Warren Lapine is back after a two-year hiatus from the speculative fiction fields. “I spent a year licking my wounds, and then another getting my ducks in a row, and now, here I am,” he told SFScope exclusively. Lapine was the publisher of the growing small-press publisher DNA Publications, which at its heyday published fiction magazines Absolute Magnitude, Fantastic Stories, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence, and Mythic Delirium, news magazine Science Fiction Chronicle, the non-genre Whole Cat Magazine, and KISS: The Official Magazine. DNA collapsed and is now defunct. Lapine, personally, has been covering DNA’s outstanding debts, even though “my accountant says I personally have no legal responsibility to do so, I feel a moral responsibility. No one should have to pay for doing business with me. I learned a lot of lessons the last time around. This time, we’re far better funded, and confident of our success.” Lapine has contacted most of the people DNA owed money to at the time of its demise, and expects to get to everyone soon, but he asks anyone who thinks they may be due money to contact him at warrenlapine at yahoo dot com. “We’ve made a lot of progress paying everyone off,” he said, “and should be done shortly.”
Lapine is starting a new genre publishing company, to be called Tir Na Nog Press. He’ll be giving DNA shareholders stock in the new company, at a rate of one-for-one.
Tir Na Nog will be launching a new incarnation of Fantastic Stories as a quarterly magazine, with Lapine as the editor. The first 8.5″ x 11″ issue will have a January 2010 cover date, and should be available in September 2009. He’s already signed up a new Harlan Ellison story for the first issue. All unfulfilled subscriptions for DNA Publications magazines will be filled with Fantastic Stories. Lapine expects the magazine to debut with a circulation of about 15,000.
Fantastic Stories will start reading unsolicited submissions in March or April of this year, and will be paying, on acceptance, 4-10 cents per word for new fiction (2 cents per word for reprints of stories that first appeared on the web). Checks will go out with contracts. While Lapine, personally, prefers hard sf and magic realism, he’ll be reading all sorts of sf/f/h for the magazine.
Over the last few years, Lapine has built up a non-genre business publishing print-on-demand books (mostly self-help and public domain reprints) called Wilder Publications. Wilder and Tir Na Nog will remain separate companies (with Lapine holding a controlling interest in both). But under the Wilder banner, he’ll be launching a new imprint, to be called Fantastic Books, to publish sf/f/h books. Fantastic Books is interested in out-of-print back lists, new novels, and perhaps some single-author collections, paying a royalty of 10% of cover price. Queries (not manuscripts) may be sent to him at warrenlapine at yahoo dot com. While the company is currently 100% print on demand, Lapine expects to move into traditional publishing in the future. He notes that Wilder sold more than 50,000 copies of its books in 2008, and he anticipates 30-50% growth this year.
Lapine is also interested in taking on editors as acquisition editors for Fantastic Books. They’ll also be paid 10% of the cover price of books they acquire. Interested editors should email Lapine a resume at the above address.
To underscore his return to the fold, Lapine has recently set up a Facebook page, and a blog on LiveJournal.
[In the interests of full disclosure, SFScope Editor Ian Randal Strock was the news editor of Science Fiction Chronicle when DNA folded. SFScope is the evolution of that job onto the web. Strock was also a DNA stockholder, and a contributing editor for Absolute Magnitude.]