To Save SF Short Fiction, We Had to Destroy It
Filed Under: SF Business, SF Publishers, Speculative Fiction
(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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