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As most of you know, DNA Publications has recently purchased Science Fiction Chronicle. We have some big plans for the future. For the last two years DNA Publications has been the only genre magazine company to see any growth. While the rest of the field has been floundering we've been establishing a strong foundation based on growth and good business decisions. We've already done some noticeable things to get Science Fiction Chronicle back on track. We started with a direct mail campaign that has increased subscriptions by more than fifty percent, and we'll be even more aggressive with our direct mail program in the coming year. We also moved the printing of SFC to Morgan Printing, the company that prints our fiction magazines, which has reduced the cost of printing the magazine by 53 percent. When we took over Chronicle it was right at breakeven, and our moves have put it solidly into the black. That means that readers and advertisers will no longer have to worry about the future of Science Fiction Chronicle; it will be here for a long time to come. After taking a long hard look at the magazine's contents I decided that Andrew Porter and his staff have been doing an excellent job of putting together a quality magazine, and at this point I plan to keep all of the columns and columnists. That said, I still plan to improve the magazine. How will I do that? I've doubled the budget for cover paintings, and we'll be increasing the page count to allow us to run more nonfiction articles that will be of interest to our readers--the first of which you'll find in this issue, written by John Betancourt and by Cecilia Tan. Over the next year we'll be covering a wide range of subjects that I hope will be informative and helpful to our readership. We've also given Don D'Ammassa permission to write longer and more critical reviews, and we will never have multiple reviews of some books while ignoring other books for no apparent reason. We've also added a magazine review column that will cover the entire field and not just focus on two or three magazines, though for obvious reasons we won't be reviewing our own magazines. Andrew Porter had to change from a monthly schedule to a bimonthly schedule. We'll be finishing out the year as a bimonthly, but with the December issue we'll move back to the monthly schedule. But my plans for Science Fiction Chronicle are even bigger than everything I mentioned above. I entered the science fiction and fantasy field eight years ago, and since then I've watched the rest of the field shrink while DNA Publications has continued to grow. I've listened to everyone complain about the state of the field, but I haven't seen anyone step up and try to do anything to set this ship to right. Once upon a time, science fiction and fantasy literature had no competition. If you wanted a science fiction or fantasy fix you had to read either a book or a magazine, there was no where else to get it. That is no longer the case, as we now have to compete with a slew of big-budget Hollywood movies, television programs, and video games. The marketplace has changed, but as a field we've done nothing to reposition ourselves. It's time for that to change. As I see it, we've left the marketing of our products to the retail end. Unfortunately, the retail end doesn't really care if science fiction and fantasy struggles. So ultimately, we have people who don't read any science fiction or fantasy deciding what people who do read science fiction and fantasy will read. This system isn't working. I've walked into many a store to find that they had a terrible genre section. Typically, I walk out and never return because I know that that store cannot meet my needs. Other readers do the same thing. Then that store notices that they're not selling any genre fiction, and instead of asking themselves what they can do to increase the sales of genre fiction, they either stop selling genre fiction or they shrink the category, further exacerbating the problem. Conventional wisdom says that we can't really do anything about this. Of course, conventional wisdom also said that DNA Publications wouldn't last a year. I plan to use Science Fiction Chronicle to do something about this problem. Starting with this issue, we'll be giving complimentary subscriptions to the people who make the genre book purchasing decisions for bookstores and libraries in an attempt to educate them about the field. Starting immediately we're looking for articles on how bookstores and libraries can cater to genre markets. We're also asking store employees to write up any successful marketing promotions that they've run in their stores so that other stores can try them; we'll be paying fifty dollars for each marketing tip that we run. If we can provide a free education on our genre to the people who are in charge of presenting it in the marketplace, they will make better buying decisions that will lead to more genre fans frequenting their stores, and to higher sales. Higher sales will, of course, lead to more money in the field and give book companies an incentive to start a new genre line or grow an existing one. I'm serious about doing what ever I can to make our genre more healthy. It's hard work, but I'd rather be doing that hard work than whining about the state of the field. You can help us by dropping us a letter giving us the address of the stores and libraries where you get your genre fiction. We don't want to miss anyone. So what does this all mean for Science Fiction Chronicle? First, it should mean that it will immediately become the most important news magazine in the field. Second, its circulation will now be close to double that of Locus, its closest competitor. That means that Chronicle is now the field's only professional news and trade journal. I think this kind of coverage is too important to be left to semiprofessionals. Frankly, from my point of view, Charlie Brown can continue getting the best semiprofessional Hugo; I'm not interested in awards, I'm interested in making sure that someone does more than just report how much better things used to be. Our attentions are focused not on the past but on the future. If the genre field is willing to pull together and support Science Fiction Chronicle in this bold move, we can move into a new Golden Age. For those who are only interested in bad news and hearing how great things used to be, there are still magazines out there, but for those who would prefer to turn their vision forward there is now Science Fiction Chronicle. Welcome to our new beginning.