Lightspeed, Year OneFrom Prime Books:

Prime Books is pleased to announce the sale and transfer of ownership of their acclaimed online magazines Lightspeed and Fantasy to John Joseph Adams. Adams, the current editor of both magazines, will officially assume the role of publisher starting with the January 2012 issues.

“With the continuing expansion and success of Prime Books, my attention and time is increasingly consumed by book publishing,” publisher Sean Wallace said. “With John already doing a terrific job as editor, it simply made sense for him to take over as publisher as well. We’re really thrilled that this has worked out for both John and Prime.”

New publisher John Joseph Adams says he is delighted at the prospect of taking over the magazines and looks forward to the challenges ahead. “It’s an exciting time to be involved in publishing,” he said. “Models are changing and so is the readership, and online magazines have a better shot at sustainability than ever have before. I believe the possibilities for growth are tremendous, and I look forward to staying in the vanguard of this new frontier.”

Fantasy Magazine was established in 2005, and has been edited by Sean Wallace, Paul Tremblay, and Cat Rambo, with Adams taking over as sole editor earlier this year. Lightspeed—published by Wallace and edited by Adams—debuted in June 2010 and was a 2011 Hugo Award nominee. Numerous stories originally published in Lightspeed and Fantasy have been reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies, and Lightspeed and Fantasy stories have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and others. Lightspeed’s first year of fiction has just been published by Prime Books in the print anthology Lightspeed: Year One.

I’m very happy about this. Not that Prime was handling the online magazine’s poorly (quite the opposite, actually), but Adams is one of my favourite editors and professionals in the genre, he has wonderful ideas on how to market and present short fiction and his turn around on stories is absolutely tremendous. It will be interesting to see how Adams turns the magazines into self-sustaining entities (without Prime’s money as a backing, as little or as much as that might have been). Either way, they’re two of the best short fiction markets out there and they’re even more firmly in the talented hands of Adams who has been their editor for some time now.

In addition to this news, Andrew Liptak, a good friend of this blog, has been named Editorial Assistant at Lightspeed. Congrats, Andrew!

You can read Fantasy and Lightspeed entirely for free.

Discussion
  • Ben Godby November 8, 2011 at 6:24 am

    That actually seems really weird. The editor is just going to foot the bill, eh? And everyone’s happy? At least with Prime-qua-publisher losing money on an e-zine, it seemed like a loss leader; but a private individual cranking out two whole ‘zines for shits and giggles? Not that I’m upset Adams will be running the magazines: they’re fantastic, and he does a great job. But this smells like (financial) trouble…

  • Sean Wallace November 8, 2011 at 1:17 pm

    Well, LIGHTSPEED wasn’t exactly a loss-leader at all . . . it’d already broken-even last year :p