As editors of this journal, we have thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the past year. We read hundreds of amazing stories, and published what we truly believed were the best twenty-seven among them. Sadly, those will be the last and only stories published under the Nine banner, as we have decided to close our doors.
The reasons are many, and ultimately personal. With this last issue, #3, we were able to turn a small profit and so fulfill our dream of paying our writers more than just their advances. We "earned out", to use the publishing phrase, but with that success came a deluge of submissions that began to show us our weaknesses: not enough staff, not enough time, and fatally, not enough commitment to put editing above our own writing and other creative endeavors. The slush pile grew, and in conversations that started as private then moved slowly to the editing table, we realized that between the three of us, there was no longer enough steam to keep this ship moving.
We would like to thank every submitting writer, every reader, and every well-wisher along the way. It was an incredibly fun and rewarding year for the three of us, and we hope that in our small part we added something to the ecosystem of online short fiction. If we did not, the fault is purely ours, because we were given the best raw materials, if such polished and professional stories could be called that. We worked with some of our favorite authors, and were introduced to new favorites that we will follow for years to come. Thank you for that. As of now, our submissions are officially closed and we will be contacting all authors with outstanding submissions immediately to release them. We apologize for those that we had for longer than some of you would have liked. This decision was not made easily or lightly.
Thanks again to all of you. We would not change a single detail of the past year, and will not look back on this as a failed attempt, but only as a short-term success that unfortunately could not last.
Sincerely,
The Editors of Nine