The Morning After: Poised for Lift-Off

by Don Webb

Issue 53 officially launches Bewildering Stories’ second year of publication. We’ve come a ways in the first year, especially in our visual presentation. Now we have plans for our second year:

Our new “welcome mat” feature will hopefully make new contributors feel at home. If anyone — new contributor or old — sends us a small bio, we’ll print it in the following issue and add it to our freshly-updated Bewildering Bios.

We want all our contributors to feel free to send us letters, editorials, articles and reviews as well as stories and poems.

New contributions are encouraging; they indicate that Bewildering Stories is gradually becoming known on the Internet. We have taken some steps to gain prominence, for example:

Exchanging links with various websites;
Using keywords and, especially, author names in our files’ meta tags;
Adding a “Home Page” button on every page. This is a new project and will require working backwards through the issues to date. The button will make Bewildering Stories much more accessible to Net-indexing robots (“spiders”) as well as to visitors coming in through the “side door,” i.e. from a search engine such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo or All the Web.

Spud’s index of issues 1-25 has now been upgraded with alphabetical anchors for easier browsing. The work needs to be continued, but we are not going to wait to compile an index of issues 26-50. Rather, we will soon have a second index in a format that will differ from the first in detail but not in substance. We will be able to extend the second index efficiently and systematically.

Finally, dare I say the dread “A-word”? Yes, advertising. But please hold the dismay: it would be tastefully done, of course. Our idea is to approach booksellers. Not only the biggest but also smaller presses. There may not even be any money in it for us and our contributors at first, but it seems reasonable to ask for an “exchange of links” to start with. As these links increase our readership, we’ll be in a position to think even bigger.

In short, we’re taking things one step at a time. I’m sure Hari Seldon would approve. Today, Bewildering Stories; next week, galactic empire!

Don Webb