Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast, Episode 21. Today we’ll continue our series by asking what it takes to be a magazine editor in this day and age—particularly when your magazine has a message and a role to play in the world at large. We’ll discover the process that takes hold of your story from the moment you click the ‘submit’ button till the moment it’s published. And we’ll talk about the biggest challenges facing editors today.
Katrina Archer is an author of science fiction, fantasy, and romance. A former software engineer, she has worked in aerospace, video games, and film, and is the publisher of speculative climate fiction magazine Little Blue Marble. She can operate almost any vehicle that can’t fly, doesn’t believe in life without books or chocolate, and with her spouse puts up with the antics of a sweet potato and a chaos goblin masquerading as cats.
Story referenced in this episode: "You Are My Endling," by Julie Reeser at the Little Blue Marble Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/you-are-my-by-82622025 .
Katrina Archer can be found at @katrinaarcher.bsky.social; the magazine can be found at https://littlebluemarble.ca
"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov
Piano music for closure
Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:
www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3
Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social
www.edda-earth.com
Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast, Episode 21. Today we’ll continue our series by asking what it takes to be a magazine editor in this day and age—particularly when your magazine has a message and a role to play in the world at large. We’ll discover the process that takes hold of your story from the moment you click the ‘submit’ button till the moment it’s published. And we’ll talk about the biggest challenges facing editors today.
Katrina Archer is an author of science fiction, fantasy, and romance. A former software engineer, she has worked in aerospace, video games, and film, and is the publisher of speculative climate fiction magazine Little Blue Marble. She can operate almost any vehicle that can’t fly, doesn’t believe in life without books or chocolate, and with her spouse puts up with the antics of a sweet potato and a chaos goblin masquerading as cats.
Story referenced in this episode: "You Are My Endling," by Julie Reeser at the Little Blue Marble Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/you-are-my-by-82622025 .
Katrina Archer can be found at @katrinaarcher.bsky.social; the magazine can be found at https://littlebluemarble.ca
"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov
Piano music for closure
Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:
www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3
Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social
www.edda-earth.com
Deborah L. Davitt (00:01.36)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, a speculative fiction podcast episode 21. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll continue our series by asking what it takes to be a magazine editor in this day and age, particularly when your magazine has a message and a role to play in the world at large. We'll discover the process that takes hold of your story from the moment you click the submit button until the moment it's published. And we'll talk about the biggest challenges facing editors today. My guest this week is Katrina Archer.
Katrina Archer is an author of science fiction, fantasy, and romance. A former software engineer, she has worked in aerospace, video games, and film, and is the publisher of speculative climate fiction magazine, Little Blue Marvel. She can operate almost any vehicle that can't fly, doesn't believe in life without books or chocolate, and with her spouse puts up with the antics of a sweet potato and a chaos grimoire masquerading as cats.
Welcome Katrina, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast and to meet you at last.
Katrina Archer (00:59.146)
Thank you for having me, Deborah. This is great.
Deborah L. Davitt (01:03.376)
Awesome, awesome, awesome. All right, we're gonna start with the usual question that I ask editors, and we'll probably tweak this a little bit as we go along, because obviously Little Blue Marble is not a typical genre magazine, it is its own thing. So the typical question I start with is, what does the process look like from the moment a story is received to the moment it's published? Because that's different for different places. Do you have slushers in place? Do you just do it, do you read everything on your own? How does this work for you?
Katrina Archer (01:33.634)
So at Little Blue Marble, I am a one-woman show. I do not have slushers. I do everything from reading submissions to copy editing, all the editing, all the proofing, maintaining the website. It is literally just me. That is.
Deborah L. Davitt (01:51.632)
Holy cow.
Deborah L. Davitt (01:56.676)
This is a real labor of love, then.
Katrina Archer (01:58.914)
Yeah, and it's why I do not publish very frequently. Usually I do about two stories a month online, and recently I upgraded that to once a week until the end of the year. So that's been a little bit of a change and a lot of work. But yeah, it's literally just me, mostly because...
Deborah L. Davitt (02:06.997)
Mm-hmm, oh yeah.
Katrina Archer (02:22.65)
I don't have a lot of money to run the magazine. I pay the authors and I pay for my stock photography that goes to feature images for all the stories. But aside from that, I just don't have anything to pay anybody else and I kind of believe in paying other people. So I don't wanna bring people on if I can't actually pay them. So, yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (02:26.084)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (02:46.168)
Wow. So yeah, true labor of love here. I kind of know what that feels like because the podcast here is a one woman show and I do all of the editing, all of the uploading, all of the interviewing, all the cold calling. So yeah, it definitely becomes a little bit of an effort over time. All right. So somebody sends you their heartfelt story. And it falls into your hands. And how do you make decisions? Do you have like a grading system of like one to 10 most appropriate for Little Blue Marble, least appropriate for Little Blue Marble? How do you go about just trying to winnow the slush a little bit since it is a one woman show?
Katrina Archer (03:34.41)
Yeah, so I'm typically open for submissions for about six to eight months out of a year. I'll close and I'll open. Well, I don't receive that many submissions because our market is very niche. We publish exclusively speculative climate fiction and poetry and occasionally some, some essays, but
Deborah L. Davitt (03:50.986)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (03:55.178)
That means that there aren't that as many people writing those stories as there would be for say, you know, a Clarkesworld or one of the larger spec-fic outlets that publishes more general speculative fiction. So I'm very specifically looking for climate fiction and so I'll typically open in January and stay open until I fill all the year slots and I
Deborah L. Davitt (04:00.57)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (04:06.506)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (04:23.094)
I try to do that by July or August because in the fall I start prepping for our year-end anthology, which is where I take all the stories that have been published during the year and put them into an e-book and a print anthology to release at the end of the year. But to do that and to get that ready by the end of the year, I need to know exactly what I'm publishing all the way through till December. Right? So typically I will...
Deborah L. Davitt (04:23.49)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (04:32.247)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (04:43.236)
Yes.
Katrina Archer (04:51.934)
I have some very specific criteria, right? For acceptance. It has to be related to the climate crisis in some way. And sometimes that can be very tangential. You know, it doesn't necessarily need to be a story set on earth, but typically it is, and, uh, I'll be, I'll be looking for themes to attend to be slightly more hopeful or activist themes regarding the climate crisis.
Deborah L. Davitt (04:55.469)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (05:07.659)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (05:18.714)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (05:20.734)
I get a lot of apocalyptic dystopias, and I've been trying to move away from those as an editor because they're a little bit depressing.
Deborah L. Davitt (05:26.146)
Yes.
Deborah L. Davitt (05:34.584)
That was actually one of the big questions I had for you later, which is probably one of the biggest myths that's out there, is that climate fiction has to be a downer. But in many ways, it has, it's a literature of hope as well, because otherwise, why are we bothering to write? We may as well just resign ourselves to the future and do nothing. You have to have hope. You have to have a way forward.
Katrina Archer (05:57.475)
Yeah, so I get a lot of, I get a surprising, well maybe it's not that surprising, but I get a surprising number of sandy deserts in my submissions and sort of those would have to be, something about those stories would have to be very, very original for me to pick them at this point because I get so many of them, right? I'm usually looking for something a little bit different, something that offers a different perspective on solutions that we might have going forward.
Deborah L. Davitt (06:04.498)
Ahaha!
Deborah L. Davitt (06:15.498)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (06:24.833)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (06:26.082)
Um, something that might offer people, uh, different ways to think about the climate crisis. That that's the type of story I'm looking for. I'll, I'll do a lot of stuff that involves nature and wildlife as well. Um, and, and so you'll see a lot of that in, uh, the selections that I pick.
Deborah L. Davitt (06:33.368)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (06:40.364)
Yes.
Deborah L. Davitt (06:47.524)
I'm going to do a little shout out to Amelia Gorman, who is going to be on one of my climate fiction anthology episodes where I have multiple people coming in and her Elgin winning poetry collection has to do with the invasive species of Minnesota. So that would be right up your alley.
Katrina Archer (07:07.33)
Oh, yeah, interesting. And it's funny, because I didn't start out by publishing poetry, but people started submitting poetry. And I find in many ways, the poetry I receive on the climate crisis is very moving and powerful. So I started to, I don't publish very much of it. Because I don't consider myself very knowledgeable as an editor about poetry. In fact, I know almost
Deborah L. Davitt (07:23.277)
Mm.
Deborah L. Davitt (07:28.078)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (07:33.982)
I'm one of those people, you know when you see a painting, you like what you like, but you don't know very much about art. That's the way I kind of am with poetry. So I'll just sort of pick the poems that speak to me. Whereas...
Deborah L. Davitt (07:39.361)
Yes.
Deborah L. Davitt (07:44.76)
Well, that's a perfectly valid response. That's reader response theory right there.
Katrina Archer (07:49.058)
Yeah, yeah. And if your story makes me cry, I'll typically buy it. Because I have a soft spot for stories that really move you.
Deborah L. Davitt (08:00.408)
Yeah, yeah, most of the editors that I've spoken with so far, I've been saying if it moves them deeply, it's an almost instant buy. Because there's so many stories that are absolutely qualified stories. They're professionally written, they're smooth, they contain all the elements that you might need, but it has to move you. And if it doesn't do that . . . .
Katrina Archer (08:09.889)
Yep.
Katrina Archer (08:25.302)
Yeah, I'm also a sucker for a little bit of a satire or something with a little bit of bite to it as well. So yeah, I kind of like those as well.
Deborah L. Davitt (08:33.665)
Nice!
Deborah L. Davitt (08:37.615)
since I have not submitted much stuff your way, I'm making mental notes of what I could possibly write for you. All right, what happens if a story is absolutely great? It moves you and everything like that, but it doesn't fit with other stories that you have, or maybe it's too close to another story that you have coming out in the near future. Do you just move things around in the schedule to accommodate that, or is it, regretfully I had to pick one or the other?
Katrina Archer (08:59.714)
So.
Katrina Archer (09:07.11)
I haven't had that happen to me very often. What typically happens to me more often is that, like I'm a little bit, because I'm a one woman show, I'm a little bit slow reading the submission queue. And so sometimes a story that I really, really want gets snapped up elsewhere because I don't, because I have a long wait time, I don't require exclusive submissions, right?
Deborah L. Davitt (09:29.76)
I will tell you how much authors appreciate that, that courtesy, we really, really do.
Katrina Archer (09:35.466)
Yeah, but what that means is occasionally I lose out on a story that I would have really liked. So what I'll typically do when the author withdraws is I'll say, well, keep me in mind as a reprint. Because I do occasionally publish reprints, and because I'm on a budget, reprints aren't that bad for me, because the price for them is a little bit lower. And sometimes people enjoy that because
Deborah L. Davitt (09:40.374)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (09:48.961)
Nice.
Deborah L. Davitt (09:52.306)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (09:56.023)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (10:02.818)
they got accepted, say, to an anthology that's limited, you know, it's got limited availability, whereas I'm sort of online, and that's sort of a foundational tenet of the magazine that it is free to read for everybody because I want it to be educational, so, and available to people in countries that, you know, can't necessarily afford, you know, regular monthly magazine subscriptions. So every story that I print is
Deborah L. Davitt (10:07.128)
Yes.
Deborah L. Davitt (10:12.042)
Yeah, exactly.
Deborah L. Davitt (10:29.129)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (10:32.398)
free to read online, essentially.
Deborah L. Davitt (10:36.264)
One of the things that authors look for is how many people are going to read my story out of a venue. What do you do to promote the magazine and let people know that it's out there and available? And do you submit for major awards? Do you turn to social media? What do you do?
Katrina Archer (10:57.234)
Yeah, marketing is my Achilles heel. It's, it's, it's not something that I typically excel at. And if I, you know, if I found someone who, you know, wanted to volunteer as a marketing person for the magazine, I'd be like, yes, please help. But what I typically do is I'm on all the social media sites, you know, so I'll promote.
Deborah L. Davitt (11:00.908)
I think it's our all- I think it's everyone's.
Deborah L. Davitt (11:19.639)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (11:21.522)
Each story as it comes out on social media, I'll send all the links to the authors to try to get them to help as well. I do, you know, the awards posts. I will also sometimes occasionally submit to the Pushcart Prize. I'll submit to the best, you know, I'll submit to, you know, the best of science fiction or best of science fiction and fantasy anthologies as well. You know, I go to
Deborah L. Davitt (11:36.708)
That's a good one.
Deborah L. Davitt (11:45.269)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (11:49.926)
Worldcon and try to get, you know, engagements on panels and I'll be speaking about the magazine. And I've also done, I've also done author readings at Worldcon where I try to get, you know, some of the magazine's authors to do a group reading. Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (11:55.134)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (12:06.156)
that's nice. Yeah, some of us can't travel unfortunately so yeah.
Katrina Archer (12:11.687)
I know, but now that now half the conferences are online. So the last the last one I did and The last one I did was all online. So yeah
Deborah L. Davitt (12:15.888)
I know, that is an amazing thing.
Katrina Archer (12:24.75)
the last two or three I've done have been all online because I haven't traveled to World
Deborah L. Davitt (12:32.392)
Um, since you are a niche sort of venue, have you seen much of an uptick? Have, have, since, but, but since you are there, there are benefits to this because I would bet money that you have not had any AI submissions.
Katrina Archer (12:37.242)
extremely niche. Very, very niche.
Katrina Archer (12:52.33)
Uh, not as far as I can tell. No. Um, I have not seen anything that I would say is an actual AI submission. I think I am too small. They haven't found me yet. Um, I'm sure they will find me at some point, but, uh, but typically. Like I get, I get people who aren't even submitting AI submissions, who are just simply not submitting climate fiction. Um, and those are just like auto, auto reject, you know, so.
Deborah L. Davitt (13:04.385)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (13:18.336)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (13:20.706)
That's the type of thing where it's like, I can tell almost within a paragraph or two, whether it's a climate fiction story. And it's like, no, sorry, this is, you know, I'm not into, um, general spec fic, right? At least, sorry, I am as a reader, but I'm not as a publisher and editor for this particular venue.
Deborah L. Davitt (13:32.094)
Yeah, exactly.
Deborah L. Davitt (13:37.204)
Yes, exactly. I remember somebody telling me that they were doing the slushing for a major contest and they had been found by the contest submission guidelines had clearly been found by some paper mill out of India or something like that where people were submitting like resumes and things like that to the contest and they're sitting there going
This is not what we are. We don't know how to even convey to you that this isn't what we are. So everyone gets hit by it periodically. It's just a question of when and where. What's the biggest single issue facing you as an editor that makes it hard to operate a magazine?
Katrina Archer (14:20.098)
time. Basically just having the time to do the magazine. I mean, I started it when I was working part time in 2017 and then in 2018, I parted ways with my job and I went on a sort of three-year kind of sabbatical. And so I had tons of time during those three years to devote to the magazine.
Deborah L. Davitt (14:48.246)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (14:48.298)
But eventually life and the bills caught up with me and I had to go back to work in 2021. And since then, I mean, I still don't work five days a week. I work four days a week, but it's, I devote essentially a day a week to the magazine is, and sometimes weekends as well. And so that, you know, it's just.
getting the time to stay on top of the submissions and then also make sure that I've, you know, got all my stories ready in the queue and pipeline. I've edited them, I've proofed them, I've got the approvals of the authors, I've got them paid, all that kind of thing, just making sure that I have enough of that lead time. And I think I surprise some authors because I run the magazine very close to the bone in terms of deadlines, you know, sometimes the proof is coming out the week before publication. So it was usually a very quick turnaround.
Deborah L. Davitt (15:20.463)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (15:32.906)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (15:37.772)
Hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing. At least then we know exactly when it's going to come out as opposed to, well, we got edits, it was a year in advance and where is my story? When is it coming out? It's nice to have that fast, quick turnaround so that we know that we can get out there and start publicizing it and celebrating it and letting people know that this thing is coming and to go read it.
Katrina Archer (15:40.467)
Yeah, so I usually.
Deborah L. Davitt (16:06.528)
So it's not necessarily a bad thing to have that kind of turnaround. What is the biggest satisfaction you found in editing? What has made you stay editing this labor of love that you've been doing since, what, 2016? Did you say 2017?
Katrina Archer (16:20.206)
2017 yeah I started in June of June or July of 2017 so yeah
Deborah L. Davitt (16:26.508)
Yeah, that's at least six years. And that's a long time in this business to be around and stay around and stay stable. A lot of magazines open, close, and are gone in an eye blink. So what has kept you coming back for this? What is the satisfaction that makes you love this so?
Katrina Archer (16:47.894)
Well, I think it's, I don't know that it's a love. I mean, it is a love to a certain extent, but we're destroying the planet and people don't seem to be reacting to that. So this is sort of a reactionary move on my part to try to encourage people to have some empathy. I mean, I started the magazine because there's tons of really, really great.
Deborah L. Davitt (17:11.596)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (17:17.646)
climate journalism out there and I'm not a journalist. And so I'm not going to be able to do better than the people who are already writing articles and the scientists who are publishing and all that kind of thing. But I am a writer and I'm a software engineer by background and I can maintain a website and I've taken editing courses and I knew, well, maybe I should start a climate fiction magazine because fiction.
Deborah L. Davitt (17:29.127)
Mm-hmm.
Katrina Archer (17:46.606)
creates empathy in people where news articles don't necessarily. And so I, you know, I felt like the role of the magazine was to try to place people in the world of our futures, whether that's, um, you know, uh, a future where we've succeeded in solving the problem or a future where we haven't. So, uh, yeah. So, so part of that is just like, I feel like it's almost a necessity to maintain the magazine until we, you know, somehow we.
Deborah L. Davitt (17:51.437)
Yes.
Deborah L. Davitt (18:06.253)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (18:14.966)
get on top of the problem. I don't know that it's going to happen in my lifetime and I probably won't have the energy to maintain the magazine for the whole of my lifetime until we solve the problem. But I think it's just one of those things where I felt I needed to do it. But one of my favorite things that is unexpected about being an editor and the thing I always love is when an author tells me, oh, your magazine is the first place I've been published.
Deborah L. Davitt (18:44.368)
That's a lovely feeling, I bet.
Katrina Archer (18:47.386)
That just goes straight to my heart every time because I actually, I'm an independently published author. I have not been traditionally published myself. So to be able to give somebody their first professional publication because we pay the pro rates, that's just a really, really special feeling to me. I always get a kick out of that when somebody tells me, oh, this is my first publication.
Deborah L. Davitt (18:53.916)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (19:03.369)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (19:14.232)
What... let's see. I'm sure that all of your children are, you know, equally loved, but what is a favorite story of yours from this year?
Katrina Archer (19:25.738)
Uh, from this year, um, I probably would have to say, Julie Reesers, you are my endling, which, uh, my endling, like, yes, like ending, but with an L in there, endling. Um, and, and it's about, um, a couple of teenagers in the not so far future who, um,
Deborah L. Davitt (19:36.537)
You are my what?
Endling, okay.
Deborah L. Davitt (19:44.266)
Okay.
Katrina Archer (19:54.982)
are starting to do, they're morphing, they're having surgeries to morph their bodies into the features of species that have gone extinct. And so the last of a particular species is called an endling in this scenario. And it was a beautiful story and it's one of the ones this year that made me cry. So yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (20:07.869)
Oh wow.
Deborah L. Davitt (20:13.619)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (20:20.9)
Oh yeah, that sounds like it must have, yeah. Wow, I have to check that one out. If I went to your website, what month would that be? Just offhand, do you happen to remember?
Katrina Archer (20:33.325)
I think it was May or June, but you can do the website has a search function. So if you go there and you type in search, R-E-E-S-E-R, you should be able to find your name and it'll take you straight to the story.
Deborah L. Davitt (20:38.013)
Okay.
Deborah L. Davitt (20:45.163)
Okay.
Deborah L. Davitt (20:50.569)
Let's talk a little bit about this year-end anthology that you do. Is this something that you just do on Amazon or do you go wide with it?
Katrina Archer (21:00.126)
Uh, no, I go wide. I don't believe in being exclusive to Amazon, uh, for a variety of reasons. Um, but, uh, no, I have, uh, it is on Kindle, but I also publish, uh, generic EPUB three version that goes out on, uh, Apple books and, uh, Kobo books. And, uh, I think it goes out to Barnes and Noble and a whole bunch of other places via draft to digital, and then the print version is also available.
Deborah L. Davitt (21:04.833)
Okay.
Deborah L. Davitt (21:16.584)
Nice.
Katrina Archer (21:27.89)
on most bookstores. It's a print on demand, of course, but the print version you can get on most major online retailers as well. And I published the anthology sort of as a way I don't, because I don't charge for the magazine, I published the anthology kind of as a way to try to get people, if they want to contribute to the magazine in some way, they can buy the ebook or the print editions.
Deborah L. Davitt (21:53.909)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (21:58.994)
I'm sure that does help a little bit with the bills. Probably not a huge amount because I know what I make in self-publishing, but you know, it's better than nothing.
Katrina Archer (22:02.867)
No, no, the magazine runs at a loss. I view this, I view the money I spend on it as my contribution to the climate fight. But I do not make any money on this.
Deborah L. Davitt (22:14.356)
Okay.
Deborah L. Davitt (22:18.784)
No. People ask me about the podcast. So are you going to make any money on this? I'm saying they're going, no, probably not for a long time, if ever.
Katrina Archer (22:24.17)
I'm sorry.
Katrina Archer (22:28.638)
No, I would have to seriously rethink my business model in order to be able to make any money from this somehow. I do have a Patreon so people can join the Patreon. But that and I offer, you know, you can if you want to do like a one time payment on the website, like sometimes I get donations from, you know, from Stripe that people just like, oh, yeah, I'll toss a few bucks your way. That's always that's always appreciated as well. But, you know.
Deborah L. Davitt (22:38.477)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (22:56.952)
Well, when we get to the end of this interview, send me your Patreon, send me your social media links, send me all this stuff, and I'll make sure that it gets added to the episode, and so people can click on it and go there, perhaps.
Katrina Archer (23:08.29)
Sure. Will do.
Deborah L. Davitt (23:10.524)
All right. We're sort of racing through the questions, but this has been a great conversation so far. Do you have, do you personally have anything out recently or coming up that you'd like to talk about?
Katrina Archer (23:24.946)
I don't have anything completely recent, mostly because my day job in the last two years has kind of been all consuming. And so I've just been running the day job in the magazine. I have my most recent works are actually under my Saskia Lane pen name. There's some romance novellas. They're contemporary, they're contemporary romances. If you like them spicy.
Deborah L. Davitt (23:35.503)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (23:48.048)
Ooh!
Katrina Archer (23:54.71)
It's called the Layover Series and it's a little bit international travel based. So those are ones I enjoy and I've got a couple of things out on submission but they're not in the stage where I can really promote them for anybody. You know, I've got an urban fantasy that I really love that I'm hoping to see out there soon. I might indie publish it soon if it doesn't go anywhere traditionally.
Deborah L. Davitt (23:59.914)
Okay.
Deborah L. Davitt (24:09.484)
Yeah, that's the frustrating part.
Deborah L. Davitt (24:21.055)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (24:22.074)
And then I've got a contemporary romance, which is actually a climate fiction, kind of climate fiction romance. So I'm hoping I can, hopefully that one might have some legs too. So I'm about to dive back into some edits for that one and hope to get it out there to people soon.
Deborah L. Davitt (24:43.432)
Sort of swinging this back around to the editing and everything like that, but also talking about your career as an independent writer. How much has your career as an independent writer shaped how you are able to promote and edit and things like that? Because you have so much experience with going wide, which and with trying to promote your own work.
has that been something you've been able to successfully leverage or has the editing of the magazine and running the magazine actually back flowed the other direction and you've learned things through editing that has influenced your independent writing career?
Katrina Archer (25:26.23)
Um, I've learned, it's gone both ways. Um, you know, I, when I started indie publishing, for me, it was all about the mechanics of, you know, actually producing a book, um, and, you know, doing, doing the editing and getting a cover done, uh, you know, getting it, getting things proofed, uh, working.
Deborah L. Davitt (25:40.565)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (25:46.062)
Yeah.
Katrina Archer (25:50.27)
Working with an outside editor if necessary at the magazine I don't work with an outside editor because it's just me but I've worked with outside editors with my own personal book and I've worked with cover designers and that type of thing I Actually, you know, they're not great covers but I do my own covers for the for the anthology simply because it's a it's a it's a you know cost-saving measure, but But I've you know
Deborah L. Davitt (25:56.762)
Mm-hmm.
Deborah L. Davitt (26:02.561)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (26:10.51)
Yeah.
Deborah L. Davitt (26:14.373)
Oh, yes it is.
Katrina Archer (26:17.402)
learned a whole lot about some of the publishing tools out there and how to, you know, create an ebook and all that kind of stuff. So it's, it's been a back and forth. The marketing side of things and the promotion. I, you know, I've started newsletters on my personal writing side. I don't really have a newsletter on the magazine side, which I probably should get to at some point, but it's one of those things where you, you can.
Deborah L. Davitt (26:43.768)
that's time.
Katrina Archer (26:44.83)
You can have so many fronts open, right? Um, and so, uh, there's, there's only so many that you can handle, uh, updating. So yeah, between Patreon.
Deborah L. Davitt (26:47.605)
Yes.
Deborah L. Davitt (26:55.404)
I like to joke about myself is that I have so many irons in the fire that it's not even funny because I've got the poetry, I've got the writing of the novels, I've got the writing of the short stories, I've got the podcasts, I've got real life stuff that needs to also get done. So you sound like you've got many, many irons in multiple fires at this point in time. So yeah.
Katrina Archer (27:17.996)
Yeah, sometimes I wonder about my choices in life. But.
Deborah L. Davitt (27:23.028)
Don't we all?
Deborah L. Davitt (27:27.824)
All right, I don't have any further questions, but this has been a really insightful and lovely interview. I'd love to have you back on at some point in the future if you would like to be back on, so just let me know. And thank you so much for having been here. I've really appreciated having you on the podcast. Next week on Shining Moon, we're gonna be writing Cli-fi and environmental fiction with Renan Bernardo, Cecile Cristofari, and Susan Kaye Quinn. Thank you all for having been here, and we are out.