As part of their promotional campaign, Weird Tales has put my story, “Directions to Mourning’s Deep,” online for free. It also appears in issue 344. It’s very short, and quite unusual, so if you have a few moments, give it a shot. Of course, they’d prefer that you subscribe, but I know that’s not always an option for everyone.
Weird Tales Subscription Drive
I just received word from Weird Tales that my story, “Directions to Mourning’s Deep,” certainly one of the strangest and shortest stories I’ve written (only a couple of pages, and written in second person), is scheduled to appear in the April/May issue. They’ve done a major revamp of the magazine, and in honor of this, they’re doing a subscription drive in which you can get six issues (a full year) for a mere $12. A fantastic deal. If you like weird fiction, take advantage of it. Here’s a shot of the new cover:
Also, you may have noticed a few changes to the website. I decided that the old site needed a little revamp, and since my day job is working in instructional technology for a university, it was a good excuse to learn a little more about PHP, CSS, and other geekery, things I needed to learn anyway to help faculty and students. I wanted to better embed my blog on my site as well as take advantage of tools which allow me to have the same content appear on multiple pages without actually having to update that content on every page. I’m still by no means a professional web designer, and it’s still not exactly what I want, but I’m happy with the progress. Probably more small tweaks, as time allows.
Okay, I had to do it . . .
Apropos of yesterday’s post, I got bitten by the curiosity bug and had to do it. Here’s the word counts of the Harry Potter books (based on Scholastic’s published information):
I – 76,944
II – 85,141
III – 107,253
IV – 190,637
V -257,045
VI -168,923
Total: 885,943 words
If we assume that all monies related to the books (movies, toys, etc.) all directly flow from the books themselves (which we should, since none of those things would have happened without the books), then a billion dollars in income translates into the following word rate:
$1,000,000,000 / 885,943 words = $1128.74 per word
All I can say is . . . wow. Most writers would be happy with a word rate starting to the right of the decimal point.
So what’s the word rate on that?
For anyone who doesn’t think there’s any money in writing fiction, this just in: J.K. Rowling made the Forbes list of billionaires.
That’s right, a billion dollars, just from writing.