Seemingly no sooner had I heard that Realms of Fantasy was going out of business again, and read the farewell messages from the publisher and the editors (here and here), than like a phoenix RoF has risen again, er, again.
Word came last week that Realms of Fantasy Magazine has been sold to Damnation Books LLC. Damnation Books LLC publishes dark fiction as Damnation Books. They also own and operate Eternal Press, which does romance and mainstream fiction.
The press release indicated that the December 2010 issue will go to print with the new ownership publishing the February 2011 issue. All subscriptions already paid for will be honored.
Future plans include expanding digital editions for ebook and desktop readers. The April 2011 issue will be themed ‘dark fantasy’ to coincide with World Horror Convention 2011 where Damnation Books will be hosting a party, and a booth in the dealer’s area.
The June 2011 issue is the 100th issue of Realms of Fantasy Magazine. Plans for a larger ‘birthday bash’ issue are already in place to celebrate this milestone.
Yay!
Posted below is a re-post of an all-call from Douglas Cohen, a RoF editor, for help in tracking down authors of submissions to RoF that were sitting with the fiction editor Shawna McCarthy when RoF closed up. If you’re in that category (as I am) be sure to email and let them know how you’d like your story handled.
– S.
ROF: Fiction: Help Me Internets!
by Editor Douglas Cohen on November 11, 2010
Hi Everyone,
I’m about to ask for your help with something. As I noted when I announced that Shawna and I would be coming back, there are a number of submissions that were in various states of consideration when the magazine announced its closure. The only right thing to do was release these manuscripts from consideration. Now, the manuscripts I had that were going to be passed along to Shawna were discarded. In the interests of goodwill, I’ve subsequently contacted all of these authors and invited them to resubmit their manuscripts to me via email if they’re so inclined. (PLEASE NOTE: this is a special exception made just for them under the circumstances–we’re still at this time just accepting submissions via snail mail).
However, there are also quite a number of submissions that are sitting with Shawna, enough that I thought it would be a good idea to post this note. Here’s the thing: Shawna is going to have a lot of reading ahead of her as we build the magazine’s fiction inventory back up. Since I don’t have the manuscripts, it would drive me rather insane to hunt down all of the email addresses to all of the authors who have stories with Shawna. And it would be rather time consuming for Shawna to email all of these people to see if they’d like their manuscripts to still be considered. Then she’d also still have to wait to hear back, which eats up more time. I’d rather Shawna be able to use this time to read stories as we get the magazine caught up. Some folks have already told me they still want their stories to be considered. But I’d like to hear from the rest of you. If you had a story that was with Shawna and would still like it to be considered, please email me (slushmaster@gmail.com) and tell me the name of your story. It will save Shawna the trouble of reading a story that has since been withdrawn. It also wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let me know you’re officially withdrawing your story or that you’ve already sold it elsewhere.
So here’s where you come in, Internets. Blog about this. Tweet about this. Facebook about this. Help us out. As Picard would say, “Make it so.”
Thanks all.
ETA: Please don’t contact me regarding general slush submissions. Not that those stories aren’t important, but it will just create too much confusion. We’ll figure this out a little later, thanks.
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