It is officially August and you know what that means! The House of Stitched Magazine is alive!
150 pages, full color spread, packed with all the information you want and need. If it has to do with creators, storytelling and darkness, we cover it!
And like any creation, our issues keep growing (don’t they always?) and our ideas keep expanding. This is where you come in!
First, well, you gotta read the magazine. Believe me, it’s not filled with marketing pages. What ads are in there are from authors and creators, and they are relevant to what you need and want. We might throw in a few sponsor ads in the front and back but as the Editor-in-Chief, my ultimate goal is uninterrupted information.
We are not filled with short stories, and our images are placed so they highlight the text, not take it over. In fact, there were so many words, I had a hard time fitting the images in there.
We’ve grown from 2 issues a year, to six. Every season you’re going to get House of Stitched Magazine.
But the best part? There’s no discrimination on who we feature. It’s not all about big name creatives. Indie creatives and “high dollar” creatives are treated the same. Why? Because it is all about the story with us. And it doesn’t matter who tells it, or how.
What this means for you, and for the creators we feature, is a chance for everyone to be seen and heard. Everyone is treated like an A-Lister regardless of how many figures are in their bank account.
We all have our favorite, dark story heroes, and I’ll definitely get to those. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones you see on the cover every horror magazine? There’s nothing wrong with that, either! I want to put the cape on the less likely creators and I want House of Stitched Magazine to be different. To do that, I have to open the box further and deliver not just the coffin, but the entire graveyard. Each and every soul, no matter their background, has a story to deliver. When I get to the ones who are more popular, I want to include interviews you don’t get to hear and answer questions they haven’t answered over and over again.
My goal is to remove the mask and get right into the soft tissue.
That’s not all (cue the announcer voice). Because this magazine does not feature back-to-back short stories, it leaves me with this amazing opportunity to include you guys. Yep, you.
In the past, I did what we called #StitchedSaturday. Initially, it was an exercise to test the writer’s ability to adapt quickly and formulate a story guided by an image. It grew, and I discovered the exercise dug up some pretty amazing stories from unlikely characters. People who never wrote before, or never wrote in our genre, were discovering their voice. This was exciting!
The steam on #StitchedSaturday seemed to dissipate a little. My staff and I were focused on publishing leaving the interaction hot and cold. Plus, it was a lot of work.
But now, since I’ve pulled back from publishing as my main focus (we still put out books, but in smaller quantities), and I’m focused on taking Stitched Smile Publications’ original intention (to guide and teach authors) to the magazine, I thought, “What if…?”
What if I reclaim #StitchedSaturday and pick one author and their flash fiction for every issue, and feature them in the magazine with an interview? What would that look like? Readers would get to see something they wrote, and we get to interview them, find out who they are, what motivates them, and what their story is.
So that’s exactly what we’re going to do!
Me and the team are going to dive in and discover voices, and stories. You get to put your quill in the ink and maybe get a chance to be featured in a magazine. Not just a digital magazine, either. House of Stitched Magazine is available in print. That’s a huge chunk of beautiful, colorful monster to set on the coffee table. With your name on it.
In addition to featuring an interview with you, we’ll have a small $25 (USD) prize so you are paid for the story we feature.
I hope you’re ready for this! We’ve got until October to find our next winner. Happy Stitching!
For now, I leave you with some beautiful images of the Fall Issue of House of Stitched Magazine which can purchased on Amazon (Digital) or Blurb (Physical).
Oh! Before I forget! We have a new WordPress dedicated only to magazine things! Hop on over and subscribe!
Stitched Smile Publications 
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