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Attention, Authors: SFF.net is Shutting Down on 31 March

Launched twenty years ago, SFF.net is one of the oldest science fiction and fantasy communities as well as the home of many author websites.

And in two short months, it is all going away. Jeffry Dwight and Steve Ratzlaff announced the news several weeks back:

We are sad to announce that, after 20 years, SFF Net is going offline. Although the reasons are prosaic (increasing costs, diminishing revenue), our deep regret is that we will be unable to continue serving our loyal friends. SFF Net has, at the core, been about online friendships, shared interests, and shared lives. We deeply appreciate each of you who’ve joined us (and stuck with us) over the years. We will be taking services offline on March 31, 2017.

The community forums are going away, and so are the email and site hosting services.

Anyone who has an SFF.net email account will need to arrange for the emails to be forwarded to another email account, and will not be able to send emails from this account after 31 March. (You can find more info on SFF.net’s transition page.)

And authors who have their site hosted at SFF.net will need to get it moved to another hosting company. The process will need to be complete before the end of March, which means that authors will need to get started now.

You can find a good set of instructions over on the relevant page on SFF.net.

My recommendation is that authors get their sites moved ASAP. This will give them time to fix anything that goes wrong.

If you are looking for a new hosting company, I recommend Reclaim Hosting. I like their service, their prices, and their interface.

And if you need help, just let me know. This kind of thing is my bread and butter.

I have lost track of the number of sites I have moved over the years, but one thing I can tell you is that something always breaks during the move.  The site will usually run slower, plugins will stop working, images might not want to load, and the entire site could come to a screeching halt.

I know to fix anything that could happen to an author’s site, so if you need help – or hear of another author having trouble – ask me and I will tell you how to fix it.

image by starmanseries

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Comments


Lemondrop February 12, 2017 um 10:50 am

So what’s going on? Self-pub authors are suffering bad and blogs are dying. This deserves it’s own article. Hint.


Self-publishing News: Spreading the Love | Self-Publishing Advice Center February 14, 2017 um 8:00 am

[…] Valentine’s Day aside, it has been a dodgy year for indie romance writers after All Romance Ebooks closed their doors with no notice. This week that malaise spread to fellow romance platform Samhain, who have announced that they will be “going dark”  on February 28th. That is, at least, some notice. A month’s more notice has been given to authors with SFF net, who have until 31st March before the platform closes. […]


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