Cool Things That Happened On My Summer Vacation

On my summer vacation, I flew on multiple jet planes in order to get to San Jose, which is a city in the state of California.

California is one of the largest states of the United States, which is a country on the North American continent.  You can Google it.

Google says that California’s Los Angeles city is the seat of the Hollywood movie industry, San Francisco is famous for its Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and cable cars.

I was not anywhere near Los Angeles or San Francisco – California is BIG!.  I got to see a hummingbird in an AirBnB’s backyard, and the inside of the McEnery Convention Center, which had lots of books and lots of people wandering around in it, and lots of people wandering around with books, and clowns on the sidewalk outside on Saturday.

OK.  Enough school-assignment padding.

Lots of follow-on from WorldCon76, not to mention lots of developments here at the sprawling, octopoid-like Amazing Stories HQ (we have tentacles stretching to every corner of the globe).

One of NH’s leading newspapers chose to cover our return to print – The original science fiction magazine ‘Amazing Stories’ back in print thanks to N.H. push

They’ve given us a fair amount of coverage over the years.  The reporter also writes a blog/niche news site called The GraniteGeek, so it’s likely he finds our subject matter appealing.  In fact, extended coverage of our return to print can be found there (though it’s pretty much the Monitor piece).

Prior coverage of Amazing’s Return can be found here, here, here and here.

Our good friends over at File 770 (can we just go ahead and call it the “fanzine of record for SF Fandom” already?) gave some space to Chris Barkley’s So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask: A Column of Unsolicited Opinion #35, which features a visit to the Amazing Stories booth – “I commended Steve for handing out a SUPERB issue for free to attendees.” (multiple emphases ours, lol), and, the latest bi–monthly issue of Ionosphere, a publication of the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F), edited by John Thiel, includes a reprint of one of my Facebook posts, saying, by way of introduction – “I received the first issue of Steve Davidson’s AMAZING STORIES in the mail today, and it was a knockout, fully justifying what the title of the magazine has always been.” (I think he should have stuck an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, but, you know, we’ll take it.) (and, again, emphasis decidedly mine.)

The reprinted post (my Facebook posts get reprinted, but can I sell a story?  Noooooooo) was titled My Trip to the Worldcon, the Prologue.  Ionosphere is a members only publication, so you can either join the N3F, which is one of the oldest and continuously operating fan clubs, established in 1941 by none other than Damon Knight, or you can read it here on Facebook.

Speaking of Facebook, Ira Nayman, our Editor-in-Chief uploaded a few images to the Amazing Stories page that demonstrates just how interstellar our readership is.  You can check them out here.

Speaking of “interstellar”:  as of our last check, Amazing Stories is subscribed to by fans in Argentina, Venezuela, The UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Estonia, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, China, Denmark, South Korea, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg ((pretty sure at least one of the subscribers there is the Gernsback Museum!), Malta, Poland, The Netherlands, Norway, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, and Singapore.  Oh, and the United States (which is a bit surprising considering the state of education in that country….).

Judging from that list, we’ve got to put a bit of a push on in South America, the Middle East and the Pacific Islands….

We’re also making progress and changes to things like our websites and our store.

To recap an earlier notice:  whether you realize it or not, when visiting the Amazing Stories website, you were actually being sent to www.amazingstoriesmag.com (even if you typed “www.amazingstories.com” into your browsers address bar;  “amazingstories.com” was forwarding you to “www.amazingstoriesmag.com”.  Confused?  Read on!)

Now, we’re splitting the functions of our website into the blog/social network site and the magazine’s site.

www.amazingstoriesmag.com (not yet active) will contain the magazine and all of the magazine-related functions, while www.amazingstories.com will take you to the daily blog (where you’ve been going all along).  Update your bookmarks.

In addition to that, our submissions website is submissions.amazingstoriesmag.com:  go there to register (you need to register separately for submissions) and submit fiction, non-fiction, poetry and artwork.

Our store is also being fiddled with and now includes the ability to purchase subscriptions to the magazine (both print and electronic) as well as individual issues of the magazine;  our cover posters are being revamped, re-touched, enhanced and color-corrected and they look STUNNING –

They’re currently available in a variety of sizes and will soon find their way onto other products as well. (There will eventually be 50+ cover posters available, spanning the early years and our “modern” era.  The line-up is displayed on this poster:

We’re also offering a few new products — a beanie hat, t-shirts and a tote bag:

(We briefly thought of printing up a hat that said MAAA! (Make Amazing Amazing Again!), but then we realized that would be kind of redundant as Amazing Stories is and always has been AMAZING.  Amazing Stories, that is. (Perhaps, given the state of things, we should do a hat that says Make Amazing Amazinger….)

You can find these and a growing list of other fine products at store.amazingstories.com.

Should we call the store “The Amazing Store”?

Finally, the crass art of doing business:

In order to keep on making this work, we need subscribers and we need advertisers.  Subscribing is easy and, we’d like to think, reasonably priced.  Head here to subscribe (or purchase a single issue).

Advertisers – rates are available upon request (steve at amazingstories dot com);  you’ll be reaching 42,000+ registered website members, not to mention our subscribers.

Indie Authors – we’re putting together a special ad program for you that can put your works in front of tens of thousands of dedicated readers of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror; several authors (contributors to our blog) have mentioned that their presence on our website demonstrably increased sales, and one even credits our promotional work with achieving Best Seller status on Amazon!  If you are interested (we’re still massaging the details but will be happy to share), get in touch via the email address above.

And that’s about all she wrote at this juncture folks.  We’re out there, we’re getting bigger, we’re offering more stuff and we want to hear from you!