An Unapocalyptic Year
Thanks for joining me on this ride
My first Unapocalyptic post came out exactly a year ago today. Since then the newsletter has grown quickly in subscribers and scope; it probably helps that I’ve dropped 74 articles in that time, plus a couple of stories. It’s been both a constant struggle, to maintain original content and provide some modicum of quality, and a joy to do the writing.
The secret reason for this newsletter is that it motivates me to sit down every day and work on producing coherent words, for fear of losing your interest and patronage. It’s a cunning ploy, in other words, designed to make me more productive. Thanks to you, it’s working.
Just within Unapocalyptic, we’ve played with design futures such as the Single Family Space Colony, critiqued current science fiction and technocratic thinking, reenvisioned the computer desktop, and you’ve gotten exclusive access to an entire new novel by me. And outside of that?
A while back I forked this site into three sections: Unapocalyptic, Stories & Readings, and Foresight. You can subscribe to all of them or the ones that interest you. Meanwhile, the test shot of The Fallow Orbits and the short story “Forbidden Life” have taught me some valuable lessons about self-publishing online. I want to create an ebook version of The Fallow Orbits and build a catalog of fun and useful publications that you can easily find and buy from here and my site. This, in addition to continuing to put out works through the traditional publishing industry.
This is the so-called “hybrid approach” to publishing. Even ten years ago it would have been seen as disreputable to self-publish at all; now, everybody’s doing it and in some ways, it’s easier than working through the industry. To succeed with this model, you have to be A) productive, B) good, and C) business savvy. I aspire to being two of those things; in any case, there’s a long period of brand-building that’s necessary for such a strategy to pay off. I’ve been using a simple philosophy for that: quality content, every week. Content, content, content, because that’s what I believe people want, particularly from providers such as Substack.
To help with this, I’ve been working on a new website. It’s not very polished right now, because I don’t have the art and design chops to make it snazzy, can’t afford to pay artists or designers, and refuse to use AI art except in exceptional circumstances. My old site is still up, at www.kschroeder.com, but not for long—it is loaded with material, from reviews to dozens of blog posts, conference and signing schedules, personal observations, and bumpf about my books and stories. Somehow, I have to transfer all of that over to a new platform. It’s coming along slowly, but it is coming along. My plan is to integrate that site and this newsletter into one flexible publishing platform.
So that’s what I’ll be providing in the upcoming year. I hope to keep building my audience by being good. Meanwhile, I continue laying down the planks that will support a true hybrid publishing venture. Expect more integrations, such as the website, as well as much more fiction. And the ‘unapocalyptic’ theme isn’t just there to provide you with a weekly boost of optimism. I really am going somewhere with all of this. This past year of posts have triangulated on a set of practices and topics, and I’ll be bringing those threads together into an approach to the future that I hope you can actually act on.
You can help by continuing to Like, share, and comment on my posts—and of course, tell your friends. This is the growth phase, but it’s not growth for growth’s sake. Help me build the brand and build out my version of the hybrid publishing model. I have a lot of stories in me, waiting to get out. I want the next few years to be the most productive of my life.
So, thanks! And please, tell me how I’m doing in the comments, and what you think I should be focusing on next. Let me know if you’ve got expertise or know somebody who’s already successful with this model, and together we’ll see if we can push back the darkness, and have some fun on the way.
—K