Vote vote vote--and rec rec rec rec

[ellen_datlow]

Ok. Here's my impassioned plea/push/nag for anyone who reads this blog and is eligible to recommend stories and or novels for the various peer group science fiction, fantasy, and horror awards.
I know that some people feel that awards themselves are a bad thing and that they should all be abolished. I'm not talking to you. I don't believe that and I know I'm not going to change your minds.

Awards are NOT going to go away but they could become less visible (which I think is a bad thing). As an editor I really appreciate it when the stories/books I edit make final award ballots and win awards. And I think most writers are even more appreciative of this. It gives a sense of validation for what you're doing by your peers (for the Nebula and Stoker).

Right now is "award rec season" and there are discussions on both the SFWA Bulletin Board and the HWA Bulletin Board about how their respective awards are dying --not enough members are recommending works to even make a preliminary ballot.

Now some people think that this might be because no one likes the work being published.
Others that no one is reading enough short fiction to be interested in recommending works in those categories.
I have a really difficult time believing the first reason. I've been reading sf/f/h short fiction for twenty five years and have found no drop off in quality in any of those fields.

I can't answer for the second but I hope it's not true because if so my profession will die and I love editing short fiction.

If you care at ALL for the genre short story then I urge you to recommend the stories that you think are worth bringing to the attention of your peers.

This is totally off the cuff and I know if I thought about it more I'd have more to write--but I'd also probably just delete the whole post...

Comments welcome!

Comments

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

Any evidence your superior taste is actually reaching a broader audience, then?

If not, what do you think the probability that you are right is, compared to the others of whom you speak, if this trend continues abd you don't reach such an audience?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

The audience for CW is growing with every issue, and is reaching out internationally (an advantage of the web, both in publishing international authors and in getting a worldwide, albeit English-reading, audience).

The increasingly inaccurately titled "big three" have seen their circulations decline each year and this trend will not stop. The response to this decline has been, as far as my reading, more of the same exact content associated with the declines. As far as the semi-pros, more people read CW material through the link I put up on my blog each month than many semi-pros have readers overall.

If you want to measure quality by way of popularity, then clearly the SF magazines are doing something very wrong. People are subcribing and then just not renewing. Newsstand returns are very high. Compared to even marginal publications on niche subjects, the circulation of SF mags is tiny.

If you want to simply test quality via reading, go right ahead. Frankly, if Ellen can claim that her reading tells her that there are plenty of good stories, my reading can tell me that most published SF/F/H short stories are tedious at best and awful at worst.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

If it is growing, then some evidence, sure, if growing faster than your garden variety internet usage growth, perhaps, or other similar publications.

I may have read a story or two, I will have to check. At one a month, won't take long, regardless.

Online is more accessible for a lot of us, no doubt.

However, at several thousand stories a year, some will be outstanding, on probability. Likewise at the other end. The majority will be mediocre or worse taking into account the following:

Admittedly I have never read at the very low end just as mentioned by girliejones recently where one market had 4 issues in a row all stories 2 out of 5 or less, so a bit of a horrible tail, there.

Even if only to pick a random number (and lastshortstory will give a rough guide to this if they publish their numbers) 10% are 4 out of 5 or better, that will still leave a few hundred that are good.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Tell you what, have Ellen post her royalty statements for the last five anthos she did, and I'll put up the numbers for the last year of CW.

I always find it amusing how fanboys react to people whose material they didn't grow up reading.

Your attempt to place story quality on a bell curve is wrongheaded, and stories are qualitatively different from one another.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

Qualitatively? No kidding. :) That has little to do with where they place. A tennis ball is qualitatively different to a story, too.

Sorry, but to a broad audience, in general, they are good, or not good. You yourself have said some are better than others, speaking of wrongheadedness.

Disagreeing with that common activity of rating material is one thing, if you are more of a 'literary fetishist' type that can't bear to bring yourself to do that, you aren't the only one.

I have read one, Orm the Beautiful, so I will give you that one if you chose I gave it 4.5 out of 5. Not sure that dragon archaeology is designed to appeal to a broader audience though. :)

Don't think I have seen any of the others, off the top of my head.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I didn't buy Orm the Beautiful. CW has two editors and two sections.

And no, readers won't say "good" or "not good" which is rather the problem. You're describing the casual reader. Short SF drove off its casual readers long ago. It now caters to an aging, shrinking marketplace of people who want to relive their childhood experiences .

There's also nothing inherent in the idea of a story that would lead to most stories being mediocre, some awful, and some few excellent. I know you don't understand that, but it's true. Stories aren't published randomly, so a curve doesn't apply. Any randomly chosen issue of MZB (to name a dead magazine) would almost certainly be chockful of crap. Any randomly chosen issue of Crank! (to name another dead magazine) would almost certainly be full of very good stories.

It just seems that such notions are beyond you. No surprises there — fanboy critics with numbered rating systems are rarely capable of reading for depth or quality.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

It obviously isn't a bell curve, either, that should be pretty clear.

0.5 0.000
1.0 0.005
1.5 0.009
2.0 0.033
2.5 0.086
3.0 0.290
3.5 0.298
4.0 0.210
4.5 0.045
5.0 0.025

As what I have for a sample of genre fiction stuff, which will include a lot of 'best' type material, not your garden variety monthly magazine publication, which would shift it lower. If you had to read all the stories in a year and rate those it would look like different.

You could interpolate a continous function from this, but pretty clearly discrete. :)


If all you can manage is binary, or trinary, then do that. ;-)

Would be pretty impossible to grow up reading Elizabeth Bear, given that she is from North America as far as I know, and her approximate similar age, I would most likely have learned to read somewhat before she did.

Who else but a fanboy would be editing an internet fantasy magazine and writing the stuff, anyway?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Adding a social science number to a qualitative phenomenon doesn't make it quantitative.


Would be pretty impossible to grow up reading Elizabeth Bear, given that she is from North America as far as I know, and her approximate similar age, I would most likely have learned to read somewhat before she did.

Are you being coy, or are you really just as stupid as that sentence reveals?


Who else but a fanboy would be editing an internet fantasy magazine and writing the stuff, anyway?

One of the bright spots of the current era is that some writers and editors are actually emerging without having grown up in fandom. If anything will allow short SF to sustain itself, it'll be from this segment.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I don't see your point--most of my original anthologies have paid royalties over the years--one has been paying out royalties for over fifteen years. Another has been paying out for six years now.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

The point had nothing to do with your sales and everything to do with the fact that I was asked to hand over privately held business information to some random stranger on the Internet.

He was trolling me; I called him on it. You're not being trolled here, so of course he didn't demand to see your royalty statements, or for that matter the spreadsheets or notes you keep while reading stories all year for YB, etc.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If we're talking international venues, then the benchmark isn't the ailing American SF magazines but China's Science Fiction World, which sells about 300,000 copies a month and which might have a million readers [1]. SFW is doing well enough to have hosted the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival. My impression is that the Chinese currently tend to go for what would be considered fairly traditional forms of SF.

I think most reasonable people agree that outsourcing SF (in the restrictive sense) to non-American writers is the wave of the future. Americans can contribute to the field as consumers, the most valuable part of any commercial field.

The audience for CW is growing with every issue [...]

There's an obvious case to compare this to but unfortunately that experiment was derailed by other factors that will not apply to the Clarkesworld experiment. Also, in light of the other factors, I don't think I entirely trust their circulation numbers now.


1: Or about one person in 1,300. If one US magazine had a similar fraction of Americans as readers, they would have about 230,000 readers (But only about 80,000 subscribers, which isn't that much better than the Big Three). Clearly the problem here is that the US is horribly underpopulated and its niche markets are accordingly puny in absolute numbers. US SF editors should consider contributing money to campaigns to increase American TFRs [2] as well as immigration to the US to preserve their own futures. This could pay off in less than a generation.

Mind you, the Baby Boom didn't really pay off for the traditional SF magazines because the bloom in the early 1950s was cut short by the destruction of the American News Company. As long as there isn't some kind of headlong rush to consolidate magazine distribution into a few large and vulnerable companies going on today, it seems unlikely that a similar event could occur in the near future.

2: Humanely. Romanian-style programs need not apply. I'm not a monster and I think it is entirely possible that there is some humane path between the underpopulation of today and a more reasonable population density in North America. Even matching the UK's population density would get the US to about 2.5 billion people.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

SFW is hardly a relevant comparison, not anymore than pointing out the number of bicycles in China is when discussing the woes of the Big Three automakers in the US. I know the magazine fascinates you, but the entire line of argument is jejune, not the least reason being that I was talking about a) the Web specifically and b) the English-reading audience.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The comparison I'd have in mind is how American car makers failed to adapt to changing customer desires and what happened when overseas manufactures gained access to the North American market. Or for that matter, why consumer electronics have such a strong Asian component.

As long as the Chinese can't gain access to the North American market, it doesn't matter what they are doing but as manga have showed, language is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Magazines aren't as price-of-production oriented as cars or consumer electronics, unless SFW is a 500 page slick with 70% ads, along the lines of Vogue.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

As long as there isn't some kind of headlong rush to consolidate magazine distribution into a few large and vulnerable companies going on today

Also, surprise, you're soaking in it!

But again, that's actually irrelevant. A more recent ID crunch happened a decado ago, but, and here's the big but:

what other sector of the trade periodical business would allow 5-20% decreases in circulation per annum for a decade without making any notable changes to the product, in either its content, design, price, format, name, etc.?

Can you name ANY?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's easy: Super-hero comics. (http://www.zaksite.co.uk/lockjaw/comic_sales.html)

Aside from being more lurid and a lot more expensive, a superhero comic today is a lot like one from 20 years ago. I will admit that there is a recent change that may turn out to be very significant and that is the increasing importance of perfect bound volumes over stapled periodicals.

DC in particular has had real problems finding a path that doesn't lead to a steady long-term decline in sales. Even their big events don't seem to help: that dip in 1985 - 1986 is about the time they did Crisis.

As an added bonus, North American comics are even more vulnerable to distribution hijinks now than they were during the Heroes World debacle of the mid-1990s and even more than the American News catastrophe of the 1950s.

Interestingly, this is another example of something parts of the Old World does better than the New (Well, make that the English-speaking parts of the New because I have not read a Lusophone or Hispanophone comic in 30 years and I don't know what they are doing). One form of comics that is doing well in North America are shoujo manga, perfect bound volumes that are aimed at women or more specifically at girls.

One American attempt to emulate shoujo manga picked the girl-friendly line name "Minx" and then hired a mostly male line-up of authors to write the comics.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I can think of a significant number of changes superhero comics made.

They shifted away from newsstand sales and towards specialty/direct sales.

They raised the prices significantly in an attempt to increase margins.

They created trade paperbacks and with a product mix: b/w reprints of older material (aiming for the lifelong reader), color reprints of recent material, and TPOs.

They stopped self-regulating content.

You can wave away "more lurid and a lot more expensive" but those are two major changes to the product (of several) tied directly to the attempt to cultivate a different audience than the traditional one of male children.


So, I repeat my question: what other sector of the trade periodical business would allow 5-20% decreases in circulation per annum for a decade without making any notable changes to the product, in either its content, design, price, format, name, etc.?

Can you name ANY?

Two more swings, batta batta batta.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

So electronic versions aren't different?

Evening newspapers did that sort of act here a while ago, though.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Nope, that doesn't change the product being sold on the stands. It does offer another venue for the content, but that isn't the same as actual electronic strategies (putting current content online, or additional content such as blogs, video, etc.)that many periodicals have used to allay costs or build a new audience.

That goes double when the e-version is nearly the same price as the print version. It's an afterthought, not a reaction to the decline in circulation.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Nick, so you're saying you actually read everything published in the field of fantastic fiction? If not, how would you know?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

No, are you saying that you do? I know you make a solid attempt to read all the short fiction, but that you also don't have much of an opportunity to read a large number of novels.

However, one doesn't have to read Every Story EVAR in order to have an informed opinion. I do read a heck of a lot of stories, and more this year than last as I am now once again local to an SF specialty shop that gets the obscure stuff and small zines, and in one of the most heavily serviced areas for bookstores in the country.

I don't read everything, but given the amount I do read and the markets I do read, it would be a bizarre demographic quirk wherein almost all the best stuff is somehow only published in the magazines and by the publishers I miss.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I haven't been talking about novels at all because I don't read many of them.

But as far as short fiction, yes I do try to but invariably miss a few here and there.

I'll give you a list of the mags I have read or will be reading/skimming this year and you can judge. There's already a list of the anthologies I have received so far this year in another post on my blog. If you can't find it I'll repost it in this thread.

I have a reader who reads the mags where I don't think there will be any horror fiction (eg Analog and the mystery mag--he passes on the dark stuff from the mystery mags).
there are nonfiction mags too as I don't have time to separate them out.

Supernatural tales 11 spring read
Subterranean issue #6 read
Subterranean #7 read
The Cincinnati Review 3.2 winter
Conjunctions #48: Faces of Desire
City Slab #10 read
Aurealis 37 read
Keleidotrope 3 October
Aoife’s Kiss September
Hungur Walpurgisnacht
Weird Tales 343 read
Weird Tales 344 read
Weird Tales 345 read
Albedo One issue 32 read
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #20
Black Gate issue 10
Black Gate issue 11
Space & Time #100 spring read
Cemetery Dance Issue #57 read
ASIM # 26 read
ASIM # 27
ASIM # 28 read
ASIM # 29 read
ASIM #31
Out of the Gutter #1
Out of the Gutter #2
Not One of Us #37
Midrash NOOS one off read
Rue Morgue 64 Jan/Feb
Rue Morgue 54 March
Rue Morgue 66 April
Rue Morgue 68 June
Rue Morgue 69 July read
Rue Morgue 70 August read
Rue Morgue 71 September
Rue Morgue 72 October
Postscripts #10 spring special issue read
Sybil’s Garage 4 read
Talebones #34 winter 07 read
Talebones #35 summer read
Tales of the Talisman volume 2 issue 4
Tales of Talisman volume III, issue 1
Tales of the Talisman volume III, issue 2
Dark Discoveries winter read
Dark Discoveries summer 10 read
Zahir 12 spring read
Zahir 13 Summer read
Withersin Magazine issue 1.1
Withersin Magazine issue 1.2
Tales of the Unanticipated #28
Interzone February 208 read
Interzone April 209
Interzone June 210
Interzone July/August 211 read
Dead Reckonings 1 spring
Shimmer winter read
Horror garage #12 read
EQMM January
EQMM February
EQMM March/April
EQMM May
EQMM June
EQMM July
EQMM August
EQMM September/October
EQMM November
EQMM December
AHMM Jan/Feb
AHMM March
AHMM April
AHMM May
AHMM June
AHMM July/August
AHMM September
AHMM October
AHMM November
AHMM December
Prism March read
Prism April/May read
Prism August/Sept
Analog Jan/Feb
Analog March
Analog April
Analog May
Analog June
Analog July/August
Analog September
Analog October
Analog November
Analog December
New Genre Issue 5 read
F&SF January read
F&SF February read
F&SF March read
F&SF April read
F&SF May
F&SF June read
F&SF July read
F&SF August read
F&SF September read
F&SF Oct/Nov
All Hallows 42 read
ASF January read
ASF February
ASF March
ASF April/May
ASF June
ASF July E
ASF August
ASF October/November read
ASF December
Fictitious Force #4
Dark Horizons 50
Dark Wisdom Issue 11 read
Beyond the Borderland 2 December 06 read
Lovecraft’s Disciples 7 December 06 read
Lovecraft’s Disciples 8 March read
Video watchdog 129 Mar/Apr
Video watchdog 130 May
Video Watchdog 131 June
Video Watchdog 132 July
Video Watchdog 133 August
Video Watchdog 134 Sept
On Spec winter read
On Spec spring read
On Spec summer read
Outer Darkness Issue 34
Whispers of Wickedness 14 winter read
Whispers of Wickedness 15 summer
The Horror Fiction Review 15 winter
The Horror Fiction Review 16 spring
Farthing 5 January
Midnight Street issue 8 winter read
Midnight Street issue 9 May/June read
Fantasy Magazine winter issue 5 covered in 06
Fantasy Magazine spring issue 6 read
Realms of Fantasy February read
Realms of Fantasy April read
Realms of Fantasy June read
Realms of Fantasy August read
Realms of Fantasy October read
Grendelsong issue 2 spring
MAR (mid-American Review ) XXII # 2
Fangoria 260 February
Fangoria 262 April
Fangoria 263 May
Fangoria 264 June read
Fangoria 265 August read
Fangoria 267 October
Horror Carousel spring
Apex 9 read
Apex 10 read
Clarkesworld up through August read

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

What, you don't read Nature? You're gonna miss my story in a couple of weeks! :)

Also, how about the "evil" themed issue of Tin House from this April?

Of the mags you list, those I have not seen and skimmed are Keleidotrope, Out of the Gutter, the Not One Of Us one-off (unless it actually was on the shelves at Pandemonium after all), Tales of the Talisman, Zahir, Prism, Fictitious Force, Whispers of Wickedness, and Horror Carousel.

What percentage of the best stories of the year would you say are coming out of those magazines? I'm not even asking about what you'll reprint, but what really knocked your socks enough enough to consider (maybe give an HM to or something)?

My blind guess is that the number of stories that are excellent in those magazines is a very very small one.

[david-de-beer.livejournal.com]

What's EQMM and AHMM?

these are all the mags you read for YB? What about Black Static (3rd Alternative), Strange Horizons, Chizine, Abyss&Apex, Helix and Ideomancer?

not that you don't have enough, already...

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

There you go. Nice list. You could take this and your anthology list, put it in one and have a link from your blog home page perhaps, as this would then basically be what I was wondering about before.