For the last seven years, I've operated Back
Alley Books as a print operation. Over the last year, the
company has run into some financial difficulties because of
excessive returns after our title Cordite Wine was nominated
for the Shamus Award last year. After the decision to cancel
our planned book of essays on hardboiled and noir private
eyes, we have been forced to reconsider our business
model.
After a lot of thought and consideration, Elaine and I
have decided to go digital. Back Alley Books is becoming Back
Alley Press, and we are going to publish a quarterly webzine
entitled (no surprise here) The Back Alley.
Our goal is to present five short stories in each
issue, along with a historical/analytical/commentary piece,
responses from readers, and a classic
(public domain) short story from the period before
1924.
I would like to invite any and all interested Rara Avis
members to participate in this new venture. It is a paying
gig, but not much. We will pay $15-$20 story, and our intent
is to submit all of our stories for the Edgar and
Derringer, and for the Shamus Awards if they feature a
private eye. Rava-Avians who would like to submit a
nonfiction piece illuminating the field of hardboiled and
noir literature would be especially welcome.
The fiction guidelines are pretty simple. Hardboiled
and noir, PI's welcome, up to 10,000 words. We'll definitely
consider longer, up to novella length
(22k or less), but we'd like to keep it under 10k. We
allow graphic violence, language, and all sorts of
political incorrectness. Sex is fine, as long as it moves the
plot along and is well-written. Nothing set more than
ten years in the future, or more than a hundred years in the
past. You get bonus points for including technology that
clearly sets the story in the 21st century, while maintaining
the classic PI ethos.
As for brass tacks, as I said, we're paying
$15-$20 a story at this time
- first periodical rights only, with the story being
archived, but you get the right to submit the story for
reprint rights elsewhere six months after publication. The
site is largely designed and ready to upload, and we intend
to publish the first issue by the end of summer. We will
offer a contract to selected stories, and pay on
acceptance.
I really hope some of my fellow Rara-Avis members will
be interested in being a part of this new publication. With
so many of the PI/hardboiled/noir webzines shutting down or
closing to submissions, I hope to be able to populate a
couple of issues relatively quickly this year - at least in
time to do some submissions to the major awards. If you have
a story lying around that you haven't sold, or even if it
needs a little polishing, please send it along. The nice
thing about this venture is that we can toss the whole thing
up onto the web in an hour or less, and it will be
immediately available for everyone to read, so we don't need
a lot of lead time compared with print magazines.
All submissions can be sent as email attachments.
Don't worry too much about formatting, but you would make my
job easier by saving your story as an .rtf document. Just
attach it to a nice email query telling me who you are, and
send it to
BarHallCom@aol.com
I look forward to reading any and all
submissions.
Take care-
R
Richard Helms Three-Time Shamus Award Nominee http://richardhelms.net
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