If you’d like to support my various projects—thank you! Needless to say, I can’t do the work I do without readers like you, and any support readers throw my way is always greatly appreciated. Here’s a few ways for you to support my editorial endeavors.
Support Me on Patreon or Drip
If you’re a reader who enjoys the free online versions of Lightspeed or Nightmare—and you’d like to show your appreciation for what we do by offering making a financial contribution—we’ve now setup Patreon and Drip pages that make it easy for readers to chip in some support on a monthly basis. You can pledge anywhere from $1-$5 on either platform (and on Patreon you can go above that amount too, if so inclined). Being a supporter on Patreon or Drip is also ideal if you’re just a fan of my work and want to send a little extra support my way.
Subscribe to Lightspeed and/or Nightmare
Although we offer Lightspeed and Nightmare online for free, we also publish an ebook edition on the 1st of every month. The ebook editions allow you to get all the content that appears in our online editions (plus some bonus content) in convenient ebook format, plus you get the whole issue on the 1st of the month, whereas online you have to wait for the stories to be rolled out week by week.
- Subscribe to Lightspeed ($35.88 per year, or $2.99 a month)
- Subscribe to Nightmare ($23.88 per year, or $1.99 a month)
Buy Books/Magazines I Edited
This seems obvious, but it’s worth stating: This is the number one best thing you can do to support me as an editor. Although I will only see a small percentage of whatever you spend on a book, I have publishers who pay me to edit novels and anthologies, and so it’s important for them to see me as a worthwhile investment. As for where best to buy them? Anywhere! Really, just buy from wherever you find most convenient.
Leave Customer Reviews
One of the best things you can do for an author—or in my case, an editor—is leave a customer review for their work. Amazon and Goodreads are the two places it makes the most impact, but of course anywhere where potential readers might see such reviews is appreciated, and on Amazon, supposedly there are algorithms that do good things for a book that kick in once a book reaches certain review thresholds, like 50+ reviews, so if you love a book, please say so! And don’t feel too much pressure to be very thorough or the like; if you loved a book and really just want to give it five stars, it’s totally okay to give a pretty general, enthusiastic one-sentence “review” that sums up what you thought.
Talk About the Fiction You Love
If you love a thing, talk about it! Express your love on social media, tell a friend. This is extremely valuable for all fiction, but perhaps especially so for short stories, since short stories don’t normally get any kind of specific publicity or marketing assistance (beyond whatever the publication they’re part of gets)—so to make a short story really resonate with the largest group of readers possible, it really does require that people who were blown away by it to say so, loudly and frequently. Which is not to say novels don’t sometimes badly need that too! Sometimes great novels just don’t manage to find their audience, and then really, really need the voices of passionate fans to speak up and sing their praises.
Ask About Books I Edited at the Library or the Bookstore
If you go into a library or bookstore and don’t find the book I edited you were looking for—ask about it! If booksellers or librarians get enough requests for certain books, they might end up ordering additional copies for sale or lending—and of course sometimes it might be that the bookstore or library didn’t have the book at all in the first place, so it’s important to let staff know if you went in looking for something and couldn’t find it.