Prime Books is launching a new online magazine called Lightspeed in June 2010. Lightspeed will publish four science fiction short stories every month, along with an assortment of non-fiction features. It will be edited by John Joseph Adams and Andrea Kail; Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.
Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. Each week, they’ll post one piece of fiction and one piece of non-fiction. They’ll debut with four original stories, and then move to two new and two reprint stories each month thereafter (all of the non-fiction will be original).
Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on 1 January 2010. Writers’ guidelines are expected to be posted by 1 December 2009. They plan to pay five cents per word for fiction, one hundred dollars per article for non-fiction, and variable amounts for art.
Publisher Sean Wallace tells SFScope that the art currently showing on Lightspeed‘s web site (lightspeedmagazine.com) “are just placeholders, but when we’re closer to launching next year we’ll definitely start showing sneak peeks. Each monthly issue will feature one piece of artwork on the website, which will also serve a double-purpose as a cover for the ebook edition.”
We also asked Wallace about his plans for the business of Lightspeed, specifically, how it will earn its keep. Wallace said “The website will be free, but the hope is that the magazine should be making money by its third year, if not sooner, through multiple-revenue streams, including advertising, ebooks, merchandise, and more.”
John Joseph Adams is the editor of many anthologies, such as By Blood We Live, Federations, The Living Dead, and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. In addition to his editorial work, he is also currently a reviewer for Audible.com and a blogger for Tor.com. Adams is currently the Assistant Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but he’ll be leaving F&SF at the end of the year “to focus full-time on both editing anthologies, for a number of publishers, and editing Lightspeed Magazine.”
Andrea Kail is a graduate of the Dramatic Writing Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has spent the last two decades working from one end of New York’s television spectrum to the other: HBO, MTV, A&E, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, as well as thirteen years at NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Her novella, “The Sun God at Dawn, Rising from a Lotus Blossom”, was a first-place winner in the Writers of the Future contest and appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. XXIII. Since 2005, Andrea has also been writing lively film criticism for such venues as Paradox Magazine and CinemaSpy.
Prime Books, edited and published by Sean Wallace, is an independent publishing house specializing in a mix of anthologies, collections, novels, and magazines. Prime Books is the publisher of Fantasy Magazine, edited by Cat Rambo.