How many indi­vid­u­als, all told in the English speak­ing world, do you think cur­rently read SF/F short fic­tion, by which I mean read at least one story pub­lished in the past year? Do you think that num­ber is grow­ing or shrink­ing? Explain your num­ber, if you can. My thoughts after the jump.I don’t think the num­ber could be more than 35,000 peo­ple. This is a totally soft num­ber, and I’m guess­ing based on dou­bling the sub­scrip­tion fig­ure of the largest print mag­a­zine, which is as good of a method as I can think of. I sus­pect that we can’t just total up all the sub­scrip­tion num­bers because there’s a huge over­lap between the groups.

If that num­ber is even close to being right, it sure does make genre short fic­tion seem like the most niche of activities…

Now China and it’s SF mag­a­zine… that’s around half a mil­lion? I keep com­ing back to that. There’s some­thing in that num­ber, in that size that I can learn from, that is telling of the sit­u­a­tion, but I can­not fig­ure it out.

Honestly, after being in London, I am sur­prised short fic­tion isn’t more pop­u­lar than it is. Everyone on the tubes appeared to be read­ing some­thing. I saw a lot of books, but mostly the free papers. Has any­one ever tried to do a free paper con­sist­ing of fic­tion? I need to read up on the eco­nom­ics of those free papers. You could get one at every sin­gle tube sta­tion, from one of sev­eral people.

Tagged as: marketing, process, readership, writing SF