Gnew and Improved: Happy Gnew Year!

Whelp, it’s 2019 and the garden gnomes are happier than ever before. For one thing, we have a new and improved website. We hope you like our gnew look!

Along with our new face comes a renewed spirit. We’re totally looking forward to reading more speculative fiction this year. In fact, we’ve got submissions in the queue that are long overdue for a read. We’ll be getting to them soon.

Another thing we’ll be getting to soon is rolling out gnew publishing offerings for writers, and we’re looking at taking Garden Gnome Publications to a new level with integration on the Steemit platform. Also coming soon, we hope to integrate with another up-and-coming blockchain-based social media website that looks promising.

What Is Steemit?

In case you aren’t familiar, Steemit is a fairly new social media website. It’s been around for a couple of years now, but the difference between this social media site and your typical site like Facebook and Twitter is something called a blockchain.

Blockchain is the underlying technology. Without getting technical, Steemit has certain advantages to traditional social media sites that make it a worthy consideration for writers. These include:

• It’s decentralized, meaning there is no centralized authority that monitors what you post and censors it based on arbitrary values
• It rewards content creators and curators for their participation on the platform
• At present time, it’s ad-free
• Steemit has a strong community of participants who are very supportive of creative writers
• Ongoing contests, curation initiatives, and other Steemit culture distinctives make it an exciting place for creative writers
• A community of speculative fiction writers on Steemit is being formed as we speak.
• It’s an awesome place to meet other creative writers and share ideas, stories, and imagination outpourings

However, while Steemit is a great place to get creative and meet other creatives, as well as build a supportive following of fans and admirers, it does have some unique qualities that make it different than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and your favorite centralized social media site. We’ll cover some of these in a later blog post.

What’s Changing at GGP?

While we aren’t yet at liberty to discuss all of the changes taking place at Garden Gnome Publications, we do know there will be some awesome changes going forward. Some of these include:

• We will know longer pay for flim-flam bush stories and flash fiction pieces, however, we do intend to push those stories out to our Steemit blog to give writers a broader audience.
• We are also working on submission initiatives for Steemit bloggers that could increase content creation rewards for those authors.
• We plan to present speculative fiction writers on Steemit with contest opportunities that include prizes and rewards. If feasible, these could include non-Steemit spec-fic writers (but we’d really like you to join us on Steemit).
• We will soon be updating our submissions guidelines and publishing opportunities for writers.

While we’re excited about the new look and pending changes going forward, we also want to note that we expect this to be a slow movement toward perfection. In other words, changes may seem like they’re coming slowly, but we’re moving as fast as we can in light of the fact that we do have day jobs. We hope you understand.

Welcome to 2019. We hope you are ready to grow with us to the next stage of speculative development.

Tags: blockchain, fiction, publishing, social media, speculative fiction, Steemit, weird fiction