Tomorrow is the last day of the contest to win an ARC of A FANTASY MEDLEY. Go here for rules & to enter.
A few people have asked, so I in turn asked the fine people at Subterranean Press if there were any plans to re-release the anthology in, say, a less-expensive softback format. The response was, “We’ve had some spot interest, but nothing like the hundreds of requests we’d need in order to justify going to press.”
I’ve genuinely no idea if there are hundreds of people interested, but if you *are* interested in trying to get them to release a softback edition of A FANTASY MEDLEY (with stories by myself, Kate Elliott, Robin Hobb and Kelley Armstrong), go here to email them with a request.
I would run a contest of encouragement, except I can’t figure out how that would work: it doesn’t do anybody any good if you *only* email and then later don’t pre-order/order a copy, but there’s no pre-order for an item that doesn’t exist, and I can’t exactly say “everybody who emails them also please paypal me $15 to show you mean it”, although that would be nice for *me*. :)
Which reminds me of a discussion I had recently about commissioning short stories, which made me curious as to what people think the going rate for such a creature should be. (I have my own quite clear idea on that, but it’d be very interesting to see if my idea and reader ideas meshed.) So, with no purchase necessary: what do you think a short story written on commission is worth? How long of a story would you expect for that dollar amount? How much say would you expect to have in what I wrote, if you were commissioning a story (I await the answers to this one with some bemusement)?
For reference: the short stories linked at my cemurphy.net writing page mostly range from 1K (the Gryphon Beach stories) up to 4K (the Walker Papers story). The two longer pieces, “A Compendium of Kitlings” and “Ill Met by Moonlight” are respectively 7 and 10K each, and “From Russia, With Love”, which is the FANTASY MEDLEY short story, is about 8,000 words.
There, now I’ve totally procrastinated through half an hour I should have been working during. I better go open up the war room and make some pretense at doing my job. :)