Incensepunk State of the Mag 2026

2025 has been huge for Incensepunk! What will 2026 hold for us?

Thanks to all our subscribers and especially to our paid subscribers—your generosity has enabled us to pay authors competitive rates for original fiction, and to expand to a second flash fiction story each month starting early 2026!

2025

In 2024, Incensepunk Magazine was just a fledgling, with only 4 published stories, 3 of those by our editors. We weren’t able to offer pay yet, so we kept it pretty close to home.

But starting in 2025, we began to offer a flat $100 payment for stories, and the floodgates opened! We received hundreds of submissions from authors new and old, from around the world, published and previously unpublished. We published 13 stories in 2025 totaling nearly 70,000 words.

We also published several nonfiction articles, spanning topics such as the patron saint of robotics and life extension technologies.

Starting in October, we began posting exclusive interviews with our authors as a thank you to our paying subscribers.

We appeared in several podcasts (The Garret Schuelke Podcast, Scifi for an Unexpected Future, Gopher Wood Lounge, and Doxacast Remix) talking about the magazine and the incensepunk movement, we presented at a Christian scifi and fantasy conference, and we interviewed a Hollywood screen writer.

By the end of 2025 we had over 700 subscribers receiving our stories directly to their inbox!

2026

We’re already starting 2026 off with a bang, having just announced the addition of monthly flash fiction stories. That means that there will now be two stories posted each month (starting in the spring time)—the current monthly short fiction story, and a flash fiction story of under 1500 words; perfect for reading in one sitting. And all of these stories will continue to be free to read!

Goals

As always, our biggest goal in 2026 is to grow our reader base! We know there are tons more readers out there who want to read science fiction with a faith angle. But it’s harder than ever to reach them. Algorithms punish sharing links from other sites so social media promotion tends to go nowhere. Most online communities have (understandable) rules against promoting. In fact, most of our subscribers are recommendations by other readers. Nonetheless, we are always interested in finding more ways to let readers know we are putting out great stories every month!

Appearances

One way we hope to reach new readers is by continuing to meet readers where they are! We’d love to be on a few more podcasts in 2026, and one of our editors will be leading a table discussion on religion in sci-fi at the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Other con appearances are in consideration as well.

Anthology

One of the most frequent questions we get is “how can I get Incensepunk Magazine on my bookshelf?” While we don’t have the means to publish print journals as some literary magazines do, we do have plans to publish select stories in an annual anthology which will be available for print on demand purchase. We don’t know the date just yet, but if that isn’t available by at least the end of 2026 something has gone wildly wrong!

Community

It’s always been the goal for incensepunk to be more of a movement than a solitary magazine. Already there are a number of authors adopting the word to describe their own novels. If you’d like to connect with other fans of the movement, the incensepunk Discord server is the best place to do it!

If you’re a paying subscriber or author we have published, we also have a chat here on Substack where you can connect! There’s a seldom-used incensepunk subreddit that we’d love to see take off. And if you’re on social media, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Bluesky.

Paid Subscribers

Paid subscribers are the sole way we fund our stories (besides emptying our editors’ own pockets—which we like to avoid as much as possible!). We’ve been very humbled at the generosity you all have shown us over the last year, offering your hard-earned money to support our authors out of the goodness of your hearts and little else! While paid subscribers get exclusive access to the chatroom, the ability to comment, and now author interviews, we are always looking for other ways to thank those who keep us afloat. We hope to find another perk we can add in 2026.

Thanks to all our readers for an excellent 2025, and we look forward to an even better 2026!