THE ICE PICK

Ralan’s Specfic & Humor Webstravaganza, www.ralan.com.

Ralan Conley performs a marvelous service for all of us in speculative fiction with this well-designed, award-winning website. Primarily a marketing tool, the site offers much more.

The pages load quickly, and the site deposits no cookies. The navigation bar on the side stays with you as you scroll down the home page, allowing you to access what you want easily.

On this website you will find Ralan’s showcase for his own fiction as well as his personal response time log for markets he submits to. You can use this time log to estimate how long it will be before you hear back on your own submissions.

But the heart of this site is in the market lists for adult and juvenile books, anthologies, magazines, and webzines, all of which he maintains and updates regularly.

He lists "Pro," "Paying," and "4theLuv" markets. "Pro" markets are those paying 3 cents or more a word. "Paying" markets pay up to 2.9 cents a word. And "4theLuv" markets pay only in copies or "exposure." The Humor section includes story, article, and greeting card markets, as well as contests.

In these sections, Ralan gives the latest news and highlights new markets. Deadlines and market notes, like "Dead market, DO NOT SUBMIT" or "no unsolicited subs" give you fair warning. And if you click on the name of a market, you will get that publisher’s guidelines. An alphabetical finder helps you locate known markets quickly.

Accessible through the markets pages, but not shown on the navigation bar, you will find lists of contests, dead markets, and abbreviations, plus information on proper manuscript format, etc. I would put a caveat on his recommendation to include your Social Security number on all your manuscripts. A victim of identity theft myself, I was warned that you should not do this unless specifically asked for it in the guidelines. If the publisher is going to pay you, they usually send a contract and ask for your number anyway.

In addition, Ralan includes links to: agents, articles, artists, associations, authors, beware, book stores, chat, contests, copyright, courses, dictionaries, editors, events, film/TV, fun, genre, grammar, groups, help, hired help, jobs, libraries, links, magazines, markets, names, newsletters, promotion, publishers/publishing, reference, resources, service, free software, songwriting, and writing for and by youth.

Do you need to design an alien planet? Try the "reference" links, where you will also find C.J. Cherryh’s list of words commonly used before 1900 (which comes to thirty-five printed pages) and www.bartleby.com, which contains links to the Columbia Encyclopedia and Gazeteer, American Heritage Dictionary and Book of English Usage, Roget’s Thesaurus, the King James Bible, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and Columbia World Quotations, the World Factbook, Strunk’s Elements of Style, Gray’s Anatomy, the Oxford Shakespeare, and much, much more.

If you want to start your own zine, try the "resource" section, which has links to all kinds of writing articles as well as links to groups like our own workshop.

The "service" section includes postal information.

The sheer volume of information here is overwhelming, and Ralan is to be very highly commended for providing all of this for us for free! You owe it to yourself to take a look at this fabulous website. (I like his little animated monster, too!)

{Published in the SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Jan. 2002.}