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

[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.