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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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Perhaps this will be stealing the thunder from my Weekend Getaway, but since I’ve posted links to both Clarkesworld Magazine and Ideomancer in previous getaways, I thought it would be fine to list them earlier in the week. I think it’s also notable to open up a discussion of how I learned about these updates, and see how other people find out about this stuff.

First up, the March issue of Clarkesworld Magazine went live on Monday.The issue includes fiction from Ekaterina Sedia and Rachel Sobel, an interview with Tobias Buckell, and typically fantastic cover art from Harout Demirchyan. There’s even an audio version of the Sedia story available for your listening pleasure!

Next, the March issue of Ideomancer has fiction by J(ae)D Brames, Michaeala Kahn, Steve Mohan Jr., and J. C. Runolfson. The magazine is under new editorship, and well, it hasn’t been easy for the new staff. That’s not to say the old staff left things in disarray (much of the old staff is still there), to steal words out of current editor Leah Bobet‘s mouth, there was “a lot of learning the ropes, back-and-forthing, heroic efforts on Production Editor Celia’s part, and serious excitement.”

I learned about the new Clarkesworld Magazine posting through several sources. Since I follow the magazine through two RSS feeds (its blog and the magazine site itself) I saw updates there. The issue was also announced on a massive round-up page from SF Signal. Nothing too unusual there. Basically getting the information from the source.

Ideomancer was slightly more unusual. There was a post in the LOCUS blink RSS feeds, but that isn’t where I heard about the new issue being live. I first got a message in Facebook from editor Leah Bobet about the issue being online. Now, I’ve used Facebook for some simple notices about the Electric Velocipede, but mostly I use the main website and the blog for updates. Still getting the information from the source, but getting it through a different medium.

I’d like to assume that everyone out there is using RSS feeds, but are you? About a year ago I had overloaded myself with RSS feeds and I cut back significantly. At that time, I had dropped from 400+ feeds to 340. Now I’m at ~180 and that number is still going down as I’m currently dropping all RSS feeds that don’t provide full feeds. And recently, I switched from ‘expanded’ to ‘list’ view in Google reader and went from all my feeds being 100% in my ‘trends’ section to averaging about 45%.

But I still read RSS feeds. I’ve just gotten more selective about it. Mostly I’ve switched to following a few close friends, as many magazines as have feeds, and a handful of places that provide decent round-ups (such as SF Signal) of things happening online. Switching over to list view probably allows me to follow a few more feeds than I am right now, but I’m happy here. I’ve got enough going on without feeling like I have to read the world.

As for Facebook, I thought this was a great place for an announcement. I have to assume that it wasn’t the only place that Bobet mentioned the new issue. It would be silly for her to limit the announcement to one location since there’s no guarantee that all Ideomancer fans/readers are on Facebook. However, since there is an Ideomancer Speculative Fiction group, people who are on Facebook and like the types of things that Ideomancer publishes can join and get relevant announcements. I have a similar group for Electric Velocipede. The cool thing about this is that there are members of my Facebook group that are not subscribers. Why is this cool? It’s exposure of the magazine to a wider audience than I hit with just subscriptions.

So how about the rest of you? Where are you learning about online fiction? Anywhere? Here?

About the Author

About Author Mobile

John Klima

Author

If you want to get in touch with me, use editor[at]electricvelocipede[dot]com rather than posting here. I don't mind the e-mail and you'll have a better chance of hearing back from me. I edit the Hugo Award winning speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede. In 2007, Bantam published Logorrhea, my anthology of stories based on spelling-bee winning words. EV Website Blog Logorrhea You can also find me online at Facebook [John Klima], Twitter [johnklima], and Flickr [johncklima]. If you can guess what the 'c' stands for in johncklima, I'll give you a cookie. If you are a publisher of short fiction anthologies or single-author story collections, I want to see them! Please send material to: John Klima, PO Box 266, Bettendorf, IA 52722
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