Not signed in (Sign In)
Categories
- Main Junction
- CROSSED
- London Zoo
- Freakangels
- Music
- Printheads
- Culturegasm
- Web Nuggets
- WorldWeird
- Blogs
Welcome, Guest
Vanilla is a product of Lussumo:
Documentation and Support.
-
-
CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeApr 2nd 2008
I suspect a planned invasion of MURKY DEPTHS whores...! -
-
I remain convinced that Analog and the like receive more submitted stories each month than they sell issues.
I'm a librarian, and I made a point of subscribing my library to Analog. It gets checked out a moderate amount (by which I mean that last year about 70% of the issues were used at least once). I read it myself, sometimes, but to be honest I hate their formatting. The two long columns make the stories almost unreadable.
Apart from that, the only science fiction "magazine" I keep up with is 365 Tomorrows, an online flash fiction daily. I did just discover a very neat online publication called "Escape Pod", a regular podcast of science fiction short stories. I may give it a go for my drive to work. -
GUD Magazine loves librarians. Any arm twisting we can do for you to consider us? We're listed with EBSCO. :)
We're also offering free digital copies to libraries at the moment. libraries@gudmagazine.com -
- CommentAuthorpaulmcenery
- CommentTimeApr 2nd 2008
I bought the old Interzone all the way from the first issue to the last.
The first two issues of the new Interzone arrived as the end of the subscription, and they were so screamingly awful that the only thing worth reading -- or looking at, the illustration nose-dived, too -- was Nick Lowe's film reviews.
I still miss them.
Picked up a copy of PostScript over at Borderlands the other day, though. And pick up any original anthologies that look interesting, like the new Solaris one.
And I keep meaning to read Rudy's Flurb, but I can't bring myself to enjoy prose off the screen. -
-
CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeApr 2nd 2008
And I keep meaning to read Rudy's Flurb, but I can't bring myself to enjoy prose off the screen.
You should try to make the effort, or nick someone's printer. It's a lot of fun. -
-
Oddly, I think flash fiction has found its niche online in such a way that it will probably always be the most popular online prose fiction form. In the same way that webcomics often work better as single episodic pages than multi-page arcs, flash fiction works better online than walls of text. It's not that attention spans are shorter online, it's just that the natural page length online is a screen. This translates to about 500-600 words of text, or about 9 panels of comic.
-
- CommentAuthorRichard Kadrey
- CommentTimeApr 2nd 2008
I'm back to reading F&SF and Asimov's, both to throw some money at them so they can limp along for a while onger and for purely self-serving purposes. I'm back to writing normal short stories after years of writing freakshow shorts and novels.
What's interesting to me is how consistently inconsistent the zines remain. Story quality within an issue can vary widely and some issues seem to contain nothing but duds. Then an issue comes along where it's gems all the way through (Though I haven't seen one of those recently). I haven't read Interzone in years, but I'm anxious to pick up a couple of issues.
For online zines, there's plenty of good material sitting in the InfiniteMatrix.net archives. Rudy Rucker's Flurb is also consistently interesting. Yeah, both of those places have published me, but they've also published people like Terry Bisson, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Michael Swanwick, Howard Waldrop, John Shirley, Marc Laidlaw and Michael Blumlein. Like Warren said, if you absolutely can't read the stories on screen, print them out. They're worth it. -
I tend to purchase the science fiction magazines when they catch my attention with a good story or two. If the Azimov, SF&F or Analog has a great story that catches my eye I buy it. I use to be subscribed to Cemetery Dance, but let that lapse, though they do have great columns that were almost as good as the stories.
The problem is that the different magazines varied in quality so much that it is really hard to justify a subscription. Now that I hear Jeff Vandermeer is involved with Weird Tales I may have to consider a subscription as no on has it on the shelves here for me to peruse. -
I dare ask the question: Mr Ellis, what was your reason for asking
do you regularly read sf magazines? If so, which ones?,
? . . . and whores generally do it for money, not love. . . but, then, there's always the exception . . . -
- CommentAuthorPaigan Stone
- CommentTimeApr 3rd 2008
Whores... and Murky Depths? Now - I think there is an erotic story lurking there somewhere. (I haven't been paid though....has anyone else? lol!) -
Ms Stone? Like I said there's always an exception. :)
You can read what Interzone's The Fix thinks of the whorebag production. -
I'm reading the fiction that appears at Futurismic, and digging on their Flash Fiction Fridays. Meanwhile, The Escapist Magazine just launched their first fiction issue. I've got a short story, "Griefer," in that one. These are both online publications, as you probably know.
-
Heh! What about the GUD whores?
-
It occurs to me that if if we're going to talk about the poor sales of sci-fi short fiction magazines, we should talk about the poor sales of short fiction periodicals in general. I have a friend who works at A Public Space. Their print run--and I don't have the actual numbers, just going off what he said me--tend to be around 8,000. I believe that McSweeney's The Believer tends to do around 20,000, and that's a big magazine, the kind of literary magazine it's COOL to read. I don't know what the sales of One Story or other magazines are, but I'm sure they are similarly low. So for Asimov's to be selling around 20,000 when it's printed on pulp and isn't doing anything particularly innovative is surprisingly good.
It's obvious, though, that the short story is dying as a medium that people want to read. Short story collections never sell, and, with notable exceptions like The New Yorker, there aren't many periodicals featuring short stories that people buy in large numbers. -
My gut, which admittedly may be naively hopeful, says that this is a cyclical thing. Short fiction may never return to the popularity of the pulps, when it was filling a niche that doesn't quite exist anymore, but I think the proliferation of something Kindle-like (but better) could see short fiction make a comeback that counts. That said, I'm not sure that the short-fiction periodical is as likely to swing, pendulum-like, back to success. It's the instant gratification and rapid delivery of short fiction (like flash fiction) that I think will help give it new legs soon-ish.
Speaking as a professional in the gaming market, in which it's possible to make a (meager, threadbare) living on far fewer than 8,000 copies, I think it's fair to say that short fiction is shrinking, but not dying. The difficulty, I think, is that it's moving into a realm for which no reliable polling exists, so there's no way to know just what it's doing or, really, how to monetize (ugh) it.
Maybe. I dunno. -
Short story collections never sell
- Unless they're written by Neil Gaiman. -
Though I would just mention this:
When I worked at the bookstore, I was in charge of handling the magazines. Once <em>Fantasy & Science Fiction</em> switched to that digest format, I convinced the managers to let me put it up in the Sci-Fi section with the books. Just put it on a display shelf, next to the new Robert Jordan books, or whatever. We doubled the number that we sold--by which I mean, we had been selling two of the four copies we got in every month, but now were selling all of them. Unfortunately, I was never able to get the managers to increase the draw for this magazine.
I wonder if there's more of a market for this than we tend to think, but folks just aren't marketing it right. -
I've had a subscription to Asimov's for the last 6 or so years, though I rarely get around to reading it. I wouldn't cancel it, regardless, because it's the only magazine I get and I like having piles upon piles of short stories waiting to be read whenever I get the chance (and the motivation).
I've been trying to get issues of Steampunk Magazine from a physical store near me (Red Emmas) but whenever I finally get into Baltimore to go there they've sold out. I may have to break down and order them online. -
- CommentAuthorPaigan Stone
- CommentTimeApr 3rd 2008
Lucifal - looks like good news for Murky Depths to me... :) And it agrees with what I was saying, MD is a very good read. I'm rather partial to Interzone also though. -
-
CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeApr 3rd 2008
SF magazine sales 2006.
Some more sf magazine numbers to play with.
From an article discussing a piece saying magazine sales are trending up:Notes: pages on the TIN HOUSE website suggest that its circulation has risen from 10000 to 12000 since 2003. As of 2006, it was stated that The Paris Review’s circulation had risen “from under 5,000 to more than 13,000.” As of 2006, McSWEENEY’S “prints 20,000 copies an issue.” As of end 2006, “GRANTA’s circulation is steady at almost 50,000 worldwide”. GRANTA’s been up and down over the years — seems to me that this is a slight increase over since 2004 or so.
I’m quite surprised to note that ADBUSTERS has a circulation of 120000.
Cory Doctorow made a central point: "But hell, how many more years’ worth of 13 percent declines can the magazines hack? " -