BUENOS AIRES—We are excited to share important news regarding the evolution of our efforts in creating a digital publication and how this change will benefit you. We are delighted to announce that Free Bundle Magazine is now All Cool Reads. This name change will allow us to present ourselves as truly the most innovative and trusted source for fiction worldwide.

You should be getting the email announcement this week. Please make sure not to mark the email as Spam by mistake.

What changed:

Newsletter: If you are subscribed to our newsletter, you can expect our weekly updates to arrive in your inbox under the new brand, All Cool Reads. Please make sure not to send or flag these emails as Spam.

To avoid confusion, here is a sample of what these emails look like in Gmail:

The newsletter archive, although short-lived since we only began to properly archive our newsletters not long ago and there are currently only nine issues in the archive out of the one hundred and fifty-eight we sent out in the course of the Magazine’s existence, will also appear under the All Cool Reads Brand.

Digital Cards We spoke of this many times in the past but never got to properly materialize. The Digital Cards will become a separate Web site, which is currently in the making and will be outside the orbit of the Magazine. In fact, we are working on the Web site so it becomes a progressive app you can easily add to your phone home screen without having to download anything from either the Google or the Apple app market. Being able to gift our readers with Digital Cards turned out to be such a powerful tool for the Magazine that we decided to expand its scope to the rest of our present and future product line.

The details for how the new Digital Cards will work will be sent later this year, so make sure to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already.

Free Bundle Originals (Podcasts) As with the Newsletter archival page, we did not begin to produce podcasts until very recently. The current podcasts episodes will maintain the Free Bundle Magazine legacy brand, but new productions will carry the All Cool Reads name and logo. You can expect to hear more about our podcasts later this year.

Verne Club The official timeline for Verne Club will now be moved to its own page under All Cool Reads. The design of the previous timeline was reported as being hard to follow by some players, so we noticed your concerns by re-designing the new timeline in a more streamlined way, which we will be presenting later this month.

PDF Magazine The old Magazine issues will remain hosted under Internet Archive for legacy reasons. The new Magazine, which will be released as a special issue only once per year, will also appear hosted on the Internet Archive, but its format will not be PDF. We are looking into publishing it as an epub since it is faster to produce, besides being one of the changes our readers have suggested to us in the past. More details about our plans for the Magazine can be found here.

I would like to thank everybody who contributed to Free Bundle Magazine with articles, essays, interviews, and short stories. Your contributions made it possible, and it has been a true privilege to meet some of you and some of our valuable readers through the years.

This rebrand also means we have a unique chance to make things better, not just for the authors but for our readers and everyone who loves fiction. All Cool Reads will allow us to publish not only short stories but report live during breakthrough industry events and present our readers with new content, such as poems, essays, opinion pieces, and articles.

We are also moving away from being a Fantasy &Science Fiction Magazine and transfiguring into a full-blown media outlet that aspires to be your place of reference to learn about the fiction Big Media doesn’t want you to read.

Thank you for all the years, and we hope you come along with us on this new phase of our Magazine.

Visit All Cool Reads →

We are thrilled to announce the first tailor-made transmedia storytelling experience of publishing: The Verne Club. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are interactive narrative experiences that engage players by layering a fictional world over the real world, and we just launched one.

From our latest newsletter:

First off, an apology: this month’s Free Bundle Magazine won’t launch on time. I will make my best effort to launch next week, but that might prove difficult with things as they are. You will understand why in a bit.

Last night, a member of The Society with whom I’ve been in touch (they call themselves Keepers) learned that someone had broken into the Grand Lodge over the weekend.

Many versions are circulating about what happened. One of the rumors says this unidentified person broke in and took possession of one of the most dangerous books in all existence: the Necronomicon.

…

Read on and go down the rabbit hole into a world of literature, dark magic, and mysteries only you will be able to unravel.

Visit The Verne Club ARG Portal →

Today we officially launched Free Bundle Charts, a reimagined weekly bestseller list focused on which books are being read and commented the most, not which books have sold the most to bookstores.

From our newsletter:

Best-Seller lists have always been surrounded by scandals in the publishing industry, and they seldomly reflect people’s real choices and preferences when it comes to reading.

What makes our list different is we do not list books based solely on how many sales they had during the week but on the impact they had on us, the readers. Places like Reddit, Good Reads, and even Podcasts count towards a book’s position in our list.

This allows us to level up the playing field for books from self-published authors, big trade publishers, and small presses alike. It also allows us, the readers, to become directly involved in the selection process.

Key Free Bundle Charts features include:

What is really being read: Free Bundle Charts Top 5 Most Recommended is the first list of its kind to rank books and comics by their popularity – giving readers everywhere the opportunity to actually see what is being read and recommended online every week.

A diverse offer in fiction: Our Top 5 Most Recommended includes recommendations for books and comics from trade published authors (namely, part of the big 5, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House, and Simon & Schuster) and self-published authors alike, thus creating a more diverse and compelling offer in fiction.

Curated recommendations: Some of our Free Bundle Charts are being curated by famous authors and screenwriters.

Testing Phase

As a part of the launching campaign, we ask people online to help us calibrate our in-house artificial intelligence algorithm by posting their favorite book of the week.

If you want to join the test, simply Tweet a book you recommend this week, followed by the #FreeBundleCharts hashtag, as this reader did:

This week, I recommend The Player of Games, by Iain M Banks #FreeBundleCharts

— Jon South @phlebasjon@toot.community (@phlebasjon) March 12, 2021

We will be running tests during the entire month to ensure a diverse and correct representation of titles in the U.S., and once that is secured, we will include aditional markets.

As we promised in our post Roadmap for 2021, we are releasing Premium themed Digital Cards this quarter exclusively through our newsletter. This first one-card pack features the classic Hetzel cover from the author Jules Verne from the Hetzel Collection.

For those who do not know Hetzel’s story, he not only published Jules Verne but discovered the man and his work. His books are among the most beautiful pieces of artwork you will find in print format. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia about them:

Originally, there were three editions: one economical, without illustrations; another one in small format, with a few illustrations; and a third one in a bigger in-octavo format and richly illustrated. It is the last edition that is now very popular among book collectors

This first Premium-themed Digital Card is themed after one of Hetzel’s covers and includes one significant illustration from the book you cannot miss! Subscribe to our newsletter for this and more upcoming cards!

Starting this year, we are re-arranging our publishing schedule to include one issue every three months, plus our Halloween special. You can expect a new magazine issue to be published in March, June, September, October (Halloween Special), and December. We have created a new calendar at the top of our Magazine Issues page to make it easy for everyone to know when the next issue is coming.

Until the first issue of 2021 gets published next March, we will be launching new premium themed Digital Trading Cards. The announcement for each new batch of the cards, their themes, and concepts will be made in the next few days.

In the second quarter, we will be introducing our Rewards Program. Each time you read Free Bundle Magazine, you will automatically be rewarded with points. The more you read, the more points you will earn towards exclusive offers, discounts, and downloadable content.

After the success of Through The Gates of Madness, we are working on launching more original productions, which will be announced soon. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to hear about what will be coming before anyone else.

As part of an ongoing effort to make Fantasy & Sci-Fi available to everyone worldwide, from this moment on, you can find every issue of Free Bundle Magazine on the Internet Archive, perpetually. We already support Amazon Kindle and Scribd, the world’s largest digital library. Still, by proudly being part of the Internet Archive pages, we are one step closer to our founding mission: to diffuse and promote the fantasy and science fiction genres in all their forms.

Getting Free Bundle Magazine on the Internet Archive was not as easy as it sounds; the tools they provide are not exactly intuitive. In fact, they can be very confusing. Thankfully, there is a fantastic community of archivists who have helped us iron out the details. Now, every Free Bundle Magazine issue will show up with only a few minutes of delay regarding the other platforms.

Currently, the Free Bundle is available on:

• Scribd
• Amazon Kindle
• Internet Archive
• Free Bundle Website
• Downloadable Adobe PDF (Portable File Document)
• Google News & Magazines (coming soon)

We are actively working on getting our magazine to even more places this year, so stay tuned!