It’s been an amazing year at the Kyanite Press. We discovered fantastic stories, picked up traction with retailers, and made many new friends along the way. The journal far exceeded any expectations we had regarding the incredible fiction within it and the support we’ve received from the writing and reading communities.

This year has also been a learning experience. As we reflect on what worked and what didn’t, we’ve come up with some great ideas for how to make next year even more exciting! With Issue 6 wrapping up and ready to come out this July, it’s time to start work on Volume 2 of the journal. We have been working behind-the-scenes for the last few months coming up with a plan with several goals in mind:

Quality: We want to ensure that enough time is devoted to each issue to make sure that everything from the selection process through final editing and formatting is executed as near to perfection as possible.
Value: They say that you “get what you pay for,” and we want to make sure we are living up to our end of that bargain. We want to pack each issue full of high-value content and ensure that the experience of reading the Kyanite Press is a premium experience.
Sustainability: The journal was a project born of the love of the art form, but until we unearth the city of gold, we need to make sure we can pay for the production costs.
Author Compensation: Nobody wants to work for free, and that includes authors. While we have always offered a cash prize for our featured story, we want to be able to compensate everybody who submits to us.

Those are all very important goals, and balancing those plus keeping the gears greased inside the machine has shaped up to be quite an endeavor! Volume 2 of the Kyanite Press is going to look a little different, and here’s the big things to note about the journal itself:

Quarterly Issues: This biggest change is that we are transitioning from a bi-monthly format to a quarterly format. There will now be an Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer issue. These will be released in November, February, May, and August. The first issue of Volume 2 will be in November 2019.
Larger Issues: We are increasing the target page count from 80-110 pages to a whopping 200-250 pages! We are shooting for our average word counts per issue to be 225% of what they were in Volume 1. This means that even with two less issues, we will have around 150% of the total content in the regular run!
Pricing Changes: As each issue will be larger, they will naturally cost more to produce. In the interest of balancing value with sustainability, we have set the price of the new issues at $24.85 in print and $14.85 for eBook versions. Savvy shoppers might note that these price increases are less than the content volume increase of each issue!

What does this mean for our authors? What do the goals of quality, value, sustainability, and – most importantly – author compensation, mean to you?

Submission and Production Cycles: One of the reasons for the transition to quarterly issues is to ensure ample time is provided for both our authors to submit to and for our staff to produce each issue. There will be a three-month submission window for each issue followed by a three-month production timeline. This is why the first issue is starting in November.
Author Copies: We will provide for each contributor a complimentary PDF copy of any issue they contribute to. There will still be an opportunity to order up to five print copies at a discount of 60% off the cover price plus shipping and handling.
Royalties: Yes, that’s right! All of the licensing agreements for contributions to the Kyanite Press starting in Volume 2 will include terms for royalties. Each issue will have a set royalty pool which is a percentage of our gross revenue, and this will be divided between the contributors with a pro-rata system based on the contributor’s word count percentage of the total issue’s word count. There will no longer be a feature story prize. Rather, everybody will get a fair share!

What about special issues and the annual anthology? We still hope to produce our Halloween Horror special this fall, and are batting around ideas for another Winter Digest in December. Both of these are on the discussion table at the moment, but their eventual fates are still to be determined. The annual anthology for Volume 1 is definitely being put together and hopefully will launch before the holiday season this year, and we plan to continue producing Kyanite Press Annual Anthologies every year!

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New to the Kyanite Press? Wondering what all the fuss is about? Be sure to visit the Kyanite Press homepage!

Interested in submitting a story for the Kyanite Press? Have you been biting your nails to the nub just waiting for this announcement? Head over to our submissions page to find out the details of submitting for Volume 2, Issue 1 of the Kyanite Press!