Behind the Radon Curtain

Issue four's launch was decidedly our largest yet. We are catching chatter of the issue in a growing number of online corners, and everything we hear is positive. For a DIY effort with no money put into paid advertising and views coming solely from our own effort, the posts of our authors, and word of mouth, we are immensely pleased.

Radon AI Situation

AI submissions remain easily manageable for us. Unlike pro magazines such as Clarkesworld, we currently only receive 1-2 AI submissions a week. That means they are more humorous than a nuisance currently. The AI submissions have begun trying their hand at poetry, and they come out worse than their attempts at fiction. Nearly always AABB rhyme scheme and a constant repeating of the keywords they fed into the AI. For us, we get submitters who clearly put our four themes (anarchism, transhumanism, dystopia, science fiction) into a generator and simply pasted what it spit out. Often, they will submit four poems or flash fictions to us, each clearly utilizing one of the four keywords. The AI submitters will also have a one-word pen name, no listed Twitter account (or they put a fake Twitter profile), and most of all terrible cover letters. The biggest tip-off currently are the cover letters. Sometimes the submitter will try to make their submission prose a bit better, but always forgets to edit the cover letter. Most of them are addressed to "Hiring Mangers" and try to "join our organization as a team member." The bios the AI comes up with for these submitters are always equally absurd.

Clearer Submission guidelines

To get ahead of a future increase in AI submissions and cut down on the number of fantasy subs we receive, we're going to clarify our submission guidelines. Essentially this means adding an extra line specifying that though we are a speculative journal, we are not general spec fic. Our number one reason for rejection remains the story not being on theme or it being fantasy. We also receive a number of photography and odd-ball art submissions that are terribly low quality. It's become such a problem that we either need to get more specific with what digital art we accept, or heavily raise our art pay rate. Though until the Patreon grows to at least $100/month (only $13 away!) that may not be feasible.

Marketing

Twitter and Instagram remain our main avenues for social media. Our Instagram has grown steadily these past few months, as our resident graphic design expert, Eden, perfects the graphics for Radon. We are utilizing Instagram reels coupled with music to great effect and see new followers each day. Twitter remains more stagnant but still a net increase of engagement. Due to Elon, Twitter remains precarious and with less users overall, but writers and publishers remain on the site, and so we do too. Mastodon remains a sort of odd-ball out. We wanted to use it to create more long-form threads, but often don't find ourselves with the time. We are unsure what to do with Mastodon, truth be told. Newer social media platforms we've kept an ear out for have not panned out, and we don't see anything else viable to move to. This means our Discord community grows in importance as a central hub as the social media landscape grows harder for newer literary journals.

Issue 5

Our mid-September issue currently sits at four acceptances. We have 1 poem, 1 flash fiction, 1 short story, and 1 cover currently contracted. That puts us at 4/22 with plenty of room to grow.

Now is the perfect time if you are thinking of submitting. We have finished the marketing blitz for issue 4 and caught up to our slush pile. We prefer to accept pieces this far out as most of the time Radon likes to edit its accepted pieces and give our authors full developmental and copyediting services. Stories submitted now that hold great potential but need one more pass are much more likely to be accepted at this point in time than, say, August. The closer we get to publication we the more expect a submission to be perfect and not need any extra editing.

Please submit yourself or tell your writing friends to consider Radon as this is the optimal submission window.

We won't spoil the cover art for issue 5 yet, but we will give you a small clue. Our past covers have heavily utilized the colors blue and terracotta. Issue 5's cover holds . . . a great deal of green.