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

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

A few days back, a friend asked me about the financial sanity of getting a dealer's booth at a convention we both know this coming August. Seeing how she wasn't selling books or magazines, I told her that she was wasting her time, because almost the entire population at literary cons consist of wannabes trying to get someone to buy their unpublished stories or pros trying to get someone to buy their already-published stories. Increasingly, nobody talks about going to these events to read those stories, unless they're looking forward to reading a friend's story in order to offer support or reading an enemy's story to offer derision. A few interested bystanders might show up from time to time, but after a few hours, they leave and they don't come back. When this gets pointed out to the people running the cons, though, they get incredibly defensive about their defective promotional efforts, and absolutely nothing changes.

Sadly, the genre magazine market, online and offline, reached that level years ago, and it's not going to get better. If anyone outside the genre community thought that financing a science fiction magazine was viable or even sane, then Conde Nast and Time Warner would have put out their own titles a decade ago.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

Seems to be pretty much the same things being said, though a few things surprised me (like Rudy Rucker's negative experience with "lesser paying" mags). In any case, I'm always for more discussion. :) And it is somewhat surreal to see all these big authors talking in the same place on the same subject. :)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I disagree. There are LOTS of people buying books. But I'm not sure I know what she'd be selling at a convention so have no idea if it WOULD be worth her while... If you're talking about Worldcon in Denver I believe a membership of several thousand people looking to buy books/jewelry/toys/videos/art/and clothing is probably a very good idea. If it's a tiny convention of 100-200 people then probably not so.

But all in all, I don't see how this relates to the marketability of genre magazines....

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Never mind. I've been noting that nobody in the genre wants to do anything about the horrible distribution and worse promotion of genre magazines for a decade, but 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. At the rate things are going, 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.

It's pure economics: we have fewer publications able or willing to host the work that gets submitted, and even fewer people willing to pay to keep those publications afloat, but lots and lots of established and wannabe writers who continue to flood the slush piles, all full of a lottery ticket buyer's certainty that they're going to be the special ones. It's a precarious system even when the retail system supporting this little game is running well, and if Borders decides to sell and the only buyer is a liquidator, well, things are going to get even uglier than they currently are.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Speaking from experience, I agree with Rucker's assessment, because generally the smaller the magazine, the more arrogant the editor/publisher. One of the final straws that convinced me to quit writing on a professional basis was when one of these darlings contacted me to contribute an article or two, and when I asked about pay rates, I received a letter starting "Since I'm not a well-heeled trust fund baby, we'll pay when we're profitable..." I have a good friend who quit being an artist for genre magazines for the same exact reason: he spent years being chased by editors who wanted his work but expected him to work "on spec" because "you need to pay your dues", and he finally asked himself "Isn't twenty years of dues-paying enough?"

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

Wow, that really hurts. Those people should be shot (or just generally disparaged or... something).

GUD's take on art, since we can't pay proper rates for it, is we're primarily looking for NOT spec work, but rather just "stuff that works with what we've got and is a story in and of itself". Stuff that the artists have already done and would like to get a little something extra for and perhaps a little more recognition for. Or that's our goal, anyway. We've begged spec work here and there, but we know it's a tough proposition. I do a lot of trawling through deviantart, asking folks if they'd consider submitting this or that...

[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]

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. :)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Arrogance is unacceptable from anyone. Although I admit that I DO get annoyed when submittors don't follow guidelines--and have to force myself to not get rude when scribbline on the submissions I'm STILL getting for SCIFICTION that the goddamned website's been dead 2 1/2 years....

[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. :)

[unrealfred.livejournal.com]

It seems like there's been an explosion of short fiction markets in recent years, albeit increasingly few (my own zine included) that can offer more than a token payment, or whose circulation numbers are anything worth getting excited about. You can argue that there's less money in it than there used to be, and you can maybe argue that fewer people are reading it when it's finally published. But I think it's tough to make the argument that there's less quality short fiction out there nowadays, or that fewer people are writing it. I think that's demonstrably not the case. Short fiction markets may not be a sustainable business model...but then, did people really get into writing and publishing because they thought it would make them money?

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I certainly got into editing as a professional expecting to get paid for my work!

[unrealfred.livejournal.com]

Oh no, absolutely. It wasn't my intention to suggest otherwise, or that a professional shouldn't expect to be treated with common professional courtesy. I just think it's a little premature to ring the death knell for the short fiction market because it maybe isn't hugely profitable.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I agree. The death knell has been ringing since I got into the field in the early 80s.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

A youtube remix of that could be quite informative. :)