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

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

the only response I keep seeing to new magazine announcements is "I can't wait to submit to it" and the only response to deceased magazines is "Now that's one less place to take my stories." More than ever, about the only thing that gets read in genre magazines is the submission guidelines, and the readers aren't reading anything past the submission address, as any slush reader will attest.

I definitely feel that.

I'm legitimately surprised that nobody's instituted a policy of tying submission acceptance to whether or not the submitter has a subscription to the magazine in order to keep the magazine afloat.

I think I've heard of a place or two that have done that, but I don't remember who or where, so it could have been a dream. Or perhaps subscribing meant you could submit more or got a fast track or something.

Then, these magazines keep sprouting up with the lottery ticket buyer's certainty that they're going to be the special ones, too. ;) Build a quality product, build a reputation, not make the mistakes of your forebears... we're not immune from it, either. :)