Turns out that I won’t get a chance to better my longlisting in a Cadenza Comp, as Cadenza is closing. Sad news indeed, although I’m wondering if it’s just another symptom of the move towards e-zines rather than paper ones. When a story on Every Day Fiction has clocked up in excess of 27000 hits as a result of a mention on StumbleUpon, you wonder if we’re close to the tipping point.
Speaking personally, my current aim as a writer is to get as many people as possible to read my stuff. Well, duh! Of course that’s my aim! And as you can see from my list of publications, almost all of those are currently online rather than print. What’s really interesting is that the likes of EDF and its sister site, Every Day Poets, are attracting submissions from some big players, such as Vanessa Gebbie, Nuala ní Chonchuír and Alex Keegan. What’s for sure is that they aren’t there for the money. But I can see the logic of self-promotion that way so that ultimately more people buy that short story collection when it comes out.
The next big question is whether that short story collection should be an ebook or (as Adrian Graham would put it) a pbook. That’s the point at which my inner luddite comes out, and I still want something tangible to hold in my hand. But then I still buy CDs, so what do I know?