With our fabulous February 2025 issue, we begin the twentieth year of Electric Spec! Wow! Who knew back in 2005 that we'd last so long? In some ways, 2005 was not that different from today. Some of the top movies included Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, War of the Worlds, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Batman Begins, Fantastic Four, and Robots. Some of the top novels included Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Twilight, Book 1: Twilight, and The Lightning Thief (Book 1 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians). Thus, in terms of stories, it seems like our tastes are much the same.

On the other hand, the last twenty years have seen huge changes in the technological realm, including how we ingest our stories. It was around 2005 that we saw the launch of YouTube and the release of the Xbox 360. Amazon Kindle and iPhone took off around 2007, and consequently, ebooks started getting popular; this continued in 2009 when Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook. Apple released the iPad with iBooks in 2010. In the 2010s, streaming became widespread. Now, we see a vibrant and varied entertainment ecosystem, including a streaming cornucopia on our smartphones.

So, how did Electric Spec start? In late summer 2005, four writers, all members of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, were sitting around in the downtown Boulder, Colorado library bemoaning how difficult it was to get short stories published when we should have been focusing on our critiques. We agreed it was tricky for all authors. If only there were something we could do… David E. Hughes was the one who suggested we could start our own magazine, an ezine, and help other authors get published. Renata Hill, Georgia Simmons, and I all quickly agreed that it sounded like a great idea. Renata was the one who came up with the name Electric Spec--for speculative fiction delivered via an electrical medium. We wanted to pay authors at least a little for their original, not previously published fiction, but let readers access it for free. We did not want to have distracting, unpleasant advertising. We wanted to help authors with feedback and edits on their stories.

Using these ideals, the four of us launched the first issue in January 2006 with five stories. We also included an Editor's Corner, which consists of fiction or nonfiction from editors. The ezine was a success! Woo hoo! We had many submissions and many readers. We put out three issues in 2006.

In 2007, Renata and Georgia stepped away, and Betsy Dornbusch joined the team. In those early days, we did quite a few interviews of authors we admired. Starting in 2008, we also had a fun movie review column, 'Spec Fic in Flicks' by Marty Mapes. I believe I made the webpages for those first three years. Starting in 2009, we had a website redesign and were hosted by an Irish IT company because of (now famous) author Stuart Neville. In 2010, based on our success, we migrated to four issues per year. In 2012, Nikki Baird joined us as an editor. In 2016, Betsy stepped down, and we moved hosting back to the U.S. A dedicated proofreader, Chris Devlin, joined the team.

Currently, we have four associate editors and three editors--and we need them all to get through the hundreds of submissions we get for each issue. All the editors volunteer their valuable time. Authors are paid via donations. Thus, we are still following our original ideals, and the ezine is considered a non-profit semi-prozine.

Over the last twenty years, we've had 298 authors and 377 original stories. Woo hoo! (And, yes, the math there shows we have published more than one story per author over the years.) We've had 72 original covers over the last two decades, with 28 different artists. (Yes, there are repeat artists.) One awesome thing about Electric Spec is almost all of those stories, cover art, and author and artist biographies are still available right now for you to read--for free! Please check them out! You might be asking how many readers we actually have. Statistics are a bit tricky since we've had a few different hosting companies. In 2024, it looks like we had approximately 50,000 unique visitors and 394,000 hits.

We continue to evolve with the times. We now have an official AI policy, namely, we don't accept stories or art created, or partially created, with AI. In November 2024, we had a fun collaboration with TTRPG player company Oblique Adventures--including a free gift for readers.

It has been a real pleasure to work with editors Candi Cooper-Towler, Collette Fischer, Minta Monroe, Bonnie Ramthun, Grayson Towler and the rest of the Electric Spec staff to create something special over the years! It has also been an honor for all of us to collaborate with so many talented authors and artists.

Hopefully, we can keep going for twenty more years!