Sure... blame the marketing. Again with the SF magazines.

About 10 days ago I responded to some of the talk that's been going around about "saving the big three" or, saving the SF short fiction magazines.  Since then, the debate has rumbled on with a number of learned men (and SF writers) weighing in on how to arrest the free-falling sales figures of these magazines.  However, what has struck me as interesting is the extent to which a lot of the debate has focussed almost exclusively on the form rather than the place the magazines have in our culture.

For example, Scalzi here essentially says "you can pull up the ladder now, I'm alright jack" by pointing out that, now that he is an established author he reaches more people with his blog than he would getting stories published in one of the SF magazines.  Which is very close to saying "why should I bother to engage with the medium where writers learn their trade... I *have* an audience?" but nobody's that much of a cock.  At least not intentionally.

However, this does raise an interesting question.  The problem is that, at the moment, SF magazine sales aren't doing too well even when compared to the performance of genre literature.  This means that SF fans aren't reading short SF anymore.  Part of this problem is that if you look at the cover of an SF magazine, you're unlikely to see any trace of a name that you recognise, unless you're already an active reader of short SF.  I mean, Ted Chiang and Kelly Link are the stars of short Sf at the moment, but have the punters who only buy books actually heard of them?  Part of the problem is that established authors have not really been pulling their weight as far as the genre magazines are concerned.  Some writers do still engage with the medium but, going by the best short fiction prizes, these writers are far less prevalent than the ones who release the stuff directly or sell straight to anthologies or who periodically release short fiction collections of their own.  Because of this, the short fiction scene has become almost exclusively about the future of genre, it has very little to say about the present.  In effect, short fiction magazines are not only competing with each other, they're competing with the anthology producers as well as the authors who want to exclusive stories to be able to sell more widely.  In short, the economics of genre are stacked against short fiction and the established writers don't do much to change that.

Jason Stoddard also wonders where all the readers are because out there on the internet you have loads of people who love SF and steampunk and what have you.  Surely there's some means of appealing to them?  this is the same idea that prompts Stross to write books such as The Jennifer Morgue and Halting State... both books steeped in the language of online geekdom.  The problem is that these people who "love genre" take their queues from films, not books.  In fact, I'd argue that your typical online geek and MMORPG player is not a reader.  At all.  There's a problem with young men reading and the online community are those missing readers.  The question "why don't they read genre?" is probably the same as the question "why don't these people read books?"... which is a question governments have been asking themselves for ages.  Sure these people love genre but they spend more time dealing with guild politics than reading.  They aren't the audience that people should be worrying about right now because they're the audience the entire publishing industry is trying to crack.  It's like trying to get Americans to like football instead of their bizarre armoured egg-chasing game.  These people are the motherload,  and if novels don't appeal to them then I don't know why the infamously inaccessible short fiction scene should be of any interest to them.  We might as well talk about getting the entire population of China to read Interzone.

Paolo Bacigalupi put together an extraordinary series of posts about the correct way to market to people.  I suspect he might well be right, but frankly it scares the shit out of me as it boils down to the fact that people want gifts and free issues.  The problem with that type of thinking and that kind of focus on marketing is that it suggests that content doesn't really matter.  In fact, it's the kind of thinking that gave us the beautifully neutral term "content".  If I don't have an interest in the contents of a magazine then no amount of cartoon characters on the envelope or football-shaped phones or cheap carriage clocks is going to make me subscribe.  I don't think that the majority of SF fans have an interest in short fiction as a media.  I think that the number of people interested in that scene is shrinking every year and the results are dipping circulation numbers.

I think the problem is that these magazines have allowed themselves to become irrelevant.  They've allowed themselves to become separated from the rest of the SF community, indeed, Interzone is the only major dead tree short fiction mag that puts any care into its reviews and news sections.  You can buy Interzone just because you have an interest in SF... you don't need to be plugged into the short fiction scene at all.  Locus is a terrible magazine but it serves to bind the community together with news, reviews, announcements and what have you and as a result it continues to sell and regularly win prizes.

I think that SF magazines need to be fully a part of the SF community.  They need reviews, they need short fiction, they need news, announcements and they need to give the people out there, who are interested in SF but aren't necessarily plugged into the SF blogs and websites, an idea as to what's going on in here.  They need to be involved because at the moment, they feel like they're off doing their own thing somewhere and that they're utterly irrelevant to every SF fan that isn't actively interested in the short fiction scene.  It's not about marketing, it's about being a part of the scene.  This is what used to drive SF magazines and, I think, it is what would drive them again.  The UK has largely missed this opportunity because SFX and its imitators have now come along and locked up the market but the Big American Three still have a chance to be a part of the scene and make existing SF fans take an interest in what they're putting out.  If Scalzi gets over 30,000 visitors a day, don't tell me that there aren't a similar number of people who could be convinced to start reading a dead tree SF magazine.

Comments

[Farah Mendlesohn]

Interzone got it in the neck at Novacon this weekend. While the specific issue was gender (an issue raised intially by the representative of Interzone), the feeling that was going around can be roughly summed up as "we don't like it but we are loyal because the field needs it". More than one person declared their subscription a matter of duty. Depressing.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think that as far as Interzone goes, the columns are decent. The reviews aren't bad compared against SFX et al. The problem is the stories that are incredibly hit and miss and lack anything even resembling a kind of editorial voice or shape... they seem chosen at random and some of them really are rubbish.

I still prefer the magazine to the American ones I've read but I think it's the non-fictional aspect that's keeping the magazine afloat. Especially as they don't pay their reviewers.

[Dave Klecha]

Part of the issue of "made it" authors not thinking the short fiction is relevant is because it hasn't been relevant to them.

John Scalzi? Very little short fiction, period, much less as a learning playground.

Looking at Lois McMaster Bujold's NESFA short fiction collection, she had maybe two or three stories out (two of them to Twilight Zone) before her novels hit.

Kristine Smith went to novels first and only later was approached about short fiction.

Many people shoot straight for novels, and I sure as hell wouldn't bother with short fiction, but that it is part of the writer scene--even if you think of yourself as a novelist (and I do) you're expected to have some short fiction sales. It's all part of that club scene.

And short fiction is not where you learn to write. Especially for the Big Three-plus-Interzone, you pretty much have to be there already. Learning to write is for the semi-pro and for-the-love markets, not the Big Three. They're the top tier of that particular game, and that game is not at all interested in promoting writers to something even greater. Jay Lake has made the transition, for instance, but Ted Chiang and Kelly Link have not. (Whether they want to or not is a separate question, but as you say even being the tops there means limited exposure and limited income from it.)

Part of the problem as I see it is combination of content and marketing in that the editors are relying upon a dwindling subscriber base to divine what is popular and in demand, and too many of those people are the duty-bound sort who will buy the mags unto the bitter end. Kind of like, in American politics, the fixed percentage of folks you can guarantee will vote for one of the two major parties, regardless of how pathetic a candidate they nominate for the Presidency.

As for the news and reviews, they have to go on-line. There is nothing that Asimov's could tell me in the issue on newsstands today that I could not have found out weeks or months ago from the internet and from the blogs and forums and newsletters of my favorite authors. It's far easier today to seek out the information that you want than to find an outlet that is serving you up all that information. Print media is just doubly crippled that way.

Plus, they have to find a way to maximize their revenue streams in order to pay authors more and attract the bigger names. If I'm, say, David Drake, with two simultaneous novel series under contract to Tor and Baen, I have absolutely zero incentive, other than duty or nostalgia or a friend's tactful begging, to throw a hat into the short fiction market. The novels will always be, hands down, a more productive use of my time and themselves attract more readers than even a string of appearances in F&SF.

The only other reason to send them short fiction, as BNAs, is to try to prop them up as the training ground for the next generation, and there's precious little evidence that they actually serve now in that capacity. From my perspective, breaking into the Big Three and selling a novel to Tor are two entirely different things, and the former is going to be marginal help at best with the latter.

[John Scalzi]

"For example, Scalzi here essentially says 'you can pull up the ladder now, I'm alright jack' by pointing out that, now that he is an established author he reaches more people with his blog than he would getting stories published in one of the SF magazines. Which is very close to saying "why should I bother to engage with the medium where writers learn their trade... I *have* an audience?" but nobody's that much of a cock. At least not intentionally."

Uh-huh.

I write short fiction: I've published in Strange Horizons and Subterranean Online. They are markets focusing on short fiction (and doing a fine job, incidentally) that pay well relative to the market, feature great authors and are free for readers to enjoy, which doesn't hurt in terms of exposure. They are *better* markets than the "Big Three," in my opinion; that's why I submit to them. Dave Kletcha notes above that I don't write much short fiction and he's right; I don't. But when I do, I put it in places where I think it will get seen.

I promote short fiction: one of the things I do on my blog, on a regular and frequent basis, is promote the heck out of science fiction and other science fiction writers. I link to good stories I read online and I note when authors (including ones with long short fiction records, like Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear) have new work out there. I promote science fiction and the writers in my genre because, as it happens, I'm fortunate to have a large daily audience of readers and I believe in the hallowed concept of "paying it forward," and using some of my influence to help the genre I write in. I don't have to do it; I do it anyway.

I've paid people the same rates they get at the "Big Three" to write short fiction -- including established authors like Allen Steele and Jo Walton, but also rather proudly including new authors like Rachel Swirsky and the aforementioned Dave Klecha -- when I was guest editing an issue of Subterranean Magazine. It was a print magazine, and when we sold out our entire print run, we put it up online for people to download for free. It had been downloaded about 25,000 times last I checked (which was admittedly a while ago), which means its overall circulation was in the neighborhood of any of the "Big Three."

But maybe you're right; maybe when it comes to short fiction and indeed science fiction in general I'm just a guy who's got his and is pulling up the rope behind him, laughing his ass off at the funny newbies as he does so.

It may also be, independently of this, that *essentially* you appear to have pretty much entirely misread the Big Three entry; this may come what appears to be the erroneous starting principle that not being properly genuflective toward the "Big Three" on the basis of their content, while handwaving aside the slow-motion disater of their business and marketing model, somehow equates to being dismissive of short fiction in general, and not pulling one's weight and so forth.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Dave --

That's a well thought out post and I agree with you. Publishers by and large don't even bother reading these magazines anymore so the idea of the Sf mags being some kind of bush league for writers is essentially horse shit. It's a scene unto itself and a shrinking number of people think it's an interesting one. If we leave stuff as they are, the number's will shrink and shrink and shrink until it reaches the point that Interzone has reached in the UK : people who are part of the scene will buy and people who feel obligated will buy.

The only valid question we who are not in the short fiction scene need to therefore ask ourselves is WHY KEEP THEM?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

John --

Thanks for turning up and apologies about the tone, it's been a stressful weekend.

Firstly, I don't genuflect. I don't even like the Big Three (I'm more of an Interzone guy) and I'm largely a recent convert to the idea that these magazines are something worth keeping around and even then I'm not at all convinced that 150 pages of art-free text with half a dozen dull book reviews is the shape that the big three need to be in.

Secondly, I know that you support the online scene. I don't have any doubts that you've "paid it forward" as far as online stuff goes, and as a tangent, as a critic I entirely agree with your point about magazines that demand dead tree submissions.

My point is that I think you, and a lot of people besides you (myself included) are trying to have cake and eat it. On the one hand we pull our hair out over how these magazines have disappeared up themselves and how their marketting nous is so limited that they don't even bother sending out review copies, let alone giving deals on subsriptions... but are we willing to say "The Big Three have lost readers... serves them right!" I'm not sure that we are and I felt that tension in the post I linked to. I think you're ready to cut the chord and your actions point to someone who does care about genre but just doesn't give a shit about dead tree short fiction zines.

I think that's a reasonable position, but it's not one I'm seeing you hold. I think you want to cut the chord. I think your support for the Big Three has been conspicuous by its absence... especially given your support for other areas and your involvement in so much other stuff.

You didn't cut the chord in the post I linked to though...

[Conrad]

I agree that the problem with the print SF magazines is that they are mostly irrelevant to the genre right now. I love short fiction, but these days I mostly buy original anthologies or author collections that are multiplying at a fast pace.

Of the big 3 magazines, I used to subscribe to Asimov's since it published some of my favorite authors, but then I realized that the ratio of issues that have even one really interesting story for me to the issues that are ok is very low, so now I'd rather check the content and buy the occasional (once or twice a year at the most) issue that tempts me. The online magazines are similarly hit or miss, so while I check them once in a while, the only one I reliably buy and read is the 163* series based now turned pro magazine The Grantville Gazette from Baen and Eric Flint.

These days I am buying lots of original anthologies, either based on theme (Logorrhea edited by J. Klima is a good example, Transhuman the forthcoming one from Baen is another), or on editor (J. Strahan, L. Anders and G. Mann from Solaris are now my favorites, so I get pretty much anything they put out)

[James]

So, what would you think about, say, Death Ray publishing a story each month? Is it easier to go the other way and insert fiction into magazines that already sell well?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think that that would be a great idea. It would also fit quite well with Death Ray's slightly more intelligent market positioning. I know SFX had a short fiction competition, but as is typical of SFX, they largely ignored the existing infrastructures and scenes in their attempt at "getting people excited" about something. SFX would never acknowledge the existence of fandom. SF fans are sad but SFX readers aren't, natch.

[Lee Harris]

I don't think it's necessarily true that "SF fans aren't reading short SF anymore". I don't believe that the dead-tree mags are doing enough to publicise their existence. They are, in the main, advertising only to their existing subscribers, so of course their readerships will decrease. They not only need to *appeal* to additional readers, they need to shout out "Look - we're here. We're what you're looking for!"

I've seen the weekly readership for Hub increase from under a thousand only six months ago, to just over 5,000 as of last week. Of course it helps that Hub is free, but that's not the point - reader numbers are increasing because people still want to read short fiction. We've proven that with a bit of advertising (we have regular - though not constant - ads running through Google, as well as other areas) you can attract people if you're providing what they want.

Getting the product right is essential, but it's only the first step - the dead-tree journals need to remind people that they're actually there!

If you build it, they will come.*

*provided you have a clear marketing strategy.

[A.R.Yngve]

I do get annoyed sometimes, when SF magazines seem to be designed and marketed purposefully not to attract attention (the Please-Don't-Hit-Me aproach to marketing).

For example: in my home country Sweden, someone decided to start (or relaunch) a proper, serious SF magazine. Great! Except that:

1. The magazine had a logo which could only be seen/read if you stood close enough that your nose touched the cover;

2. The cover printed author names and headings by the same "Please Don't Hit Me" paradigm;

3. The cover art was badly layouted, often semi-abstract, sometimes printed in badly matched colors which made it very hard to see what it was supposed to depict... in short, the covers seemed ashamed of themselves.

4. The magazine suddenly ceased to come out for several months, and then appeared again in a "double" issue...

I didn't renew the magazine subscription, despite actually enjoying its contents. Was that wrong of me? Or was it a way to avoid the vague feelings of depression I got from (infrequently) seeing the magazine in my mailbox...??

[Darren]

Interesting post, Jonathan. One thing, though:

"Publishers by and large don't even bother reading these magazines anymore"

I can't speak for my colleagues but it's not that I can't be bothered to read short fiction magazines, it's that I don't have the time.

The mechanics of modern publishing are such that most editors I know are having to do at least their reading, and sometimes their editing, in their own time. Once you've read the manuscripts your authors have delivered, edited said manuscripts, read the submissions you've received, the trade journals, reviews and websites/blogs that help you keep up with the field, read your newspaper/newsfeed and maybe - maybe - even read a book purely for pleasure, there's just no time to go fishing through short fiction looking for tomorrow's novelists.

Sad but true.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Darren :-)

That's kind of what I was getting at. The "don't bother" is largely a matter of phrasing. I didn't mean to imply that you just aren't interested, what I meant to say was that you are busy enough as it is and lots of things take precedence over sniffing out new talent in the magazines.

Apologies for indelicate phrasing.