What We're Up To

Today's post will be an exclusive and hodge-podge list of everything our journal is currently up to. 2024 has been a year of immense growth for us as we expanded our team multiple times, introduced first readers, launched our first print version, and more.

Two Newest Teammates

We searched through CLMP and found and successfully brought Myranda and Renee on as Marketing Editors. We are currently training and integrating them into the fold. We have made a push this past year to specalize our departments rather than having all editors stress themselves out doing everything all at once.

With their help, we'll get a handle on our current marketing endeavors and be able to branch out in 2025 to ideas we've wanted for a while, including guerilla sticker campaigns and tabling at select sci-fi conferences.

Issue 9 Reading

We are in the closing weeks of reading for January's Issue 9. Every year around the holidays the submissions decrease by a noticeable degree. Once award season dies down it is as if writers go into hibernation and don't emerge until March. For a journal publishing on January 15th, this proves tricky and leads to us spending the holidays glued to our submission queue rather than relaxing.

As we are striving to be proactive and move up our production efforts to ensure print arrives at the same time as online, and are hoping to secure our stories sooner rather than later. Currently, poetry is sitting wonderfully and nearly full, while fiction is less than half filled. This Issue has proven trickier than others this round in the fiction department, in that we have had to let go of one or two stories after discovering the authors had misrepresented their publication status and availability.

Award season

We make a point every year to spend as much time as we can nominating and supporting our authors. In 2024 alone we added three new yearly award nominations and have so far nominated over 50 stories and poems for awards and anthology collections.

On Friday we will announce publicly our final award of the year for Best Small Fiction nominations:

1) "Motor City" (Issue 8) by Jonathan Mann

2) "I'm Only Going to Do This Once" (Issue 6) by H. A. Eugene

3) "Maelstrom" (Issue 8) by Jay Caselberg

4) "FAQ List for Planetary Purification" (Issue 6) by Vivian Chou

5) "Softer Shades of Zap and Blue" (Issue 8) by Emma Burnett

Social Media

Bluesky is now our main social media platform, supplanting Twitter. The majority of the writing community is currently completing its transfer to Bluesky and we'd love to see you there on our profile here. Rest assured we will remain on Twitter to reach as many people as possible even while its proverbial ship is sinking, or until we get banned for promoting progressive literature that challenges the corporate status quo.

Revamping Print Edition for Issue 9

With Kallie joining the team in September as our dedicated Production Editor, we have had the time over these past months to revamp the graphic design of our print edition and also have begun making more improvements to our website.

A sneak-peak of our revamped print edition is in the photo above, with our main focus and changes centered around readability and moving the eye logically and smoothly across the page. We have also changed and updated our story sections and content warning page for the next edition, but we'll be sharing those sneak peeks in the coming weeks.

We have also given the first of two coats of paint to our Awards page on our website which you can check out now, and will be modernizing our About section over the coming month.

Poetry Nebula

Beginning with Issue 9, all speculative poems published in Radon will be eligible for a Nebula Award nomination. SFWA just announced that they are introducing a poetry award category for 2026 and eligibility begins January 2025. Since our inception, we have placed immense focus on science fiction poetry as an art form and are overjoyed that the discipline is getting its due. We hope this encourages more speculative poets to take up the pen and for the genre to soon receive as much critical acclaim as their fiction counterparts have received for the last 100 years.

Artist-in-Residence

In 2025 we will be looking to begin an Artist-in-Residance program. Rather than looking for a new artist for each Issue we would like to work with an artist over the course of a calendar year and three full Issues. This will allow us to better create custom cover and back art for our issues (paid each time of course) and additionally new art for our website. As our journal grows and requires more specific artwork we would like to more closely work with artists and give them the opportunity to get paid for multiple commissions. We want to better connect with the artistic world and enter into a working relationship that is mutually beneficial.

What Lies Ahead

December begins our busiest month where editorial will be reading, editing, developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading | Marketing begins tweaking our graphical templates and laying the foundations up for the issue launch marketing push and sending reviewer copies out now that we have print copies | Production springs alive with Indesign and HTML coding to prepare our print/epub/online Issue launch. Many moving pieces operate all at once and have to meet internal deadlines so that like a chef every part of the dish finishes cooking at the same time.

Thank you for your continued interest and passion in our journal. All that we do and all the effort we pour into Radon is to ensure we provide you with the most professional and high-quality experience possible.