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Monday, March 20, 2006
Stats for Issue 11
Here are the stats for issue eleven:
 | Issue Ten (live from 12/15/05-3/14/06) 12/15-12/31: 25306 page views 1/1-1/31: 41947 page views 2/1-2/28: 40727 page views 3/1-3/14: 26664 page views Total Issue 11: 134644 page views |
Wow. That's a pretty serious spike. 15.75% jump in page views from issue ten.
If I may, I'd like to take a moment to address our wonderful guest editor of issue eleven: Well, Myfanwy, you said you're a sucker for data. And you gotta LOVE this data, girl. WOOHOOOOOO! You rock! posted by Dave Clapper at 4:34 PM 0 comments
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Announcing the Kathy Fish Fellowship
Announcing the Kathy Fish Fellowship
It seems that many awards in people's names are established posthumously. We're ecstatic that we can recognize Kathy Fish while she's still very much alive and kicking. As she steps down as our Fiction Editor, we at SmokeLong want to recognize Kathy's enormous contributions to the magazine and to the writing community as a whole. In particular, Kathy has always been a great champion of new writers and has exhibited an uncanny talent for finding previously unpublished writers whose work just shines.We want to foster that sort of commitment to new writers, and in that vein, we're creating the Kathy Fish Fellowship. All writers previously unpublished in SmokeLong Quarterly are eligible to apply. Following are the guidelines for application and the terms of the award itself:
Application Guidelines
1. Applications should be emailed to fellowship@smokelong.com.
2. Applications should include five samples of your flash fiction (stories of a thousand words or less). These samples may be unpublished or previously published in venues other than SmokeLong. We'll be reading these to get impressions of each applicant's writing. The writing samples should, as a whole, best reflect your ability, style(s), etc. Show us who you are as a writer through these samples.
3. Applications should include a few paragraphs (under a thousand words total) about what you hope to accomplish in the next year with your flash writing. Are there specific elements you want to improve? A larger story you want to tell through a series of flashes? Help us learn how we can help you realize your goals should you win this award.
4. Samples and paragraphs about goals, etc. should be included in the body of the email, rather than as attachments.
5. There is no application fee.
6. Application deadline is September 15, 2006.
Fellowship Awards
1. The winner of the 2007 Kathy Fish Fellowship will be considered a "writer in residence" at SmokeLong for each of the four issues to be published in 2007. Each issue will include one flash by the Fellowship winner.
2. The winner of the Fellowship will receive $500.00, to be paid as follows: $100.00 on announcement of the winner, and $100.00 upon publication of each of the four issues in 2007.
3. The winner will be announced December 15, 2006.
Again, this award is open to any writer not previously published in SmokeLong Quarterly. It is not restricted to writing program students (as we are all, in some way, students of writing), although we will certainly be distributing this announcement to various writing programs. We also encourage teachers of writing to pass this announcement along to their students.
We're looking forward to reading your applications, and we want to once again extend our deepest gratitude to Kathy for all she's done for SmokeLong and for writers of flash fiction. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Kath. posted by Dave Clapper at 4:35 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Issue 12 Is Live
Besides great writing from Gary Cadwallader, Myfanwy Collins, Sarah Leavitt, Robert Lopez, Antonios Maltezos, Mary Miller, Tristan Moss, Chivas Sandage, Tom Saunders, Paul Silverman, Andrew Tibbetts, Ania Vesenny, Joseph Young, and Jamie Zerndt, there's an announcement that should be of interest to writers we've not yet had the pleasure to publish. Go! Read!SmokeLong Quarterly posted by Dave Clapper at 4:36 PM 0 comments
Friday, March 10, 2006
Storyglossia
Meant to post about this a while ago, but spaced. Storyglossia has had some nice things to say about a couple of SLQ pieces recently: Pornography and Axl Rose Is My Dog. And he frequently has much to say about lots of good reads. So go check it out. Nice blog. posted by Dave Clapper at 4:37 PM 0 comments
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Top Ten Page Views for February
Taking a little break from some freelance editing work. Randall Brown conducted some workshops at a conference for high school writers in Texas recently, and asked me for some information about how many people read SmokeLong as compared to how many people read print mags. I put together the five most viewed stories for each of the past several months. Found it pretty interesting, so I'm going to continue doing something similar each month, mostly for my own perusal. Will be interesting to see if any obvious patterns emerge over time, and perhaps this'll help us better understand what people want to read and how we can better promote some stories that may not be getting as many reads.
Anyway, ten stories with the most views in February are:
1. Pornography by Steve Almond (Issue Nine)
2. Forks in the Road by Eve Abrams (Issue Eleven)
3. Retirement Home by Greg Ames (Issue Eleven)
4. No One Left to Care About the Fat Man by Rusty Barnes (Issue Eleven)
5. Five Fat Men in a Hot Tub by Jeff Landon (Issue Ten)
6. A Drop of Dew by Edgar Omar Avilés, translated by Toshiya A. Kamei (Issue Eleven)
7. Ice by Joseph Young (Issue Eleven)
8. The Mother’s Guide to Flight Patterns by Theresa Boyar (Issue Eleven)
9. Song of Giants by Girija Tropp (Issue Eleven)
10. Flights by Jim Tomlinson (Issue Eleven)
A few things I'll note here, because it's easy to make assumptions:
1. Steve Almond's story was published on June 15. Jeff Landon's was published September 15. All of the others were from the issue published December 15. The fact that two of the top five are older stories attests to the power of archives, something that print magazines don't really have the capacity to exploit.
2. One might think Steve Almond's story is up there because... well, because it's by Steve Almond. Interestingly, though, that story was out of the top 5 a few times since it was first published. Also, his other story, "The Evening of the Dock," is not ranked. And Stuart Dybek's "Brisket" similarly dominated the number one spot for a while, but has since fallen out. I wouldn't be surprised to see it come back, though, as "Pornography" has had similar fluctuations.
3. One might think Steve's story gets such big hits because of its title. When Googling for that title, though, it doesn't appear anywhere near the top of the search listings (surprise, surprise). There are also several other stories with similarly provocative titles that haven't seen this sort of -ahem- exposure.
4. Steve's story has absolutely dominated for the past three months, each time outpacing the second most viewed story by about a 4:1 ratio. But, as I mentioned, it wasn't even in the top 5 at all for a few months. So what happened? Good question. I've found recent links specifically to that story on blogs, etc., but no such links going back as far as the spike in hits for Steve began. Go figure.
All of that said, one final point that I mentioned to Randall: based on the numbers of hits that stories get on SLQ, it's more likely that a specific story on any given day will be read by at least one person than that it won't. And that includes everything we've ever published, going all the way back to issue one. Pretty freaking cool, and not something that most print magazines can claim, I'd guess. The power of the internet to put literature in front of a lot of people on a long-term basis is amazing. posted by Dave Clapper at 4:38 PM 0 comments
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