Every few months, leagues of Chicken Littles run to the rooftop to proclaim the impending death of short fiction. Fueled by annually declining subscription numbers for the "big three" genre magazines or the announcement of the closure of another, these reactions have some grounding, but fail to take the big picture into consideration.
Let's start with the "big three" since they are the most popular target in this saga. For those not in the know, we're talking about Analog, Asimov's and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), the three magazines you're most likely to find at a newsstand or bookstore. Asimov's, at thirty-one years, is the baby of the bunch and they all are, as a whole, the old guard, time-tested survivors of an age where genre magazine readerships were considerably higher. Today the concern is over their more recent declines and whether or not those numbers can sustain continued publication. From my position as an outsider, it certainly appears that there is reason to be concerned.
The Littles would have you believe that the recent problems with the subscription numbers are tied to the health of short fiction as a whole. After all, just look at the number of failed markets listed at Ralan.com. (Ralan.com is one of the best sites to check for information about genre short fiction markets.) While they choose to look at that information as the second sign of the coming apocalypse, I simply see it as a reflection of new market realities.
Changes in technology have made it increasingly easy for the average person to launch a magazine and as a result, there has been a boom in the number of new markets over the last few years. Decreased risk in launching magazines has led to some "interesting" endeavors and many have failed. This should not be a cause for alarm. What we are seeing is a move from a few well-planned entries into the market to more of a shotgun approach representing a variety of different business models and philosophies. This is particularly true with the online markets, where a "standard" or best model has yet to prove itself. I have no doubt that for some time the failure rate will continue to be stunning. That said, some attempts will hit the target and the market will be better for it. This is evolution at work.
As someone who publishes an online magazine, I'll admit to having a bias, but I don't think that anyone would argue with me when I say that online publications have made significant gains in the last decade. You'll find a lot more established authors published in online venues, the best paying markets are online, and judging from conversations with other online publishers, our readership, while smaller than our print cousins, is growing. Here are some other interesting facts:
A significant number of print publishers have launched online publications: Baen (Baen's Universe), Subterranean (Subterranean), Prime (Fantasy Magazine), Tor (not yet, but they say really soon now), and Wyrm (Clarkesworld).
Well-known authors Orson Scott Card and Rudy Rucker have launched their own publications. (Intergalactic Medicine Show and Flurb, respectively)
The magazine with the 2nd largest readership/listenership is EscapePod. It boasts a download rate of over 18k per issue. (#1 is Analog)
Online magazines do not have the distribution issues print magazines have. Issues are instantly available around the world and accessible by more people than they would have been in print.
It should also be noted within the context of this discussion that there is a greater variety of short fiction markets now than ever and not at the expense of print magazines. We have a wealth of excellent small press print zines (like Electric Velocipede, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, and Sybil's Garage) and many good online magazines (like Lone Star Stories, Abyss & Apex, Strange Horizons, Farrago's Wainscot, in addition those already mentioned). No, the market is certainly not hurting for good fiction, places to read it, or enthusiastic fans to enjoy them.
If it isn't the market causing the "big three's" woes, then what is it? I think it is safe to say that we can hold the publications themselves somewhat responsible. In the last twenty years, we've seen the rise of a new generation of readers that have had a very different entertainment experience than their parents. The market has been changed by these people. Have magazines been keeping pace, standing still, or falling behind? Let's take a look at Weird Tales.
This magazine was much farther down the spiral than the "big three" is at present. They were bleeding subscribers at a near-fatal rate when the publisher woke up and realized that they had to do something. Weird Tales, like many others, had remained relatively unchanged during the last two decades, and the market had moved on. They had become a time capsule, a magazine for your father's generation.
Over the last year, Weird Tales has virtually reinvented itself. They overhauled their design, reorganized and replaced staff, embraced the internet, and targeted their marketing. Initial reports indicate that their efforts are paying off. Their subscriptions are up significantly and they've been attracting positive attention from circles that might not have considered paying much attention to a genre magazine. It's a very promising start and an excellent example of how to embrace change.
Obviously, any insinuation here is an oversimplification of the problems the "big three" face. Things are always more complicated than they appear from the outside. A good solution for one, may only be a first step for another. All we can do is hope that each is being proactive in dealing with their problems. In the end, however, each publication has the responsibility to deal with its own problems. We shouldn't be so quick to blame the market if something bad happens.
So, this has been my turn on the rooftop. It's up to you to decide if I'm just another one of the crazies screaming or someone who made a few good points. As a huge fan of short fiction, it's distressing to see so many beloved magazines come and go, but I refuse to go to that dark place. I look to the new guard to move us forward and the old guard to rise to the occasion, but I don't expect this to happen without casualties. It's time to judge the health of the market by the successes, not the failures. We're supposed to learn from failures, not make them the standard by which we judge things.
What do you think?
I think you've largely captured my feeling on the evolution of short fiction markets here. I come at this as a long time SF reader, who didn't even notice the short fiction markets existed until a couple of years ago when I found Escape Pod. If my experience is at all representative then Steve Eley has done more to bring new readers into short SF than any other editor.
My experience of the 'big three' has been very much as you describe - old fashioned and out of date. Analog was never in my ball park, but Asimovs and F&SF should be. But with a few exceptions the stories are just not well written enough. It pains me to say that, as I'm a great defender of the literary value of SF, but the big magazines are clinging onto a style of writing that hasn't improved enough over the years to be interesting to readers like me.
My overall feeling is that if short SF is going to stay around or even grow, it has to always be improving its quality. I see a lot of talk about distribution models, marketing, subscriber drives etc...but while they play a part the real key is producing utterly compelling fiction. I'm glad to see that process of improvement happening, online and in 'zines, but until it reaches the big magazines, or they are replaced, there will be a bottle neck. Imagine if the big three all overhauled as Ann Vandermeer has at Weird Tales? I think you would see a massive increase in subscribers.
Damien G. Walter
http://damiengwalter.wordpress.com
The decline in SF short fiction correlates with the decline in reading in general fiction which has been noted by the NEA and others as well. And I think that you are on to something. The publishing industry as a whole has not been putting out top quality work and has been expecting the same quality sales. Many of our woes come down to the simple fact that there is a lot of bad fiction out there masquerading as good. People are not stupid. No one wants to read bad stuff. So the lesson here maybe that if you keep the quality high, the people will come.
I remember reading that report. It demonstrated a 10% decline in adult reading over the period from 1982 to 2002, however, population increases during the same period caused the number of total number of readers to remain flat. When you started looking at it by age, it was certainly much more depressing. Definitely worth reading. Would have been nice to have had more specifics by genre though.
The declines in SF short fiction (at least among the "big three") don't map to anything I'm seeing in that report.
Here are two graphs that illustrate why some people are very concerned:
The phrase 'A Perfect Storm' springs to mind when I look at those graphs. Many different factors are all colliding to create that drop. Competition from other media, fewer young people reading, the SF fanbase discovering the internet and so on.
One thing I find interesting is that fouth big mag, Realms of Fantasy, is left outside the Big Three. Obviously thats because its purely fantasy, and Analog, Asimovs and F&SF are the Big Three of 'Science Fiction'. IMHO its the falling interest in Science Fiction that has hit the Big Three worst, as tastes among younger readers are more geared towards work that crosses genre and has a more literary bent.
I tend to consider the title "Big Three" as more honorary than anything else these days. I didn't include Realms of Fantasy, simply because they weren't one of the three. The data I have on them is less complete, but here it is:
Makes for an interesting comparison. Doesn't it?
I'm really glad you pointed out Weird Tales. I've been watching them closely and think that the magazine is moving in very exciting directions.
And of course, thank you for mentioning Shimmer.
A couple of other factors to throw into your equations:
The precipitous subscription decrease for the big three followed the precipitous subscription increase which came as a result of attempts to sell many cheap subscriptions, far too few of which converted to long-term subscriptions. Also, while they were getting out of that field just before the charts you show, the field itself has all but disappeared (when did you last get a mailing from Publishers Clearinghouse?). At any rate, those cheap/stamp subscriptions artificially inflated the numbers, making the later decrease look that much worse.
Also, the consolidation of the retail marketplace. When I first got into the field, there were four science fiction bookstores in Manhattan. Today, there are none (the remaining Forbidden Planet gave up on books and magazines such as we're discussing years ago). This mirrors the death of the independent bookstore. The megastores don't care for small selling products (such as sf magazines); give them a bestseller, or give them the shelf space. That's why it's increasingly hard to find the big three (or any other sf magazine) in a bookstore magazine rack.
This decline also mirrors the consolidation of the distribution industry, where we went from more than 100 distributors to fewer than five in less than a decade. Yet another increased barrier to distributing magazines to potential new readers (that is, those who'll pick it up if they see a copy and then get hooked). Newsstand distribution is one of the best ways of finding new readers.
And there's also the skyrocketing costs of direct mail marketing, which is the other best way to find new readers.
Not so much a data point as an observation: when I was publishing a paper magazine, I was regularly urged to move it to the web. I steadfastly refused, citing a couple of reasons. 1) at that time, no one could show me how the web publication would be able to make money, either for the contributors or for me. And I still wonder how many of the fiction e-zines are making sufficient money to pay their contributors and their staffs without resorting to "well, it's a loss-leader for the rest of the business." 2) print publication, to my mind, has almost no barriers to finding readers. Anyone who can read the language the magazine is printed in can read the magazine, whether they subscribe, buy a single copy, read a library copy, whatever. They can read it whenever, where ever. But an electronic magazine requires far more infrastructure and expense on the reader's part: computer, knowledge of how to use the computer, internet access (and if it's a free-to-use computer, such as at the library, it can only be accessed for and at limited times). [Having said all that, of course, I have to note that I'm now editing an online-only publication, hoping to make a living at it. We'll see if the market has matured enough to let that happen.]
You talked about the quality of the fiction in the big three not keeping up with the market, but then pointed to the young turks (yes, including Weird Tales) succeeding not because their content is better, but because they're trying to adapt to the audience more. I'm not sure which is the answer, or if they aren't all merely small pieces of a much bigger answer. For myself, as much as I try to embrace the internet these days, I still prefer reading my fiction on paper (for various reasons not germaine to this discussion). I've been wondering for several years if the ultimate triumph of the ebook/ezine over their paper forebears is merely awaiting the rise of the next generation (or the one after that): the kids who grow up on computers.
I think the problem is that the dropping subscription numbers are being used as evidence when the correlation of subscriptions to health-of-short-fiction is weak to begin with.
If magazines were the only means of distributing short fiction and sales went down, that would be one thing, but that isn't the case.
I invite you to take a quick look around fanfiction.net, which is an archive that is primarily short fiction. I hoped to find some kind of aggregate number, but it seems they only give a breakdown by fandom.
The ever-popular Harry Potter, whose count is in the "books" section, lists 358,067 stories!
Without getting into a discussion of writing quality (often abysmal) or that the works are derivative (completely undisputed), the fact is that *somebody* is reading those stories, else people wouldn't be posting so many. In a way, it's kind of a giant slush pile--while the majority of stories may not be so great, there are always the unexpected gems, and those are the ones you go back to and read again.
If the short story itself were actually endangered, a place like fanfiction.net would have no audience. Sure, it's a place where people who want to write gather, but it's a also a place where people who like to *read* gather.
I disagree with Mr. Strock about the difficulty of transitioning to the web. Given the huge readership of a fanfiction.net, I suspect that the real problem is that nobody has quite figured out how to tap that market, which has nothing to do with a lack of readers.
Maybe the numbers will improve when we start to see ads for books and magazines where readers can actually be found.
J. Green has brought to light a point my fuzzy brain didn't bring out clearly in my previous comment: When you're reading short fiction, you're reading short fiction. When you're buying a magazine, you're paying for the editor's taste and experience in winnowing down that huge slushpile (which you liken to fanfiction.net) into a few stories he is pretty sure you're going to like a lot. If he's wrong more than he's right, you're going to stop buying his magazine and he loses his job or goes out of business. (Understanding, of course, that some of them aren't actually charging, such as Clarkesworld.)
As for the "huge readership" of fan fiction and that specific site, ask yourself how many of those readers are reading how many of the available stories? And how do they dig through the huge slushpile to find the good ones. Actually, people have figured out how to tap into that market. One example that comes immediately to mind is Sarah Rees Brennan. She was, to me, a complete unknown when I heard she'd sold a fantasy trilogy. Turns out, she's ammassed a stunningly large following of readers with her fanfiction. A publisher saw in her not only a built-in audience, but talent, and offered her a professional book contract (for more, see this interview: http://sfscope.com/2007/10/interview-with-sarah-rees-bren.html .
Magazines aren't the only method of distributing short fiction, but they are the best method we've yet found for getting the best stories in front of the greatest number of readers' eyes. If you wanted to pay me to read through that huge slushpile that is fanfiction.net, and point out the good ones, we could probably come to an agreement. But that's why magazine editors don't bother: adding the "send your manuscript to me to consider" hurdle cuts way down on the amount of dreck.
Thanks for the response Ian.
Though I never said the quality of fiction was an issue for the "big three," it certainly could be. It is a common reason for people to stop reading a publication. I had been talking about the package, all inclusive. I believe that Weird Tales wouldn't have turned itself around on editorial decisions alone. They also adopted a new attitude, style, and marketing approach. It became something more than just the fiction. They look fashionable (for lack of a better word) and that may be necessary to bring in new readers.
The graphs were chosen to illustrate what has people frightened. I also selected a broad enough period of time to help rule out the possibility of this decline just being an anomaly. There is reason to be concerned, but rather for the publications, not the market as a whole. I'm tempted to locate the data for the prior ten years just to see how the discounting you mentioned played in.
As a former bookseller, I'm way too familiar with the troubles of independents, consolidated distribution channels and increasing postal rates. Everything you said is true and I should have pointed out those things when I mentioned that it was a positive that online magazines didn't have the same distribution issues as print magazines. Thanks for filling that in.
Online publications have issues too, but they appear to be obstacles that time will solve. Increasing readerships seem to indicate that the number of online readers is increasing. The infrastructure issues you mentioned as an impediment to access seem to fade even faster with each passing day. Best of all, printers and mp3 players make it easy to take online text or audio stories with you where ever you go. I think that all these changes will make fiction easier to get, no matter where you are.
All in all, I think this is a great time to be a fan of short stories.
By the way folks, Ian only mentions in passing that he edits an online magazine. It's SFScope.com, a great place for SF news. Check it out sometime.
To Mr. Strock:
That was actually precisely my point.
The problem is tapping the readership--I don't think that there's any question that it's out there.
Generally how people wade through it is that one has friends in the preferred fandom and somebody reads something and says they liked it, which gets the word out in the oft-cited "viral" fashion, then there are those who love a certain fandom and at least skim everything that comes in to see if it's any good...
Fanfiction.net specifically also has what they call a c2 feature where someone is acting more or less as editor and collecting the stories that they think are good, and much as with a magazine they present these stories, and if they choose well, people will continue to go to them for recommendations.
I'm not particularly beating the drum for fanfiction.net, by the way, it's simply a good working example--fanfiction.net takes ads, so why is it that I've never seen an ad for any magazines or books on it? That's what I meant about figuring out how to tap into the market--it might be a great place to advertise a magazine.
To be fair, it also might not, but the point is no one can answer that because no books or magazines are putting ads there, which seems odd when you have a huge number of people who like to read that are using the site.
It doesn't matter if any given story only gets read ten times, because most people only follow a couple of fandoms, and there are thousands of fandoms on there, so you're talking a lot of different people, and I think it's fair to suggest that these people are more likely to be interested in a magazine than, say, the folks playing fantasy football.
I personally think that the seeming inability to tap the market is due to the more fragmentary nature of the Internet, and the fact that is really best compared to a collection of neighborhoods that make up a city.
In the city example, if you want to attract a younger crowd to your new coffee house, you find a location where a lot of college kids are likely to see it, but this isn't followed in the case of online advertising nearly as much as it ought to be, and is probably the reason that the ads aren't always as successful as their placers might hope.
Personally, if I wanted to advertise a fantasy/science fiction magazine, I would check out some anime communities (because a lot of folk who like anime *also* like speculative fiction), I would look around for the thriving fan forums and fan sites centering on certain shows (Stargate anyone?), I'd look for role-playing games and card sites, and so on. In short, I'd put my ads in the neighborhoods where people were most likely to be interested in my product.
I would also join communities in which I had an interest and make sure the link to my magazine was in all of my signatures, because people who might never click on an ad might check out the link in my signature. Most places have no problem with that as long as you're actually a participant in the group rather than just there to advertise.
As in the case of Sarah Rees Brennan, as more companies figure this out, the overall picture should improve. Until there's a person actually taking the time to seriously handle on-line marketing, though, advertising will likely remain a hit-or-miss proposition, and the sky will keep falling.
Thanks for an interesting, discussion, by the way
Answering only your specific point about advertising on the fan fiction sites, I know there's a very clear and specific reason why you're not seeing it:
Fan fiction exists at the sufferance of authors and publishers. They know it's out there, but as long as they can maintain the fiction that they don't really know about it, everything works just fine. Once they recognize its existence, however, copyright law requires them to attempt to control it or shut it down. That's why trademark holders so vigorously protect their rights (if you've ever seen an issue of Writers Digest, you'll remember all the ads by trademark holders reminding writers that they're names are trademarked); if they allow some uses of their copyrighted work, the line between "noncommercial" and "commercial" blurs very quickly, and they may lose control over their intellectual property. For the average short story, that doesn't mean much. But specifically for the creations which spawn fan fiction, that can be very valuable (I'm sure you heard of the recent suit by J.K. Rowling against the fan website of her work which wanted to publish it as a commercial book; as long as it was strictly non-commercial [the web site], Rowling could allow it, but once it showed it might become a competing commercial property, she was required to try to stop it if she wanted to maintain her copyright and trademark).
Advertising on a site is a very loud statement that the copyright and trademark holders know the content exists, and if they're contributing to the commercialization of the fan fiction, they're damaging their own intellectual property.
Grr. Can't believe I typoed "they're" for "their" in the first parenthetical. Sorry.
I think J. Greene's point of the Internet being like a collective of neighborhoods, or perhaps small towns, is fairly apt. When you think of what the world was like before telephone service came into being, it was a bunch of small communities that were days or weeks apart. News traveled slowly and ideas and ways of life were more parochial. It was very difficult for something to break through that barrier and become popular on a national level.
It took something like radio or television to be able to send the same information to mass groups of people. It's interesting how something like the Internet, which in some ways covers a broader base of people than radio or tv, serves to segregate people into more insular communities.
This is most likely due to the fact that now instead of being the one Black Flag (sorry I am old) fan in your town, you can now connect with all the Black Flag fans around the globe, and do so to the inclusion of other bands and people. Previously, you'd be forced to interact with non Black Flag fans, since you could only "live" within your physical community. Now you can "live" online and interact with people who are just as unique as you are.
The trick is targeting those communities and making them fans and then supporters. And that takes a lot of work. And speaking as someone who runs a magazine on his own but also works a full-time and a part-time job as well as having a family, there just enough time enough in the day to find all those markets and chase after them.
Mr Klima's point highlights another issue affecting many zines today, which is scalability. Because most zines are basically volunteer endeavours, its very difficult if not imposible for them to grow beyond a certain size. Even the professional mags like Asimovs etc, who are paying their staff and writers at some level, are owned by very small business who just don't have the resources to scale the business up where their are opportunities to do so.
I'd like to see what happened if a daring venture capitalist put some real money into establishing an SF magazine, and really targetted the online communities J.Greene is talking about. My guess is with enough expenditure on marketing you build up a subscriber base of 100k plus, but its unlikely you would see any real profit from it and very unlikely it would be scalable into a billion dollar industry, which is what any investor would be looking for. I'd like to be proven wrong on that though...:)
"Though I never said the quality of fiction was an issue for the "big three," it certainly could be."
But I wonder if quality of fiction is a huge reason for declining numbers. While the title of this post is "Chicken Little and the Death of Short Fiction," it's more accurately about the fiction market, and not the fiction itself.
For that, though, I think it's a cogent assessment of both what's right about the market and what's a little less than right about it. Perhaps, as the author noted, there are no standards for the online market, yet, but that's the benefit of the scores of markets listed at Ralan.com; given that "shotgun" approach, some might actually hit their target pretty well (this venue, itself, serves as a great example of that).
The actual quality of fiction, however, is fodder for another discussion, given the direction of this one. But then again, I also wonder how related the two might be.
I'd like to point out that Analog and Asimov's are both published by Penny Publications, one of North America's largest publishers of puzzles. They do have the resources to do whatever they want, I largely suspect. Whether or not they actually would do so is another matter, however. :p
All due respect Sean, but Penny Publications aren't exactly News Corp. I doubt they have a few million sitting around in investment capital, or even the leverage to borrow it. My guess would be they are a private company, sitting on a shrinking customer base that gives them such limited potential no one has even bothered to buy them out yet.
John Klima, I think that in some ways, your comments illustrate part of the reason the transition is so difficult, as do the ones by Mr. Strock and Mr. Walters.
There is a very effective model for a mass market, it's worked for years, but that model is changing--and it's not just in publishing, it's been an ongoing issue for all of the media companies.
In my opinion, the town model of the internet is a good one, but it only takes us so far because users are not confined to a single town and frequently spend time in a number of towns, and this fluidity is one of the things that just isn't in the paradigm of the mass market model.
There are also the copyright issues. Rather than "let these communities exist on the publisher's sufferance", it would be a lot better to work out something reasonable by way of a fan-fiction policy that permits fan creativity but still protects the publisher's interests. A bunch of fans writing stories that aren't for profit are not a threat, they are tapping and increasing interest in the product, and those interested are all potential customers.
Unfortunately, most take the "sufferance" attitude and miss out--and everyone can see how well the draconian approach is working out for the music industry.
Another problem I see is a lack of freshness of content. One reason a lot of forums/communities attract so much fan activity is because there is always something going on there.
Just as a case in point, this magazine has now published June's issue. And I've read the whole thing already, the proverbial cover to cover. It's only June 3rd... so what is going to keep me coming back for the rest of the month? And if I don't visit for a month, what's going to keep the magazine from falling through the cracks in the list of sites I regularly visit?
The discussion we're having is a partial answer--I'd finished the stories on the second, but I'm here on the third because we, the community of readers of this magazine, are having an interesting discussion about the changing fiction market.
I think a successful model would update the content more often. If the magazine contained ten stories each month, for example, then it should add a new story every three days--the point is to give a reason to come back frequently. The serial format would work wonderfully well on the internet, and spark a lot of discussion in-between releases.
Again, in my opinion, there's a lot of missed opportunity. Why aren't we seeing downloadable backgrounds of the cover art? Talk about product placement--if I liked the cover and put it on my computer, *every* time I looked at my desktop, I am being reminded of the product.
Money could be made with this if it were planned carefully--for example, the site might charge a minimal fee like a dollar for current covers and offer covers past six or twelve months for free. It would be easy enough to track it for royalty purposes as well, you'd have a count of who paid, and so what if some people gave it to their friends for free? The friend has in fact accepted an ad for your product that they are going to look at every single day when they sit down at their computer, and you'll be offering a new cover next month anyway.
This "added value" model is used for a lot of Japanese animes, why are we not using it? During one of my favorite show's heydey, I had an email address with the name of the show as the domain, I got two screensavers and a bunch of high-quality pictures that I was happy to pay for because they were fun to have. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would pay a reasonable fee for product-related merchandise that I enjoyed, and while that may never be a large moneymaker, it does add to the profit side of the ledger without a corresponding increase in cost.
Transitions are never easy, but companies who try to force the old model on a new market are ultimately going to be the losers.
J.: I don't really want to get into fan fiction as the passion around it could completely derail the topic. It is an interesting topic though and will think about using it for a future editorial.
Instead, I'll address some of what you make in the way of suggestions for Clarkesworld and presumably other online magazines. We've actually had a few discussions about moving off the monthly schedule. The block has been the amount of content necessary, which we've been addressing. Eventually, we'll shift, for many of the reasons you mentioned.
As for value-added, of course. I've actually spoken to some of our artists about reusing covers as windows desktops, prints, mugs, etc. It's not covered by our current contract, so more work is needed.
Online magazines are still learning to take advantage of this medium. We're coming in with a print mindset and adjusting over time. This whole comment section, for example, is something non-traditional and quite useful in this medium. It allows our readers to be involved in a way they never could be in print. I think that's progress.
My comments were intended as general, I'm truly not picking on this magazine at all, but I'm really glad to hear that you're looking into some of those value-added options because I hope to be coming back to read for a good long time.
I'd just love to see an article on fan fiction in the future, I'm sure it would lead to some good discussions.
Picking? Nah. Didn't think so. Not even for a second.
A couple of comments.
I agree wholeheartedly with the comments of J. Greene and Neil in 19 & 20. The need to consistently have new material to draw repeat visitors has to be balanced with maintaining an established level of quality. Also, the idea of placing ads on specific sites is a good one, it does take time to find and contact individual sites - time an editor may need to spend at a "Joe-job" (thank you Norman Partridge) or to put the website together or read the slush-pile.
I like the idea of the downloadable backgrounds, but are they a loss leader for free? are they pay-pal? do you get a free download if you order a specific month's chapbook? Each option has their points. Also, contracts dealing with art and republishing or changing of format can be complicated - so do you try to do it yourself or do you get a lawyer to write the contract - that costs money.
Comments about the Big 3/Realms of Fantasy/Weird Tales. To start out, I have been subscribing to FSF for 7 years, been reading WT for about 10 years, and reading ASIMOVS for 20 years, but stopped subscribing to it last year after 5 years.
I think all fiction magazines have to worry about ossifying while still not changing so much that they drive away too much of their established audience.
I dropped my Asimov's subscription b/c too many stories seemed similar and I felt the magazine lacked energy, for lack of a better term. Now, I pick up interesting-looking issues at Borders.
On the other hand, I have never thought of dropping FSF. In fact, I think it has done a great job of bringing new writers with different styles to my attention. I purchased the following collections specifically b/c of their work in FSF: Laird Barron, Theodora Goss, M. Rickert, Charles Finlay, and Matthew Hughes.
Being exposed to vibrant new writers is one of the things I enjoy so much about Clarkesworld.
With WT, I am giving the new direction a chance. I admire them for taking a chance on changing direction. But, I feel that the old WT had a unique voice. I don't think there was another significant market for much of that short fiction. Most of the stories in the new WT seem like stories I could find at LCRW or flytrap or Ideomancer or ... I read those publications already so I would prefer to have a prominent outlet for a different type of story. To me personally, WT has lost its individuality.
Okay, this is way too long. Especially for a first post. But as a reader of SF/F/H magazines for over 20 years, the continued viability of short fiction is important to me. Thanks.
Kelly: I've been reading WT for a long time, too, along with LCRW, Flytrap, and, sometimes, Ideomancer, and I know that it's most definitely NOT the same kind of fiction. LCRW and Flytrap do not take horror for the most part or stories with horrific tones or approaches. If you look at the authors for all of those pubs, too, there is little or no overlap between LCRW/Flytrap/Ideomancer and WT. I don't say this to be combative, but to ask you to define *what specifically* you're not fond of. Because I find a huge amount of difference between those mags--and, in many cases, between LCRW, Flytrap, and Ideomancer.
Jeff
"With WT, I am giving the new direction a chance. I admire them for taking a chance on changing direction. But, I feel that the old WT had a unique voice. I don't think there was another significant market for much of that short fiction. Most of the stories in the new WT seem like stories I could find at LCRW or flytrap or Ideomancer or ... I read those publications already so I would prefer to have a prominent outlet for a different type of story. To me personally, WT has lost its individuality."
I would really, really have to disagree. I read all three (although my subscription to LCRW has been up the past few months and I need to renew) and I don't see at all what you are saying.
LCRW's works are more whimsical and literary, and some of them don't even have any element of fantasy (not that this is a BAD THING, this is a great thing because the work is very diverse). LCRW reminds me a lot of McSweeney's in many ways. And most of the stories in it's pages are very light and literary and take place in a contemporary reality.
FlyTrap is well, FlyTrap. There is no pinning it down. And it's very different from LCRW and WT.
WT, OTOH, is very much horror/fantasy hybrid, with a lot of leaning towards older WT style stories taken in through a newer, literary style lens. I'm liking the fiction a lot- much more so than the WT of last year, before the new look and editorial styles.
The older one was pulpier and felt dated. It felt like people trying to write the exact same stuff from 50 or 60 years prior. Genre has changed so much for the better since then, and I think the new WT is a great combination of pulp and literature, of strangeness and horror.
Damien:
Penny Press publishes virtually every crossword puzzle, sudoku, logic puzzle, etc. magazine that you can find on newsstands in the States. There are a lot of magazines that they put out, and the cost of the puzzle magazines is very small. I do have to state that I worked for Penny Press/Dell Magazines in the past. They sell a LOT of magazines. They probably do have a couple million sitting around that they could invest into re-inventing the science fiction magazines (they also publish Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines).
Yes, they are a private company. And yes, they have little to no interest in their fiction magazines, particularly their science fiction magazines. At least they did when I worked there. They acquired them from Dell when Dell wanted to get rid of its magazine publishing. Penny Press was only interested in the puzzle magazines (they were essentially buying their largest competitor) but Dell insisted that the fiction magazines were part of the deal. While I worked there, I know there were several parties who tried to acquire the science fiction titles away from Penny Press, who turned them away by asking for more money than the magazines were worth. Having the magazines in their stable is a sort point to be sure.
They do have a shrinking customer base for the fiction magazines, but not for their bread and butter. Would advertising in their puzzle magazines help the fiction magazines? They don't do it. It wouldn't hurt. It wouldn't cost them anything to try. My aunt is a voracious mystery reader and puzzle doer. And I suspect she's not the only one. There's a built-in audience that's being ignored.
I think there's equal parts hubris and ignorance driving what Penny Press is doing with their fiction magazines.
Oh, and Damien again, I have to agree with you that while you could pump money into the magazines and build up a readership to 100K or so, I don't think it would be sustainable.
Interesting stuff John. Raises an interesting question as well. What if Penny Publications suddenly saw the light and did decide to reinvent and reinvest in its SF mags, how big could they get and be sustainable?
I'd guess I'm not alone in finding the fact that the two biggest mags are owned by a puzzle compay depressing. All that wonderful, really creative storytelling in the the genre, and its being sold like puzzle books! I'm sure the editors of the magazines are constantly struggling against the culture within their publisher.
Back on topic though, I tend to agree that it is a very exciting time for short fiction now. There are so may exciting print and web zines, most of which seem to be growing. I'd be interested to see how many make to become sustainable in the mid to long term. I wouldn't be surprised to see at keast half a dozen of the current crop make become really established, challenging or even replacing the digests in coming years.
I was gently reminded by a friend that Gardner Dozois has been talking about the fate of the "big three" for some time now. So here is some more food for thought.
In The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (published in 2005) he says:
Last year, in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection he updates the situation:
and adds:
I wonder what he'll have to say about that wider short fiction market in the next volume. It comes out next month, so I won't have to wait long. I think that wider market has continued to be encouraging. We'll see if he agrees.
There was an interesting article in the New York Times today. My post gets deleted when I try to give you the link, but it is an editorial by Paul Krugman, "Bits, Bands and Books"
I made a post to the "Short Stories" forum at the board here that contains the actual link if you should have trouble finding it.
I thought it apropos to the discussion.
Just posting that link for J:
NY Times - Bits, Bands and Books
Thank you kindly, Neil.
And in an astonishing display of synchronicity,
Ballmer Tells the Washington Post That Print is Toast
"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sat down for lunch with editors and reporters at the Washington Post and told them print will be dead in ten years"
That article can be found at techcrunch.com
Again, I'll post the full link on the forum.
And if I don't visit for a month, what's going to keep the magazine from falling through the cracks in the list of sites I regularly visit?
just like to point out that Clarkesworld is one of a few magazines now employing feeds; so I don't need to come here, I can just let the url loaf around in my feedreader and when it updates I'll know.
Feeds are very, very handy tools and it's surprising that many of the ezines in particular are slow to utilize them.
Whether it's better to give a partial of a feed (enticing the reader with a few para's, and the hoping they'll click on the link and come here direct), or to include the full content of the post (entire story or article; Apex online does this looks like), is a more difficulty question to answer. Similar with the option to receive the feed into your mailbox, a feature I think is more suitable to the flash online zines and 2 of them (Every day fiction and Flash Fiction Online) provide that option.
I prefer reading in print, when possible which with short fiction zines isn't as easy as it would ideally be. Online zines are both free and more easily accessible. But, with print zines I'm more likely to read the entire issue, since I can put it aside, take it with me and come back to it later. Ezines - I get behind, and am likely to skip entire issues or subsections.
I think a successful model would update the content more often. If the magazine contained ten stories each month, for example, then it should add a new story every three days.
hmm, that's a hard one. Bogger belief used to be "blog early, blog often" and "content is king."
As to the latter, content is only king if it can excite interest and cause conversation, like this one.
But the problem with conversation is that if the primary source (the blog, or short story magazine) updates too much content too often, it can potentially derail its own conversation.
The new content distracts, diverts time use and leaves less leisure to participate in an ongoing conversation.
The conversation is now "old" by virtue of its having been replaced by new content. And the new content can cause new conversation, and still more content causes still more conversation, and...it fragments time, and people don't have infinite amounts of time available in a day, or even a month.
There's still a lot to be said for less is more.
Getting back to feeds, tying it in with updating more content more often -- when my feeds get unmanageable, the first thing to go are the sites/ blogs/ whatever, that update too often.
I still follow blogs that update once every 2 months or so; I take the time to read the entire post.
I love IO9; but I skim most of their posts and sometimes just mark them all as read to clear my inbox when I don't have time.
They sometimes update to about 25 posts per day. I see that and I skip them all.
Connecting that principle to short fiction magazines - the same thing could happen.* I'm very willing to take the chance on missing out on great stories, great articles, interesting interviews, etc, if they start making too much demand on my time.
*and does - SH's policy of almost daily updates has me skipping a lot of their content. Their book reviews are fabulous and I'm more likely to come back later to read them. The stories..I gave up on reading them completely. In large part this is because I started reading Fantasy magazine on a more regular basis. Firstly, it's more to my tastes, and second they both update new stories on Mondays (the once a week principle), and thirdly, I simply don't always have time.
Fantasy also has a feed which makes it easier for me to scan their total content, whereas SH don't. I have to go the site itself, hence lately I don't.
This is something I mentioned on Sean's blog last year when Fantasy announced going online - in my case, at least, they've become competition for each other. They compete for my time.
Fantasy won, not just because I prefer the fiction (non-fiction SH is better), but they make it easier for me.
I'm fond of people who make life easy for me, and make allowances for my time.
Both CW and Chizine publish regular schedules, the one monthly and the other quarterly; both are numerically light on content. All of that suits me -- I know there's time for me to come back (dependin on what's happening in real life, I won't read right now, but come back a week or month later) and read them all, and I know there's enough content to satisfy but not too much it overwhelms me with sheer volume.
I tend to enjoy Helix' short stories, and they publish regular (plus point), but the volume of stories and the preference for longer lengths puts me off quite a bit.
Longer length shorts- better for print; shorter length shorts - better for online.
Print mags need to rethink their total package and most of all their distribution systems: make it pretty, make it easy for me to get hold of and don't make me mad with substandard delivery systems.
Online magazines need to place a premium on ease of use and readers time: make it easy for me to access (feeds bring the story to me. Making me come to the story is an additional schlep), and make allowances for my time.
Anyways, that's me, obviously mileage will vary from person to person.
Lots of very interesting ideas here, but so little time, as John Klima says. Sybil's Garage has been print since its inception, but we do post a few stories online in each issue. One of the ideas I'm toying with is posting a few stories between issues online to attract more readers.
As many people suggested in various ways above, print magazines are hard to sustain. But as Mary Robinette Kowal so aptly explained to me once, with the invention of the photograph, portraiture began to wain. People said, "Why ever would I need a painting of myself when I can take a photo?" So the painters of the day reinvented their art as specialty/luxury items. As Steve Balmer and others have stated, print *may* be on its way out, but it won't vanish if the print magazines understand that having something in your hand that you can see, touch, smell and fold is a completely different experience than reading on a screen, however compact. With Sybil's Garage, I try to give the reader more than just black text on a white page. You could mimic what we do online, but I don't think it would have the same feel.
Wow. Sorry to have dropped out of the discussion; things happened. Just read through all I missed, now what's to add?
Like John, I, too, worked for Analog and Asimov's (though I was there before the sale to Penny). I was with them at Davis and at Dell. The biggest difference I remember is that Davis -- the small, family company -- cared about the magazines because they'd founded one and had the other on purpose. Dell was less of a caring environment because it was a huge corporate culture; as long as we maintained profitability, they let us muddle along (as opposed to SFAge, which was closed down while it was profitable because the owners felt they could make more money with that space with a wrestling magazine -- they were right). I'll let John's discussion of the current owners' motivation stand, as I was never an employee there.
But in all that, "profitability" was always minuscule compared to other industries. Publishing is just not set up to make owners ginormous profits; it's always been, and probably always will be, for the love. Of course, recognizing that fact makes one feel a little better about the future of publishing short fiction. Since those of us doing it know we're not going to get rich, most of us are content to keep publishing as we are. Penny, I suspect, will either sell the magazines at some point, or continue to ignore them and let them keep going. I don't really fear for their futures (F&SF, of course, is editor-owned, through its last several editors).
As to the "advertising on web sites" comment (which was a long time back), I'm going to put on my businessman hat and note that SFScope accepts advertising at remarkably affordable rates. The question is convincing potential advertisers of the utility of buying ads. If we're all doing this in our spare time (as John famously is), and we know we're not planning to make a profit, then an advertising budget of any kind beyond subscription forms probably isn't in the cards. That's the divide between short fiction (as published by we who must) and books (as published by corporations, who may not understand science fiction, but definitely understand product and marketing).
As we're discussing the death of one form in which entertainment is distributed (magazines for short fiction), I've just stumbled across this interesting data point regarding another "dying" form of entertainment: vinyl records. See this CNN article for something on their resurgence.
J.Green: Ballmer is just wrong. I suspect he knows it too.
David: I agree with you on a lot of points there. The medium which fiction (and non-fiction) appears does influence people in different ways. Print has a long history and steady legs. Online, things are still developing.
I'm not sure I agree with the point of new conversations killing the old. As an old BBSer, I've been participating in online forums since the mid-80s and what I've observed is that a lot of healthy discussions on one site is more likely to drain from a competitor than from another discussion within the same site. This, however, could be the difference between building a community and having readers.
Matt: I think it's a great idea to supplement a print magazine with an online presence. In fact, I believe that magazines that don't, will suffer in the long run.
Ian: "Publishing is just not set up to make owners ginormous profits; it's always been, and probably always will be, for the love." Seems that there are plenty of people making money in the publishing business... or were you referring to a specific subset of that group?
By the way, a kind soul has supplied me with subscription and newsstand numbers all the way back to 1970. I'm making a few new graphs. Interesting stuff.
Someone kindly supplied me with subscription and newsstand data back to 1970. I've also added in Realms of Fantasy, since I was able to get that data. Unfortunately, they release data a year behind the "big three" so there is a bit of a gap. Click on a graph to see a larger version.
Neil: No argument there, I just posted it as food for thought because it seemed like as we discussed the subject, it kept coming up elsewhere.
I've been thinking quite a bit about all the points raised in this discussion, and I think that the real issue is that it's a competition for *attention*. There's been a huge explosion of media choices, and this was true even before Internet use was widespread. The more choices, the more the numbers have gone down.
I don't know if anyone here is familiar with the "s curve" of new technology adoption, there's a quick once-over at Wikipedia (Diffusion of innovations), but the corresponding bell curve that goes with it is, I think, very pertinent.
I suspect that this relationship also applies to the explosion of choices, not just those in the given field "magazine subscriptions", but in the broader "entertainment" category. The Internet has simply added fuel to the fire by increasing those choices exponentially.
The time people have to spend on entertainment is finite, thus, the real battle becomes getting attention for a given offering.
News stands used to be a source of attention, and the magazines were able to use that to good effect, but with fewer news stands, the "attention value" has dropped considerably.
The Internet is a promising replacement for the news stand, but part of the problem is that, since it's not the time-tested approach, a lot of companies are reluctant to put resources towards it. You can see that reluctance operating in some of the comments in this thread, in fact!
The key is going to be finding the places that have high "attention value" for the given item.
For example, if I were going to advertise Clarkesworld Magazine, there are two sites I can think of, megatokyo.com and i-am-bored.com, that are quite cheap for advertising that likely would yield quite a few visitors, which of course is the first step in getting sales.
Megatokyo is good because it's an online comic that attracts a lot of gamers and anime fans (who, as I have mentioned, ALSO tend to like science fiction and fantasy).
i-am-bored.com looks like it might work because the people there are looking for something to do--the price is low enough that I personally think it would be worth a try.
Those places, though, are not the ones that quickly come to mind when one thinks "put an ad on the Internet", and that's exactly why the transition is so difficult.
Interesting graphs. What they tell me, at a glance is that:
1. Something happened in the early 1980s to artificially inflate the number of subscriptions (see the slow, steady growth before the jump), and they couldn't hold on to those new subscribers. (I think the 1981 drop in Asimov's numbers is when the magazine went from six times a year to monthly.) The magazines are losing subscribers, but the baseline should be the numbers up to 1978, so they're below where they should be, but the 80,000 they've lost from the top were subscribers that probably shouldn't have been there in the first place (see my earlier comment about the Publishers Clearinghouse, etc. subscriptions).
2. Newsstand sales were dropping in the 1970s, and then they got completely slammed in the 1980s (the same time the subscriptions took that precipitous climb). This may have been external forces, or it may have been internal decisions (selling magazines on the newsstand brings in far less money than selling subscriptions, even though the subscriptions are sold at a discount to cover price, so someone may have seen climbing subscription numbers and decided to drop newsstand distribution). Then, of course, was the consolidation in the distribution industry which we've already discussed.
3. I guess that means 1998 looks like the year when they started losing numbers among the hardcore readers (as opposed to the cheapo subscriptions that they weren't able to convert to long-time readers). Anyone remember what year Analog and Asimov's were sold to Penny Press?
Neil, you quoted me as saying: "Publishing is just not set up to make owners ginormous profits; it's always been, and probably always will be, for the love."
And responded: "Seems that there are plenty of people making money in the publishing business... or were you referring to a specific subset of that group?"
Perhaps it's those years I spent on Wall Street coming back to haunt me. I was looking at it purely from the investor's point of view. "I've got money to invest. Which business will return the most money in the least amount of time?" Publishing is never the answer to that question.
Also, check out the top 10 (or 20 or 50) companies on whatever financial measure you want: there are no pure publishing companies at the top. The only publishing companies there are tiny divisions of much larger organizations, and they contribute very small percentages to the bottom lines. Publishing is (or can be) a steady money-maker, and books are one of the products most resistant to economic downturns, but the numbers just aren't there to consider it a big money maker.
There's some truth to the old chestnut that the only people in publishing are the truly committed who aren't interested in getting rich, and the trust-fund babies who already are. Of all the full-time jobs I've had, the salaries in publishing were the lowest (regardless of my experience, time with the company, or anything else).
1. The spikes start in 1980 and last through 1983, and then it begins to reverse the gains, quickly. By 1996 it's back to the baseline from 1978. (Nearly eighteen years). I would attribute the spikes to Publishers Clearing House, which seems to have delayed things a bit.
Asimov's was already monthly, in January 1979, so the 1981 decline wouldn't be impacted by this. It is likely that when Davis Publications acquired the magazine from Conde Nast, that there may have been a bumpy transition time, here, which would impact subscriptions.
2. You do see steep declines in the early 1980s, for Analog and Asimov's, but then it bottoms out by 1984. The attrition rate slows down, effectively. This could be attributed to the fact that the distribution channels (mass) decreased from 500 to 5, as has been reported elsewhere. (Consolidation) Nothing else would explain those steep declines but a tightening of channels. (Though F&SF appears immune to those problems. While their attrition is constant, it's not steep).
3. Penny Press acquired the magazines in 1988, which you see as an upward spike, as the stronger distribution takes hold. But then you see it revert back to the baseline, before 1988. The effect is temporary. (You also see a slight improvement when Dell acquired them, in 1991, but then a decline afterwards).
Pulling up the graphs, and eliminating all else but the revelant individual mgazine performance:
Asimov's actually was making effort at reversing its decline in subscribers from 1986 to 1987, and again 1991-1992, but then after 1994, it consistently dropped every year except for 2002 and 2004.
Analog also reversed its annual declines in 1993 and 1998, but pretty much roughly 1992 marks the consistent decline from that point on.
1995 marks the steady decline of F&SF.
I'd say that 1992 to 1995 marks the decline of most of the magazines, which is unrelated to Publishers Clearing House or distribution concerns. The attrition could be anything from customer dissatisfaction or the base growing older, or the impact of other competing entertainment interests. We'll never know, I suspect, but here's a summary of what's gone on since 1993:
Analog, 1993 - 2007 = a loss of 44,000 subscribers
Asimov's, 1993 - 2007 = a loss of 49,916 subscribers
F&SF, 1993 - 2007 = a loss of 34,767 subscribers
I imagine the same probably happened to the mystery digests?
Analog and Asimov's were changed ownership in 1997 and moved to a slightly larger format in 1998. It's during this period that you see a very temporary spike in newsstand sales, which, if I had to guess, was probably due to better distribution.
I suppose when it comes to money, we're talking more individual perspective here. Wall Street (you) vs me (educator). Should be pretty obvious why we don't have the same criteria.
Thanks for digging up those old numbers and for graphing them, Neil. Interesting stuff.
I agree with your point that any magazine that loses circulation and does nothing about it has no one to blame but themselves.
I disagree with some of the other points here and I think there are some ways in which the comparison between WEIRD TALES and the digests is a little forced. But I don't have time to get into a protracted discussion now.
Anyone want to turn this into a discussion group at Readercon?
By the way, Kelly C.'s post (#23) made my day, but I do need to point out that F&SF has never published a story by Theodora Goss. I don't want to take credit for something we haven't done.
Hi Gordon. Thanks for stopping in and I hope that when you do have time, you come back and fill in some of the points you disagree on. Your perspective would be a very valuable addition to this discussion.
My reference with Weird Tales was merely to show how one publication (in much worse shape than any of the three) was attempting to recover readership. I hope I was clear that I didn't think it a magic bullet that could save everyone. Each publication needs to find its own path.
As for Readercon, I'd be up for a discussion group.
Sean wrote: It is likely that when Davis Publications acquired the magazine from Conde Nast, that there may have been a bumpy transition time, here, which would impact subscriptions.
Davis bought Analog, but founded Asimov's.
Penny Press acquired the magazines in 1988, which you see as an upward spike, as the stronger distribution takes hold. But then you see it revert back to the baseline, before 1988. The effect is temporary. (You also see a slight improvement when Dell acquired them, in 1991, but then a decline afterwards).
Actually, Penny bought them in 1998. Davis had them (and me) until 1992, when we were sold to Dell (at the time, part of Bantam Doubleday Dell). Dell sold us (and the name Dell Magazines) to Penny in '98.
I'll be at Readercon, and would be willing to talk about this, too. Who's going to propose it?
I hate it when I can't edit and fix my mistakes: yes, I meant 1998
Sean