Jim Kelly on SH
Somehow I seem to have failed to mention that James Patrick "Jim" Kelly's most recent "On the Net" column in Asimov's spends a big chunk of its space talking about Strange Horizons. The column purports to be about Michael Swanwick, but is partly devoted to a discussion between me and Jim about online magazines in general and SH in particular. I was immensely pleased; Jim has consistently been tremendously supportive of us, both online and in person, and he says some very nice things in this column about us in general and about some of our authors in particular.
I'm a little disappointed about two things there, neither of them anything to do with Jim. First, the Asimov's site apparently likes to post Jim's columns one to two months before they appear in print; I suppose that helps keep them timely, but it does seem weird to me, and it caught us a bit by surprise (since we were expecting the spotlight not to hit us 'til February). Um, but that's not the disappointing thing; the disappointing thing is that for the first full month that the column was online, none of the URLs in it were active links. I wrote to their Webmaster twice asking them to add links to the URLs (as they've done for every other "On the Net" column they've posted) and got no response. Sometime in the past couple of weeks, they did finally add links to some of the URLs, including the SH one, but it's still disappointing; I suspect (with no real evidence) that people are significantly more likely to click a link than to copy a URL and paste it into their browser, so I suspect we could've picked up a little more traffic if those links had been live during the first month. But maybe not, I dunno.
My other disappointment is entirely the fault of my own unreasonable expectations. Last year, very close to the time that Jim's first mention of SH appeared in print, we had a mysterious spike in traffic. I guessed that that spike was due to Jim's column, and then managed to forget that that was just a guess. So I've been looking forward to this column appearing in the print Asimov's, expecting another spike. Well, the issue has started arriving in people's mailboxes, but so far no spike has materialized. It may be too early for that, or it may never happen. Oh, well; if nothing else, the writeup did make me and a bunch of our authors feel good, and that certainly counts for something.