Issue 7 Retrospective & Journal Status

Issue 7 Retrospective

We are proud of how smoothly Issue 7 came about, and the high quality of the authors and cover art. Previous retrospectives have discussed our tribulations with acquiring work later in the submission window than we would prefer, leaving us scrambling at the final hour. This issue, we started out the gate with acceptances. We had a steady flow of them over the next four months, giving us plenty of room to enter production on our own terms and ensure every story was given multiple editing passes with the authors.

Content-wise, Issue 7 was our largest yet, nearly 10,000 words and twenty pages longer than our typical release. This was due to us publishing primarily 1.5-3k length works, only one flash fiction story, and publishing an additional story compared to our usual ten.

Our cover art for Issue 7 also raised the bar, and we are challenging ourselves to meet it going forward.

As an aside, it is always interesting to develop a unique relationship with each issue's cohort. Some issues have a large number of authors who continue to engage with us online and in our Discord community, bringing their energy, positivity, and opportunities to the rest of our community. Other issues we will never hear from many of the authors once the issue is live, as they are not online. We want to continue relishing in our authors' accomplishments after the publication date occurs, and like a proud parent, always hope they'll stick their heads back in one day.

During Issue 7's reading period, we were put on a number of reprint newsletters and received an above-average number of them. In the end, 19% of our issue was reprinted, which is a good ratio, we feel. As a non-paywalled journal, we enjoy being able to reprint renowned work that otherwise would either not come our way, or would be closed off to the public. We also enjoy being author-friendly and allowing them to get paid for previous work when most of the industry rejects it. The only drawback is that we cannot nominate reprinted work for awards on behalf of the author, and we wish we could.

Staffing and Playing Catch-Up

We felt we finally hit our stride with producing issues with Issue 7, but all journeys have bumps. The week following release, a number of Radon editors who have been on our team since Issues 1 and 2 went on hiatus. Additionally, a number of editors have had real-life events and tragedies occur that prevent them from devoting time to the journal, leaving us extraordinarily short-staffed.

Alecto has left to work on her own projects, Kelsey moved to indefinite hiatus, Saga to temporary hiatus, Sol on temporary hiatus, and Teague to only help out with cover production design.

Genre journal publishing is a rapid-fire endeavor with no breaks, little funding, and sheer grit and determination the main motivating factor for literary journals existing at all. Each year magazines come and go, the last few seeing so many (including Apparition Lit) hang in the towel. Please rest assured Radon is young, nimble, and hungry, with no end in sight.  

But individual editors will always burn out and need to rest. So at Radon, we encourage our editors to take breaks when needed, breathe, and come back for a future issue when they are mentally able.

To help fill our staffing need, we put a call out in May online and through CLMP's Jobs With Publishers, and have brought onto the team Lucas, Angie, Francis, and Mary. Each of them will receive a more detailed introduction when they are ready to have their bios public and their training completed. But we are excited to have them and the multitude of skills they bring.

Where We Are Now

June will be filled with our post-release content, onboarding our new editors, and catching up on our slush pile. About 150 submissions stretching back a month need to be addressed, and we are ramping up our fiction reading capabilities.

Our Issue 7 interview series just began and we expect it to run weekly for the next 2-3 months. We are also producing our author spotlight series highlighting the stories in our latest issue. For June we expect to do two a week, then later this summer slow down to one a week.

In July we will begin laying the groundwork for our print issue, scoping out IngramSpark, testing out file construction and distrbution, all the fun business tasks of running a publisher. We imagine that there will be a great deal of late nights as we create from scratch a production pipeline that includes print release and worldwide distribution. Speaking of, the anarchist distro Organise! Magazine in the UK is looking to distribute our Issue 8 release and beyond across the pond and bring our authors to many anarchist book fairs. More as it develops this summer.

Award Season Approaches

Award season is coming up quickly this Fall, and SFPA's poetry award season is already in full swing. Four Radon poems were nominated for the Rhysling Award, and three of them made it to the finals. Those three will be in this year's Rhysling Award Anthology and go on to vie for top honors in a membership vote that begins in July.

The poems are:

• "The Poet Responds to an Invitation from the AI on the Moon" by T.D. Walker (Short Poem Category)

• "The Day We All Died, a Little" by Lisa Timpf (Short Poem Category)

• "Chemical Rebalance For Young Cyborg Housewives" by Mahaila Smith (Short Poem Category)

• "Eight Dwarfs on Planet X" by Avra Margariti (Long Poem Category)

Additionally, Mary Soon Lee's poem "Downlift" was nominated and became a finalist for the SFPA's Dwarf Stars Award. Focusing on poems 10 lines and under, this award will also go to a membership vote this summer, and we wish Mary's poem luck.

This summer will be filled with hard work but the growth of the journal is exciting and we can't wait to get our issues into your physical hands. And once we get down producing print copies, who knows, maybe we can begin work on the fabled Radon anthology.