Jeremiah Tolbert

(Warning, the below is poorly thought out and writ­ten hastily. I will write more later this week.)
Doug Cohen has recently launched a sub­scribe to a SF mag­a­zine drive via his Livejournal.

I have a sus­pi­cion that telling the SF writ­ing blo­gos­phere to sub­scribe to short fic­tion mag­a­zines in an effort to save short fic­tion is like instruct­ing a bunch of buggy whip mak­ers to buy buggy whips to save the buggy whip man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try.  I know Doug means well, and I don’t mean this as a crit­i­cism of him, but I am very doubt­ful that telling a small group of active online fan­dom to sub­scribe to mag­a­zines will make a bit of dif­fer­ence in the gen­eral decline.   I’ve been just as guilty

The gorilla in the room that we rarely acknowl­edge is that nobody wants to read short fic­tion.  If they did, then there wouldn’t be this mess. I’ve heard and read hand wav­ing about the changes in dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els, but hon­estly, I don’t buy it.  In this day and age, if you have a burn­ing desire to read sci­ence fic­tion short sto­ries, you can Google up a mag­a­zine in less than a second.

Do I think that the pub­lic could be mar­keted towards to encour­age the read­ing of more short fic­tion? Maybe.  A good mar­ket­ing team can sell just about any­thing.  Do I think any­one has the money to back a large cam­paign like this?  No.  SFWA would be the only orga­ni­za­tion that I could see such an ini­tia­tive com­ing from, and they’re a mas­sive joke; an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to inter­nal pol­i­tics and rumor­mon­ger­ing more than the decline and col­lapse of the indus­try around it.

There is no solu­tion.  The public’s inter­est has moved on.  If you’re a writer, go write video games, movies, tele­vi­sion, or books, in that order of pop­u­lar­ity.  That is where the public’s inter­est is right now, and if you don’t like it, then I’m afraid that you should prob­a­bly get used to the idea that short fic­tion is a small, niche hobby of lit­tle impor­tance.  I’m fine with that.  I find that I enjoy writ­ing it, and that’s enough for me.  Short fic­tion for me is a way to learn writ­ing, but I won’t regret leav­ing it behind if I were to crack another (more pop­u­lar and bet­ter pay­ing) medium, or find some amal­gam of sev­eral of my own.

I don’t sup­port the record indus­try for its fail­ing busi­ness model. I don’t think the SF print mag­a­zine world deserve spe­cial treat­ment either.  I do, in fact sub­scribe to quite a few mag­a­zines.  But it’s not out of any effort to save them from the dust­bin. There’s plenty to read online, and will be as long as weirdos like me keep writ­ing it.

I’ve been around and around the fund­ing mod­els for online mag­a­zines in my head.  I’ve con­cocted the most ridicu­lous Web 2.0 mod­els for online pub­lish­ing that you can imag­ine.  But none of them will work, because there’s no evi­dence what-​​so-​​ever that there is enough pub­lic inter­est to jus­tify the build­ing of such a thing.  Every model fails, because there just aren’t enough peo­ple inter­ested in read­ing and sup­port­ing a mag­a­zine mon­e­tar­ily for it to even sus­tain itself.   Don’t quote Strange Horizons at me, either.  Their fund drive doesn’t seem to be doing too well this time around.

Science Fiction, meet the long tail.  It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.

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Tags: business, My Writing, SF, short fiction