From the “woe is me” and Corporate State Department: a shout out to our second issue’s contributors for their patience:
I am keenly conscious of the fact that Gernsback was often late with a check and on my list of Things We Will Never Do is – be late with payment.
Technically, we’re still not “late”: having not yet received the shipment of print copies for distribution I can claim that the stories and art have not yet been published, and our policy is payment upon publication. Folks have been informed and no one seems to be bothered by this, except for me. The first issue, I sent the checks out a bit early (good will, establishing a precedent, burying the past) and had intended to do the same this issue.
Unfortunately, PayPal has decided to interfere with an unexpected “account limitation” owing to the fact that I, for some reason this late in the game, have to verify both my existence and physical address and, so far, PayPal has refused to accept the documents I have provided (reluctantly), including my state-issued driver’s license. (Despite the fact that the account has been used to both send and receive thousands of dollars up to this time, now I have to verify?)
Mini Editorial: It should be illegal for a company, any company, to refuse to accept state or federal issued forms of identification for business purposes. Who is running the show? Obviously, the corporations and not our elected governments.
There are good reasons why people who are in business use a Post Office Box as their registered address and, if that is good enough for my state driver’s license, it freakin well ought to be good enough for PayPal. (Hint: If your official address is a PO Box, quess where all of those utility bills you’re so keen to get ahold of are addressed to?) And BTW, PayPal, the instructions in your email missives do not match the instructions on the Help page for the same issues your customers are directed to. How about YOU get your act together before asking me to do the same?
End Mini-Rant.
I fully expect to be able to send out payments this coming Monday after having put this silliness behind me. Which will work out as I expect to be receiving our second issue the same day. In the meantime, authors and artists, thanks for your patience.
Other Site Related Stuff
Logging into the store returns you to the login screen.
We had some issues with members trying to log in to order in the store a while back and, despite the fact that those issues were not related to our programs or servers, we went in and adjusted a few things, which seemed to handle most of those issues. (Still sounds like it was our problem that we “fixed”, but it wasn’t. We enhanced our capabilities to handle other server’s issues better.)
But not all.
We don’t want anyone to ever have an issue. Unfortunately, we’ve done as much in-house testing as we can do and those results strongly suggest that no one should be having an issue. Which forces us to rely on our customers to let us know when they have an issue.
Please don’t get frustrated or angry: if you’ve tried and aren’t getting anywhere, get in touch with me and we’ll sort things out.
More
I’m quite pleased to see that we received our first order for non-magazine merchandise the other day. Woo Hoo!
Which crowing allows me to remind everyone that we have Books, Comics, Posters, Coffee Mugs and Ts for sale, in addition to the Print, Digital and Premium editions of our magazine.
All can be found in the Amazing Store and (hint hint – we know there are plenty of people out there who would LOVE to receive something Amazing this coming holiday).
Reception
We got a nice review of our first issue over on the Featured Futures website, brought to our attention by File770’s Pixel Scroll
I think my favorite line is this one:
Speaking of that non-fiction, it opens with a presumably irregular “Publisher’s Note” from Steve Davidson which thanks everyone, living or not, who contributed to this revival and makes a good point about Amazing being not just a magazine, but a symbol of science fiction and “the genre’s birth place.”
I might be biased.
Jason goes on to say other nice things, including:
The new Amazing is attractively presented, with interior illustrations and cartoons (the first is especially funny) enlivening its three-column layout which packs in a lot of wordage relative to its 104 pages. An interesting bit of style is the use of the first column of each story for a drawing of the author set above the biographical blurb.
I’ve asked Jason if I can include this review on our Or So You Say page, where I’m collecting LoCs Letters of Comment) from email, twitter, facebook and elsewhere. You might want to hop over and see what others are saying about our efforts.
And Another Thing(s)
Richard Kraus of Larque Press sent us a note requesting updates on our third issue for his Digital Enthusiast publication and also commented on our first issue, which comment you can find at Or So You Say (hint: he thought it Excellent!)
I also queried and received a go-ahead from the ever-enthusiastic Chris Garcia for a contribution to the up-coming issue of Journey Planet, the Hugo Award winning Fanzine edited by James Bacon (2019’s Worldcon Chair) and Christopher Garcia, plus, often, a host of guest editors. My article is titled The Tentacles of Silicon Valley, but you’ll have to wait to see if it is accepted for publication before you can read it. I’ll be thrilled if they accept it – publication in an award winning fanzine! (If you’re not sure why I’m so excited, check out Chris’s Hugo Award Acceptance speech, which itself was nominated for a Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Hugo. (It’s the second video in.)
No, we’re not done.
The Big News (saved for last) this week is, this coming Wednesday, December 5th, we’re going to start a weekly SF Trivia Contest.
There will be TWO winners for each contest: one prize will be awarded to the first person who leaves the correct answer in the comments, and an additional prize will be awarded to a randomly selected contestant from among all of those who have provided the correct answer..
The prize will be a One Year Digital Subscription to Amazing Stories. (If you are already a subscriber and win, your subscription will be extended.)
That ought to be enough for today, yes?
