Today’s Market Health Question: How Many Readers Are There?
Filed Under: SF Business, Speculative Fiction
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.
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