Our very own William Ledbetter is administering a new science fiction short story contest jointly sponsored by Jim Baen’s Universe and the National Space Society. It’s called the “James Patrick Baen Memorial Writing Contest.” The winner will be published in Baen’s Universe at pro rates (their lowest rate is .06/word), so this is a worthwhile effort.

Details can be found at Bill’s website, here:

http://www.williamledbetter.com/contest.htm

Check it out and here’s wishing good luck to all who enter!

I put some Yahoo content-sensitive ads on the site.  Why?  We’re hoping to generate a bit of income, and plan to use all of it (if there is any) for paying our writers.

Until this point, you see, we’ve been paying authors out of our pockets.  It will no doubt remain this way for the time being, because it takes time to built up income from these ads.  Our hope is to fine tune the context matching so that the ads that show up here will be of genuine interest to our readers, and thus be of use to them.  They click and learn (or find) something they can use, the company that placed the ad gets business, and we get a percentage of the revenue for the click.  Everyone wins.

At least, that’s the theory.

So did we sell out?  I don’t think so.  We’re just trying to get more money to pay for more stories.