.50/year for as long as you choose to keep renewing!
(And if you’d like to help us out in a way that doesn’t cost anything, would you help spread the word? Livejournal, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter… anything would help! Thanks!)
As for the sad news: after researching and talking and considering all our options, we’ve decided that we can’t do the film screening we were hoping for. It’s simply too expensive and would eat up too much time. We’re going to see how CG’s financial situation goes, and if it improves over the next 6 months or so we may look for another screening opportunity. But right now, we just can’t afford to risk that kind of money. (But if the Earth Day sale nets a few hundred subscriptions we’ll reconsider! 😉 We’re especially bummed out because we were looking forward to seeing this film ourselves – the only copies readily available are terrible quality, but the one we conceivably would have gotten was probably the best quality copy of that film in existence.
Finalized the PDF today, with color images this time. It came out really nice – I was a bit worried about the color when converted to PDF, but I should have known it would be fine. After all, the color covers convert well.
We’ve noticed a dropoff in submissions this month. I equate it to how we just started revealing the next couple of Upcoming Genres; writers are considering future issues because they have more time to conceive, write and edit stories for those issues than this current one. I hope that’s what it is, anyway, and that next month will see numbers increase back to normal (or better). At any rate we’ve got a decent enough sized pool, and we’re hoping some folks will submit stories during the last few days of the month as usually happens.
Are their any plans to set up a yearly subscription through Kindle? My husband has one & I’d love to try it out that way. It’s more comfortable to read than a PDF (which I’d just print anyway).
librarianlord, that is something we’d like to do, and I’m going to see about getting the process going with it. But there are a couple of problems with a Kindle subscription:
1) It couldn’t be as cheap. It would still be very reasonable… probably around $19 or $20 for a year.
2) As far as I can tell, Kindle subscriptions are actually month-to-month… that is, they’re paid monthly and they can be canceled any time. While we don’t have aproblem with this, it might cause some structural problems on our end. We’re planning on eventually having a “Subscribers-only” area on the website that would be password-accessible. It would be very difficult to track Kindle subscribers so they can have that access, and even harder to track if they stopped paying (and therefore should have their site access canceled).
These are things we’re working on, and at the least we’ll probably offer the Kindle subscription. The site access may or may not be included though, depending on what I learn from Amazon/Kindle.
Also, if you don’t mind my asking: Do PDFs read on a Kindle? I’ve heard differing replies to this question.
Your Earth Day sale is fantastic. Consider me subscribed. Also linking to it from my LJ.
Just wanted to clarify – the pdf edition will be automatically emailed to subscribers?
Noel, thanks for subscribing, and for the link!
To answer your question, yes, you will receive the PDF automatically. However, since we’re expecting a fair number of new subscriptions today, we’re going to wait until near the end of the day and send it to everyone all at once, rather than doing a lot of individual emails. For future months, everyone will get the PDF on the first day of the month.
Do PDFs read on a Kindle?
The answer is… sort of. You can get software to try to convert it, but, it messes with formatting something fierce. Kindle relies on text information while the PDF is graphic. So (as I understand it), your converting software is trying to read the PDF to make the conversion. Also Amazon keeps going back and forth over how they feel about the conversion software.
Hmm. So in other words, the capability exists but it’s not really useful. Ok, thanks. I was wondering about that. I know that when I prep isues for Kindle publication I have to strip out all but the most basic formatting, which makes sense.
If I manage to arrange the Kindle subscription I’ll be sure to post about it here, so keep your eyes open!
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