One thing I've noticed is that most RW media outlets don't actually care about RW media that they themselves are not directly connected with or producing. There's little to no coverage, journalistic or otherwise, of the broader field.
Our local rag covered our reprinting of the Cosmic Courtship and the other works of Julian Hawthorne, but I don't think any other major outlet reached out or responded to our solicits. arkansasonline.com/news/2021/may/…
We made news when we found and republished a previously believed lost Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan fragment, completed by one of our regular contributors.
We're at a point where RW culture media outlets should be keeping tabs on what we're up to, even just an eye, but they don't.
In the first few years, yeah, as an unknown and unproven entity, begging hat-in-hand for any sort of coverage makes sense, but after a decade and a proven track record, it's more that RW culture/media journalists are incurious and prefer outrage bait anyway.
I know it comes across as being bitter, but it's more that I'm flabbergasted that RW c/m journos don't care/are unaware of a publisher who:
>was a Hugo Finalist
>published a lost Tarzan story
>published near-lost works of Julian Hawthorne
>has stayed in business for 10+ years
Anyway, our 31st Successful Kickstarter is ending in about 30 minutes.
So, something I've talked about in the past is the continual downward pressure on the market value of written fiction and the limited things we've done to do our part in combatting it...
There is a TON of written fiction out there, and the body of written fiction is growing at an unfathomable rate as new authors continue to add to it.
The actual readership probably does not grow at any remotely corresponding rate to the body of written fiction, and even avid readers have limited budgets and limited bandwidth.
One of Cirsova's goals was always to "regress harder." Not in the "we're not woke" sense, but people on the right always wanted to retvrn but to yesterday, when things were only a little less bad. Cirsova emerged as a reaction to the Sad Puppies and Brad Torgersen's Nutty Nuggets
"Where were the nuggets, Brad?" For all of the rah-rah, the Sad Puppies slates displayed a lack of the extremely sexist and racist tropes their enemies accused them of indulging in: Where were the strongjawed chads saving scantily clad space princesses from spear-chucking aliens?
Cirsova's original goal was to move the starting line back to old [actually middle-to late] pulp era, the 1920s-1940s, particularly indulging in the kind of storytelling found in Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, and, obviously, Weird Tales.
Okay, so, a big part of the problem isn't so much that the big stores don't have the stuff [they often do], it's that there's a disconnect between how they organize their books and where people think the books should be+various surprises [like popular authors being out of print]
Big book stores don't have a general fiction section; they break up things along whatever lines the publishers tell them, even if it makes books harder to find. Recently, I tried to pick up some Dick Francis books for my mom. Is he in fiction? Mystery? Thriller & Suspense? No...
Dragonlance is trending because people are saying "we must retvrn (to the thing that sent D&D down this road in the first place)"
Look, I get it. I, too, loved the Dragonlance books when I was a little kid, but the modules sent the game down a very rigid story-driven path while the books and setting itself stripped out almost all of the weird kitchen-sink elements that were baked into 1e.
The result was worse gaming and a far blander fantasy genre in general due to its overwhelming popularity and influence.