Radon Sneak Peek

Today we are giving you the exclusive chance to see our issue four cover art!

For this issue we have partnered with a known Swedish artist who we’ll unveil next month.

We will not be sharing this art with the world until around April 23rd and so we ask that you help us keep this under wraps for the time being.

Please see the attached art and then keep reading after for more news.

Team & Graphics & Socials

Our team has solidified at around seven editors working on Radon once we clock out of our day jobs in the broader publishing industry. Those range from university presses, scientific organizations, science journal publishers, bookstores, and libraries. We likely are in the market for one additional editor to round out the roster, but are only passively looking. The current team has achieved a wonderful level of efficiency and familiarity that has helped streamline processes up and down.

Speaking of, you likely have noticed our increased graphic output (and the large increase in quality). Our newest editor, Eden, deserves the majority of this thanks. In addition to our existing graphics for launch and author spotlights, we now make them for general marketing collateral and all author interviews. We hope these images help funnel eyes toward our authors in addition to helping us break into the Instagram sphere.

Though Twitter has been through rough times, we remain on the platform and use it as our main arena because the writing community has stayed. Though fragments have broken off, none of the touted replacements for Twitter have panned out. Mastodon is great for long-form tangents but the platform hasn’t quite found its footing. We tend to be more blatantly anarchist on Mastodon as we are on an anarchist server. Should any of you know of a publishing or reader-centric server that has opened, we would be interested in exploring the option.

Accessibility and Issue Reading

We heard feedback from our last issue that we have taken and wish to implement this year. For some, epubs are their preferred reading method. Since more people download our full issue PDFs than read individual pages, this is something we take seriously. We had hoped to have PDF and epub versions ready for issue 4. But simply put we haven’t been able to troubleshoot the conversion process well enough to be ready in time. With Aimer and Renee’s wedding alongside getting through the issue 1-3 author interviews hampering our free time, we plan to have it as an option sometime before issue 5.

Issue 4

The next issue currently has over twice as much prose accepted as poetry. We are hopeful the imbalance will shake itself out over the next month. We’re not beholden to a certain number of each form, so it’s all right if it’s slightly out of balance. But considering that fiction stories always eclipse poetry in readership, we want to ensure the poems arriving in issue four swing out in a big way. We maintain that Radon chooses poems slightly differently than other journals. While we do consider and value more traditional poetry construction, we ultimately want modern and accessible free verse poems with vivid imagery. The kind of poems that are accessible, that have emotional, narrative throughlines that can be understood without an MFA in Poetry. We want to make it so that people no longer say, “I don’t get poetry, so I avoid it.”

Wedding timeline

Aimer and Renee wed on May 6th, only around a week before issue four. Because they’ll be out of commission for a week or two, we hope to get a great deal of our editing come early in April so we can be ready with no delays. As our site has been future-proofed by Aimer over the last two issues, we hope the site update will be seamless.

Final Tidbits

For now we are focusing on finishing the Submittable pile (around 100 authors currently waiting for a decision) and locking in the last six acceptances for the issue.

Editing begins in April. Radon prides itself on a more robust editing process for our accepted authors. Word has spread and some authors we are now accepting have told us that they submitted to us for this very reason.

The Radon authors who were nominated for the Rhysling Award in the ‘Long Form Poem’ category should probably expect good news later this year. But you didn’t hear it from us.