1500 And Counting… Help Us Keep Going!
Wow. 1500.
After posting the new episode of Comic Con Carne: Silver Screen Edition here on the site, I was looking at the various articles still in the works and noticed I’d just posted item number 1500. That’s quite a milestone. And it sneaked up on me.
With this new episode comes some changes in the show — new graphics and a new host in Brie Henderson — and there are days when I think we can do no wrong, because the volunteers here at SciFi4Me are very talented people. They bring both skills and passion to the table. Yes, some more than others, but that’s more a result of everyone having real lives and real jobs outside of this operation.
Of course, our success comes after uphill climbs, countless hours of sharing links and posting on social media, and now we have a new tool in our newsletter, which I’m hoping you’ll take because we want to make sure you know everything that’s going on across all our platforms — YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest — so you can stay informed. Because some of you are only connected to us through one or two of those channels, not all of them. And we’d like you to get everything.
And maybe share us with a friend or two.
Because you are our lifeblood. We don’t grow without people telling other people about us. We can do the heavy lifting — the writing, the video production, the posting — but without someone to watch or read, it’s all for naught.
Ideally, I’d love for us to get a million subscribers overnight and keep them coming back to our site every day forever, but I know it takes a little effort a little bit at a time. It’s like eating an elephant. And we’ve been growing steadily over the last three years since we setup SciFi4Me 2.0 on WordPress. But we’ve got some really cool projects coming up that I’d love for everyone to know about. And for that, I need our regular readers to be our ambassadors.
One of those projects is The Cosplay Diaries, something that turns out to be more timely than we thought. Right now, with cosplay being a hot ticket, and with a lot of discussion being generated by shows like Heroes of Cosplay and people like John Scalzi turning up the heat on harassment issues at conventions, we feel it’s the perfect time to set up a forum where you can tell your stories — good or bad — and let’s have an actual balanced look at the world of cosplay without all the random noise generated by manufactured drama and Internet trolls.
Tell us about your first time in a costume. The charity work your costume group does on weekends. That kid who saw your blaster and wanted to jump in your spaceship to fight aliens. The birthday party that used a lightsaber to beat a pinata. The kid with cancer who loved a visit from Boba Fett.
These are your stories. You tell them to your friends. You tell them to your family. You post about it on Facebook. We invite you to share here.
Other projects are in the works — new shows for SciFi4Me TV (that’s what we’re calling our YouTube channel), and more books to go into the library, in addition to plenty of books reviews for current and upcoming novels and short story collections.
Plus, the fall TV season is just around the corner, and we’ll have recaps for most — if not all — of them. Which shows are you looking forward to seeing? Do you have any interest in writing a recap column? You never know when an opportunity will strike. Maybe this is your chance to be a citizen journalist…
Because this is a site by fans, for fans. When I launched this site back in 2009, it was specifically because people were shouting into the InterEther “We just want a place that’s strictly science fiction”. And that’s what we’re striving to deliver here. Genre. Nothing else. No wrestling. No pop culture. No gorefests. No politics. No agendas.
No kidding.
To those who have contributed to this site in the past, thank you for your time and talent. You’ve helped get us this far. To those still actively contributing, I appreciate your efforts more than I can say. And to those of you who frequent our humble destination with regularity, thank you for your time and interest. But don’t keep us to yourself. Share us with anyone you think might be interested. The reward would be …. more wealth than you can imagine? Maybe not. But we’re growing our community here, and we’d love for you and your friends to be a regular part of it.
Join us. And together we can rule the galaxy…or something.
