Cover Story » Nonfiction

Editor's Preface

Written by Eric Flint

As you can perhaps deduce from the simple existence of a second issue of the Grantville Gazette, the first issue—which we did as an experiment, to see if there would be enough interest in such an online magazine—proved to be successful.

Quite successful, in fact, better than I'd hoped. As of today, we've sold about 1750 copies. With that sales base, the magazine can be financially self-sustaining, which was the prerequisite for being able to continue with it. I still can't afford to pay professional rates for the stories and articles—which the Science Fiction Writers' Association has now pegged at five cents a word—but I can cover all the other costs, including paying professional rates to a copy editor as well as the percentage received by Webscriptions and Baen Books. And I'm hoping—I think not unreasonably—that over time the magazine's sales and subscription base will become large enough that I can start paying professional rates for the stories and articles instead of the current semi-pro rates. In order to do that, I estimate we'd need a stable sales/sub base of around 2500 readers.

So... onward.

Now that I know the Gazette will be an ongoing publication, I've got more leeway in terms of the kind of stories I can include in the magazine. A number of the fiction pieces being written in the 1632 setting are either long or are intended as parts of ongoing stories. There are two examples in this issue: Danita Ewing's "An Invisible War" and Enrico Toro's "Euterpe, episode 1." In terms of its length, "An Invisible War" is technically a short novel. So, it'll be serialized over the next two issues of the magazine. Part I appears in this issue; the concluding part will appear in the next.

Enrico Toro's story is somewhat different. Neither he nor I know what the final length of this story will be. It's written in the form of episodes, each told in epistolary form by the ...