I am absolutely delighted to announce that starting today, Shimmer will pay $.05/word for fiction.
When we started Shimmer back in 2005, we paid five dollars per story. We said right from the beginning that someday, we’d pay pro rates. And now, thanks to the generosity of Art Director Emeritus Mary Robinette Kowal, we’re there.
Why? Ann Vandermeer took Weird Tales in a wonderful direction — and it always seemed to me to be a direction very much in alignment with Shimmer. The new publisher, however, is taking things in a very different direction. Even without publishing the overtly racist chapter of Victoria Foyt’s novel Save the Pearls, it’s pretty clear that Weird Tales is no longer interested in publishing the kind of beautiful, dark, and original fiction that I adore — and the vocal outrage from the entire speculative fiction community shows that we are not alone in loving these stories.
So Shimmer and Mary Robinette Kowal are taking a stand.
We’re saying: We love these stories.
We believe in these stories.
We believe in excellence.
Won’t you join us? Read our guidelines here, or subscribe.
That’s great! Congrats!
Good to know! After a long, long dry spell, I’m hoping to start submitting my work again — and Shimmer was already on my short list. 🙂
Awesome news for everyone; congrats to Shimmer!
Great news. Except now it’ll be even harder to get into Shimmer! 🙂
Do you guys have subscriptions available through Weightless Books? They are an ebook store that I use to subscribe to a bunch of spec fiction magazines. I like to keep my magazines organized and having them all at this site makes that easy for me….you might be able to increase your subscriptions by being available there.
Fantastic news! I’m delighted to see Shimmer grow in this way against the backdrop of such a mess.
Yay! I haven’t been writing much since I started college, but I’ve always intended to send something to Shimmer some day. Now I have another reason to do so. I’m going to subscribe tomorrow to make sure you guys can keep this wonderful little zine going on for many many more issues.
Hi Thaddeus! I don’t know if we have a subscription set up on Weightless yet, but you can buy individual issues! Here’s a link to Issue 15: http://weightlessbooks.com/genre/fiction/shimmer-magazine-issue-15/
Also, HI ALAN! 😀 (You are the Alan I think you are, right?)
Having just crawled out from under a mighty big rock in time to see a tweet about Shimmer’s pro-rates and the Weird Tales blow-up, I am a tad speechless.
My spec-fic critique group will applaud both your new rates and your stance. 🙂
And, because I’ve been taught the genteel art of closing with a compliment, I’d like to add that Shimmer’s “Clockwork Jungle” issue was one of the most outstanding magazines I’ve ever read (which is saying something because that includes many back issues of Scientific American).
Sophie: If you mean the Alan from the AW forums, yep, that’s probably me. 🙂 Nice to hear you’re still helping out with Shimmer in spite of your no doubt busy schedule.
Signed up for my digital subscription today. I’d go for the print version if I wasn’t already running out of shelf space for books and magazines at the ripe old age of almost-21. Eek! Good thing I have a Nook now as well as Adobe Digital Editions on my laptop.
Thank you for this positive response to the sad, disturbing news regarding WT and that novel. I recently crawled out from under a large-ish rock only to stumble upon the WT news and I wondered why I bother sometimes. Then I came across Shimmer’s response. Thank you for reminding me that we all can shine, and thank you for shining and shimmering yourselves.
This is fantastic news. Thank you for doing this, and may the other magazines wanting to achieve the same goal follow in Shimmer’s footsteps. Congrats!
Great news, congratulations! Shimmer is such a lovely mag.
And big thanks to Mary for getting another pro market out there. Wonderful.