SF Signal: MIND MELD: Is The Short Fiction Market in Trouble?

[ellen_datlow]

"One of the many perennial arguments in the science fiction blogosphere centers on the health of the short fiction market, so we turned the Mind Meld microphone to people in the field and asked them:

Q: Nobody questions the relevance of genre short fiction, but there is some debate about the health of the market itself. From your perspective, is the short fiction market in trouble? If not, why the debate? If so, what is the cause?"

David Moles, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Reed, Mary Robinette Kowal, Sarah Langan, Neal Asher, Jeffrey Ford, Paolo Bacigalupi, A.M. Dellamonica, Rudy Rucker, Abigail Nussbaum, Jason Sizemore, Charles Coleman Finlay take on the question:
Mind Meld

Comments

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

What do you suggest to help distribution and or promotion? The distribution system has the magazines at their mercy. What kind of promotion do you think would work? I' haven't heard any ideas from anyone about this.

Also, I'm not saying you're wrong about readers other than would-be submittors buying the magazines, but where is your evidence of this? Just hearsay and anecdotes aren't good enough.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

My latest gimmick for promotion is trying to leverage my other hobbies... I write computer games "in my spare time" and have tacked on an ad for GUD to the end of it. Then again, the game has to be successful in terms of distribution in order for that to have any effect... and chances are, like anything else, it won't be. But there's always the hope. :)

Definitely there are some readers that are not would-be contributors--perhaps even many. But if all the would-be contributors were subscribers, the industry would look very, very different. I wish I had an easy way to match orders database up with my submissions database, but the data is very non-normal. Even emails aren't very trustworthy so far as that goes, but it could be interesting to see what the data looks like, anyway. Hmm. :)