New to Hardihood Books? Start Here.
A Quick Guide.
Hi,
I wanted to create an anchor post for new visitors to the site to orient themselves. If you’re new around here, this is the post for you. You can also check out our About Page. If you’d like to learn more about what I’m doing here, please read this newsletter.
Hardihood Books is a new online magazine for fiction and persuasive nonfiction. At the moment, I (Ben Connelly) write most of the content: six posts per month, plus a newsletter for paying subscribers and a monthly roundup to the entire list. However, we do take guest submissions. If you would like to find out more information about submissions, please read these guidelines.
Most months, two of my posts are nonfiction (essays) and four posts are fiction (short stories or serial installments of novellas and novels).1 Each month, I send a roundup email on the second-to-last day of the month with links and descriptions for every post published that month. On the last day of every month, I send my email newsletter to paying subscribers.
Two of the posts I publish each month are free. If I’ve ever made a post free in the past, it won’t go behind the paywall at any point in the future. Sometimes, I will remove the paywall from old posts that I’d originally kept behind it.
If you’re new to Substack, the padlock symbol indicates that a post is behind my paywall. All of my free posts have the “free” tag on them, and you can find a single page with every free post if you select the “free” option on the navigation bar.
Navigation Bar?
If you’re confused about the many options on my navigation bar at the top of the homepage, or if you aren’t confused but you’d like to learn more, or if you’re new here and don’t know how the navigation bar works, please read this post on Tags and navigation.
Favorites:
Below, I’ve provided a quick roundup of some of my free stories and essays. I recommend checking some of these out to get a feel for what I publish. You can click on any of the titles in this list to avoid scrolling through our archives:
Fiction:
“Unidentified Federal Observation”
“The Department of Loneliness”
“The Tragedy of the Illumination”
Nonfiction:
“Another Attack on Substack Over Free Speech”
“Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones”
“Science Needs a Moral Compass Outside of Itself”
If you read a story that you like, please consider sharing it with someone else who might find value in it.
If you would like to help support the work, please go ahead and sign up for a paid subscription. This will also give you access to the entire archive of content, as well as all future content.
Subscriptions:
A subscription is $5 per month ($50 for a yearly subscription). For the price of two cups of coffee (or one depending on where you buy coffee), you can read every short story, essay, and newsletter that we publish. You will also be able to leave comments.
If you’d like to try it out for a month, you can sign up for $5 and cancel anytime to avoid being billed the following month. That $5 gives you access to every story or essay we have ever published going back to May of 2021 (we’re closing in on two hundred posts). As of this writing, that includes three novellas - two of which are science fiction, one of which is a detective thriller. I plan to introduce a fantasy novella and a full-length historical novel in the near future.
If you are on the fence, I would encourage you to sign up for our free mailing list. You’ll receive my monthly roundup email with links to all of the posts published each month, and the occasional book announcement.
For over two years, Hardihood Books has been in its first phase - during which time I built up a body of work. Now, it is entering its second phase, in which it will transition from being my personal project to being an online magazine. You can support that transition with a membership, or - if you’re simply curious and you’d like to see what we can do - you can sign up for our free mailing list.
Cheers,
Ben Connelly
Post-Script: My Books
If you’d like to check out my book, this link will give you more information. It’s available on all online retailers and can be ordered by bookstores. As I publish more books, I’ll continue to update this list:
Which fiction genres? Mostly realistic (literary) fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and occasionally thriller. I don’t write horror or romance and I’d like to write more suspense, but I don’t have much of a knack for it. Some stories are satirical or humorous. When it comes to nonfiction, I write on topics I’m interested in. If you scroll along the navigation bar, you will see some of the themes I tend to explore in my fiction and nonfiction.