The only print books I buy are books I really want but aren’t available in the Kindle store, or technical manuals with lots of illustrations or where careful line formatting really matters to understanding code examples.  And that’s only if I can’t get a PDF of those. As far as fiction goes, I have converted 100% over to Kindle, and my purchases are on track to match or exceed what I was buying in print.

My wife is slightly slower to make the change, but the availability of classic fiction for free in the iBookstore has changed her reading habits as well.  I see from looking at iTunes that she’s downloaded a couple dozen books that are in the public domain.  She hasn’t been big on the Kindle yet, but I suspect this is more related to her being in graduate school than because she’s not making the jump to e-books.

All it took to finally push me to complete eBook purchasing was a store where most everything I wanted was available and a large color screen capable of doing more than just e-books.  Its so convenient to be able to pop into Amazon any time I hear about a book I want, find out if it’s available, and buy it with one-click shopping.  I’ve always got a few books on deck.  Something about the iPad means I read more and more quickly lately as well, but I can’t place exactly what about it does that.  Sheer novelty, maybe. 

Also, I’m really tired of the huge boxes of books every time we move.

I don’t think I could have done it with the Kindle device itself, or any e-paper device really.  I understand why most of the e-paper aficionados go that route, but it’s slowness of refresh was the deal breaker for me.

There’s this definite feeling in the air that things are changing rapidly, tipping past the tipping point.  More and more of the work I do as a web designer involves setting up places to help market or sell e-books.  It’s really great to see this new electronic renaissance happening in publishing.  The web brought one big wave of change, and lower-cost e-readers is bringing yet another.

How do you feel about this shift?  Are you making the change as well, or are you sticking to paper?

LIE #1:   Editors give every story fair consideration. OR:  Editors reject stories without reading them at all.

The truth is, the slush is deep, and it’s rarely an editor’s favorite part of the job.  Why do you think so many places have slush readers?

Every story doesn’t get fair consideration.  Not every story deserves it.  If you can’t be bothered to read the submission guidelines and follow them, it’s an easy rejection.  If you have five grammar and spelling mistakes in the first two paragraphs, it’s an easy rejection.    If it’s a story about vampires, and I hate vampire stories, it’s mostly an easy rejection.

Most stories get at least a page out of me. Then I skip to the last 3 paragraphs, if I’m feeling generous.   Some get less.   Some work is so obviously bad that it’s startlingly easy to know it’s not going to work.  But every story gets looked at.  Nothing ever gets rejected without being partially read.  Honest.

LIE #2:  Editors never reject a good story.

I rejected plenty of really good stories at the Fortean Bureau.   I’ve even rejected a couple at Escape Pod.  The reason is pretty simple: editorial vision or scope.   The Fortean Bureau was looking for a particular kind of story.  Your space opera, no matter how good, was never going to appear there.  Likewise, we don’t accept horror or fantasy at Escape Pod.   If the story is good, and sucks me in, I will recommend sending it over to the other editors.

Stories get rejected for being too long, too short, too similiar to another story the editor has already bought… there are as many reasons for rejection as there are stories.  And not all of them involve you making mistakes.  There are aspects of the process that a writer cannot control.  Best to just relax about it.

LIE #3:  Editors don’t foster new writers like they did in the old days, and don’t care about new talent.

John W. Campbell was a meddlesome bastard who sent his writers specific ideas for stories.  He was not what you call a “hands off” kind of editor.  He wrote his fair share of stories, and some of the tales I’ve heard about him make me think that he was often thinking as a writer as much as he was an editor.  He wasn’t afraid to rewrite someone else’s story.

For whatever bizzare reason, some people wish editors would take that level of interest in their work, and  they lament that editors no longer foster new writers, giving them the kind of constructive criticism that leads to their personal growth.  Everything for writers was just wonderful back then but these editors today are jerks!

Not true.  Campbell may have had time to do this with a larger percentage of his submissions, but the field was smaller then.  Today, there are tens of thousands of writers all trying to break in to the same publications.  We simply don’t have time to give personal feedback to each submission.  These days, sometimes the best you get is an encouraging rejection.  My first came from Stanley Schmidt: “I like your writing, so I hope you will send more in the future.”  Not very specific, but it does the trick.  It tells you that you’re on the right track.

As much as I give Gordon van Gelder a hard time for his opposition to online media, the man writes a very succinct and helpful rejection letter.     Even the form letters have a system to them to help you figure out why the story was rejected.  I always simultaneously feared and looked forward to his short notes.

Editors do build a stable of writers.  The reason most people don’t see it is because by the time you come along, the editor has already established a group of authors he or she can count on.  But short story writers in particular are always going on to write novels, so openings do occur from time to time.

If you really want feedback on your work, join a workshop or critique circle.  It’s not the editor’s job to help you become a better writer.  Sometimes, we’re helpful, but we can’t do it for everyone.

LIE #4:  Editors are people too.

“Editors are just like us.”  No, we’re not. You don’t have a neverending stream of bad writing coming at you day in, day out.    You get to read for pleasure, selecting material that has been through at least one filter.  Whereas you turn on the tap and get a stream of nice drinkable water,  we put our mouths to a sewer pipe and hope to get at least one swallow that won’t give us raging diarrhea.

I know the sentiment of the phrase is meant to imply that we’re not godlike arbiters of taste, making and breaking careers on a whim.    But editors do wield power.  And it changes us.  Generally it makes us ill-tempered and easily distracted by shiny objects.    I’ve yet to feel godlike, but I’m not ruling out the possibility.  Maybe when something I’ve published wins a Hugo, I will ascend to Asgard.

LIE #5:  Editors (and critics) are failed writers.

As a rule, no.  A lot of us are moderately successful writers.   Some of us have never wanted to write and never will.  There are a few who have started out as writers and given it up for the editing/publishing game (Gordon, I think), but not all of us have.

We’re not driven to become editors out of bitterness.  We all come to the position for different reasons, but I think most of us start out as optimistic and hopeful.  We think that maybe we have a vision for a type of story that nobody else has seen before.  We day dream about finding writers that amaze us and publishing them before anyone else.

It takes a peculiar sort of ego to take up editing.  And thank god.  If it wasn’t for editors, we’d all have to sort through the kind of self-published garbage that made it possible for Geocities to stay in business for so long.  I shudder to think of a world without editors.

And finally, a well-known truth:

You can bribe an editor.

Most of us are broke and driven to drink copious amounts of alcohol.  See the sewer pipe analogy above.  That gives us a weakness you can exploit.  Next time you’re at a convention, go to the bar, and buy a drink for your favorite editor.  Make sure you do it early on, because seven or eight drinks in, we’ll never remember your name.   We’ll be lucky to wake up in the right hotel room, or even the right state.  Who bought the drinks on a night like that will be the least of our concerns when we wake up naked atop a desert mesa covered from head to toe in blue paint.

Putting a name to a face, along with a mental database note of “bought me a beer” doesn’t hurt.  One of the things that makes editing easier is pretending that the stories aren’t all written by human beings with heart.  Sometimes, we have to put that out of our minds.  And if you find a way to politely shatter that illusion, well, it can be good for you.  But only if you are likely to start selling stories anyway.

There are no great secrets to being published.  Read lots.   Write stories.  Lots and lots of stories.  Submit the work until the stories are either accepted or rejected by every market you could bear to see your name associated with.  That’s pretty much all there is to it.  Everything else is basically unimportant.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1.  I’d like (and am thinking about building) an online submission tracker software that’s as easy to use as Gmail and that can actually recommend markets to me for pieces.  I’d like it to track keywords associated with my work.  And after I sell a piece, I’d like to keep track of what rights I’ve sold, where to, and have it suggest reprint opportunities to consider.   In addition, the site would provide detailed statistics on markets, with graphs, culled anonymously from user data.

2. I’d like this same software to track my headcount progress and help me set goals.  I’d like it to graph my productivity, and compare it against the average user of the site.   I’d like a simple script to add to my site that will act as a word progress bar that updates itself automatically based on what I enter in my software.

3. I’d like to be able to actually load my submissions into these programs.  Then I’d like to tell it where I am submitting next, and have it automatically format my cover letter and story in the preferred format and present it to me for printing.

4.  I’d like to be able to set a queue for each story, so that when a story is rejected, and I enter it into the software, it readies it for the next location automatically.  Basically, automating my workflow.

What else could your computer do for your writing?  And yes, be forewarned that I may borrow your idea as a feature for an application I’m considering building.

So what are some problems you’d like to see solved?

The anthology of astronomy stories I’ve been working on for the last year or two, off and on, is finally completed and available: Diamonds in the Sky.

The anthology is free and you can go there now and read the stories, most of which are original but a few of which are reprints from Analog or Asimov’s. Contributors include Hugo and Nebula award winning authors. Each story focuses on one or two key ideas from astronomy and should have some educational value, but are hopefully first and foremost simply entertaining and good quality stories. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a public education and outreach effort, and I’d like to reach as many readers as possible so please spread the word!

via Mike Brotherton: SF Writer.

I did the website for Diamonds over a year ago.  This one has been a long time in the works, but it’s now finally live!

Roundbottom is my core project right now, but I have a strong desire to launch a new ‘zine. At the very least, I am going to publish a few stories in the Fortean Bureau format, but what if… what if I created a meta publication like the Surreal Guide to Botany or the Disease Guide from a year or so back–but as a kind of naturalist’s research publication.  Nothing stuffy and dry like real scientific magazines, but basically paying other people to write posts like Dr. Roundbottom.  I’d accept submissions from both artists and writers. I’ll provide a forum for artists and writers to team up, if they want to make a joint production of an article/piece.

Art would be allowed in any format.  Not everyone has to do the photography thing that I’m doing.  But the basic idea behind all of this is that each article is written by another naturalist in their own world, similar or different to Dr. Roundbottom, but at least passably steampunk.

To start, I’d offer $50 a post (not longer than 2000 words) for the writing and $50 for the art.  You’d be free to sell both anywhere, and we will provide a link to sell prints at your print store for artists.   We’d have an option to pay more at the end of the year to publish a print edition of the research notes.

Finally, and I’d be doing the same, you have to allow–and I’m not sure how to legally formalize this–references to be made to your work and characters in other submissions/posts.  For instance, Dr. Roundbottom himself might reference your paper and link to it while talking about something similar in his world.  And you’ll be able to do the same with Roundbottom.  This kind of sharing isn’t covered under any kind of Creative Commons license that I know of, so perhaps I would need some odd contract legalize.  I should talk to the Creative Commons people and see if they have suggestions.

Would anyone submit to something like this?  I’m basically thinking about the comments that happen already on Roundbottom and formalizing a way for writers and artists to participate in this fashion and get paid for it. I understand that it would be difficult to sell any writing written directly for htis project to anything else, so that’s one flaw that i have to consider.  Please provide your thoughts and comments!  Would you submit something to this kind of publication?  What rules do you think would need to be made?

Personally, I think if you can do print, do it.  But electronic editions should be a given. It costs maybe an hour of your time to take your files and convert them into the popular formats.  There are websites that do it for you. If anyone wants to know about those, I’ll dig up the links.

Cory Doctorow has talked about this in the past, and I agree with him.  Sell a normal subscription for print, but those people get a free electronic version as well.  The electronic version supports the print version.  It’s easier to search, and, honestly, easier to share, which at the size we’re talking about?  People pirating your stories around is a good thing.  Anything that makes it easier for people to spread the word about your publication is a plus.

Also, sell a cheaper straight electronic version.  If someone really wants to just get a PRC file every month, then let them.  But I think you’ll find that the electronic version is a selling point of the print version.  I can’t guarantee it will increase sales, but I think it’s the best of both worlds.  It’s your chocolate in my peanut butter, my peanut butter in your chocolate.  Mmmm!

I’d be ecstatic if every book I bought came with an electronic version so that I can search it afterwards, or even better, while I’m waiting for the book to arrive via Amazon.  In fact, yesterday, I ordered some web application design texts and after I placed my order, Amazon tried to sell me a $15 e-book copy of one of the books so I could start reading right away.  That’s great–only I sure as hell ain’t going to pay another $15 for a $50 book for that promise (and probably find that it is full of DRM that prevents me from really using it).

There are things I can do so much better on a computer or e-reader than I can do with a book.  But paper is still easier to read until we see e-ink really take off (the Kindle is apparently cool, but I’ve never seen one in the wild).    The two formats are complimentary, and I’d really like to see someone try out the model I’ve outlined above.  I’d subscribe, anyway, and I currently subscribe to no magazines (although that’s a factor more of my recent unemployment than it is any problem with the magazines).

Are you publishing a print zine and giving away e-copies to your subscribers for archiving and easy indexing?  Let me know in the comments.

Donors receive prizes and gifts in addition to a nifty membership card with artwork by a different artist each year.  This year,  the editor-in-chief approached me about doing a photograph for the membership card.  I have given them a Roundbottom–style image called “The Dissection.”  It looks exactly like it sounds.  The only way you can See that image in all its glory is to donate to Strange Horizons!  If you’re a Roundbottom completest, send money now.

This is, by the way, the “secret” image and photoshoot that I was referring to a while back.  I’m very happy with the way it turned out.  In case you’re wondering, the beautiful model is my wife.  The woman holding the scalpel is just some person I dragged in off the street for the shoot. I kid!    You can catch a glimpse of the image over on the 2008 fund drive page.  Go check it out and let me know what you think.  I’ve had it on my desktop as wallpaper for weeks, and I really dig it.

Speaking of Desktop Wallpaper…

Is that something any of you would be interested in me making from some of my photography?  If you want wallpaper, just let me know what image and what resolution, and I will make it for you and post it on the site.  I’ll probably include my name and site URL in the lower right hand corner, just as  a little bit of advertising for me, but leave it otherwise unadorned.   Post your thoughts in the comments, or email me directly.

I hear what you’re thinking, “You mean your dream magazine wasn’t the Fortean Bureau?” At the time, it was everything I could make it be with the constraints (financial, content, format) I worked under. And even though the magazine is on semi-permanent hiatus, I still follow the publishing side of ‘zines, and I’m still coming up with ideas for what I would do differently the next time. Here are a few of the ideas that I can’t stop thinking about and wanted to share with you and see what you think. Many of them shake up the way things work now in a fundamental way. Don’t take these ideas as to be an assault on the old ways, your favorite magazines, or your favorite writers. These are thought experiments and can’t do you any harm.

Play With the Creative Commons: The Story Factory

Many writers have released content under the Creative Commons license, giving explicit permission for the kind of sharing that cannot be stopped thanks to the realities of the web. I think we’ve generally reached a point where most non-Luddites accept the web for what it is. Many of us are hoping there will still yet be a way to give away content online and still make some money without being famous in the first place. But that’s another topic for another time. I want to talk about the other types of Creative Commons licenses as a foundation for a different kind of magazine.

The idea here is to publish work, and pay very well for it, under the stipulation that it must be released under a creative commons license that allows for commercial derivatives. Essentially– pay authors to open source a story entirely. That’s step one.

And in an acknowledgment that the line between writers and fans has blurred, in step two, you solicit submissions that are built with the open source tools provided by your core writer. Each publishing cycle, you have one new open-source piece, and the previous month’s derivative works. If you want, use the original author to help select the issue’s secondary wave content.

Step three, once a year, you accept submissions that are derivative from everything from the previous year, which includes all second-wave works too (which were required to be released under share-a-like licenses as well). So, you end up with the original, the first wave of derivative works, and then a third wave of derivative works that can draw from all of the above. Essentially, a CC-licensed enforced shared world process, paid for by the magazine. Creating a form of legal fan fiction, but with the gateway of an editor to ensure quality. Authors can always play in the worlds they created, but they open those worlds up from the start for others too.

Underlying all of this is linking technology that threads the stories together on the site, making it easy to find related content. Wind this sucker up, and watch it go. Sell advertising as your revenue model, maybe. Or possibly use the fund drive model.

User-Selected Content: The Mob

Digg is a social website that selects its content by user consensus. Each member of the site can dig or bury a story, and these cause content to rise to the front page, where it is seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Take this model and apply it to the publishing of a zine, with some modifications.

First of all, you have an editorial board that applies loose standards, weeding out the truly awful stuff. The work above a very basic level of competency is paid a small fee, say $10, and held for further consideration, with a maximum limit set.

Create a members only, password-protected area for your core fandom. They pay a small yearly fee to have privileged access to content. Then you dump the incoming slush pile into the hopper and your core fans go to town, ranking and rating the stories, ultimately, giving it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. At the end of a publishing cycle, you take the best-rated stories, and you pay them a larger fee, and then you reject the rest.

Some publishers will argue that being taken to the second level of consideration will constitute being published. An adopter of this model should remain neutral on the issue, saying that this assessment is up to the individual magazines. Your recommendation would be–send your work as a last resort, if this is a concern you have. The details will fall out over time, and other editors will decide how they feel about work that’s been through your system.

Go Really Multimedia: The Soup

Let’s face it. You automatically limit your audience by focusing on genre literature. The web allows you to publish any information at all. Take advantage of that. Publish comics, videos, animations, Flash games, illustrations, audio plays. Publish all of it, and most importantly, don’t section everything off into little ghettos. The illustrations are not secondary to the stories. Everything is presented on an equal footing. It’s all speculative art.

Accept reprints here. You probably can’t afford to demand exclusive rights in perpetuity from the video makers or illustrators, and your best work is going to be stuff that’s been out on the web already. The value of your zine is not its exclusivity but in the way it aggregates the best content together. A one-stop shop for all the SF things you like. There’s a wealth of artists working in a variety of mediums, and the people that are fans of each one of these mediums could potentially be brought together under one roof, and then you could see more cross-pollination. Video watchers occasionally reading a story, maybe? A lot of genre fans don’t even know genre magazines exist. Bring those people in with the other content and expose them to great content. It’s a win for everybody.

Publish and Fund Alternate Reality Games: The Metaverse

I’ve nattered on about ARGs in the past. Some of the genre’s best writers are making a partial living writing for really big budget ARG games for companies like Microsoft or the Beijing Olympics. There’s no reason we can’t take the general model here and build a magazine around it, except that they are generally massive undertakings.

So limit their scope. Think of the pre-existing ARGs as novels in scope. Take the concept and bring the experience down to one that can be played out in a few hours, or a month, here and there. As a publisher, you would provide tools to facilitate the creation, as well as editorial guidance. Perhaps a social networking tool to encourage ARG makers with different skillsets to collaborate and create the projects. Once projects are completed, they are then submitted for review. You can choose to pay for the project and run it as your content, or not. If not, the team can take their game and publicize it themselves.

I leave the funding model as an exercise for the reader, because I don’t have a clue.

Help the Fans Put their Money Where their Mouth is: The Rocket-shaped Piggy Bank

A common complaint among fans is that they can’t find the work that they want to read. So build a magazine that uses basic economics to determine which authors you publish. Underlying it is a social networking tool that allows fans to find other fans with common authorial interests. Coalitions can be formed, and a database of working SF authors is provided. Authors can take control of their profiles and provide information to the fans–but the main idea here is to say “here’s what I need to do what you want.”

Inspired by the site Fundable, you take the basic idea of group fundraising that doesn’t take any money until the goal is met, and you make it possible for fans to pool resources and directly contract with authors to write stories. At least at first, the fundraisers probably shouldn’t be able to require anything specific about the work other than its author, but it’s possible that you could open up the model so that a group could offer bounties on stories with elements they like. For instance, The Coalition For More Robots raises $500 in pledged donations for a story featuring the kind of robots Asimov used to write about. The Coalition must elect editorial leaders. These leaders then receive offers from authors and choose whether or not to accept them as meeting their fund requirements. The system would handle all the money side of things in additon to the social networking aspects.

Part of your job as an editor would partly be contacting the authors who have funds raised requesting work from them and letting them know your site exists. Most SF writers have some access to the web, so this would be easy with at least a certain tier of writer. I have a feeling that the kinds of funds we would see would be directed at much bigger name authors, like Martin, King, etc. Those may present difficulties. You would have to develop a blacklist of authors who would not take commission work from the site for any amount of money, maybe, but even without it, nobody is under any obligation to accept the commissions that the site helps organize.

In Conclusion

Some of the above, perhaps all of them, would fail. There are certainly problems with each one that I haven’t gone into here. I may possibly expand on each of these ideas in future posts, examining how they might succeed, or not, and paying attention to what kinds of funding models could keep them running. And hey, if you want to launch a business based on any of these, just give me an opportunity to invest early on, that’s all I ask.

What do you think? Do any of them spark your imagination? What is your dream zine?

A few years ago, we were all upset when SCIFICTION was dropped by the SciFi Channel. The genre lost its best paying market, and arguably the highest quality publication, online or in print. Its departure from the scene left a hole that many have tried to fill, to varying degrees of success. But the world has changed significantly since then.

Today, nearly every publisher, large or small, has some sort of online component. No longer is digital content being largely ignored, as it was when I first came onto the scene in 2001. Baen, Prime Books, Small Beer Press, Tor, just to name a few that have recently or regularly released content online for free. Tor’s coming social networking/publishing site might be the final piece of the puzzle that ties the SF/F community together under one roof (depending on the extent of their social networking tools). I eagerly await the chance to beta test their site.

SCIFICTION and Strange Horizons stood mostly unopposed for a very long time. Smaller, respectable markets flourished, but none of us had the audiences of these two publications. Baen came onto the scene, and shook things up, but I don’t know much about them because their model of the subscriber wall keeps me out. Tor is going to bring in the existing online audience, and I think they have the clout and stable of authors to bring even more readers to online short fiction.

Tor’s entrance onto this stage is going to elevate everyone’s game. With a new giant player on the scene, the smaller publishers are going to be working harder to innovate, harder to stand out. We’ll see even more experimentation. We started out with the online fiction itself as the experiment. Tor’s entrance proves that experiment’s central thesis. People will and do read fiction online, and in great numbers. What’re more, I believe it validates the model of the short fiction as advertisement for long form publishers. Prime Books, Clarkesworld, and Subterranean have pioneered this.

I can’t help but think that we have Cory Doctorow to thank for much of this. I’m sure many people released books online for free before him, but did many who had traditional publishing contracts release their books online in conjunction with the print release? It’s almost certainly his influence that has led Tor to developing their coming site–I’m sure others, such as Patrick Nielsen Hayden and semi-anonymous Tor employees at who I do not know are ultimately responsible for the project, and I don’t want to minimize what they are doing. But Cory blazed the path. That path is turning into a paved road. Soon, it may be a highway.

Who Falls Behind?

I like the fiction in Asimov’s and F&SF very much, but they are beginning to look a bit like large warm-blooded bird ancestors prone to massive extinction by meteor impact. F&SF has made some strides in the online world, with it’s free fiction and blog, but the fiction is mostly pretty old, practically ancient in online terms, and their presentation leaves much to be desired.

Asimov’s web presence has not changed significantly since I first visited their website. It’s a mess, frankly. It’s great that you can buy it for the near-mythic Kindle, and they’ve been available in various e-formats for a long time via Fictionwise. But they have utterly failed to take advantage of the web as a medium. And no, I do not count their septic forums. I haven’t paid much attention to Analog, but I suspect they’re in a similar place, being owned by the same publisher.

What Next?

Who will make the next innovations in publishing? I think it will still be the small, fleet-footed publications like Futurismic, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and so on. Podcasting, once the sole domain of EscapePod, now has several other major players on the field, even excluding the various EscapePod spinoffs. And remember, their number of listeners outweighs the readership of any print magazine out there. I also think that their listeners are not the same people as the subscribers of magazines. It’s a completely different audience, and ignoring the podcast audience would be like throwing money away at this point. I predict more will offer podcasting supplements to their web presences. Small publishers will begin to investigate developing for the mobile web, and this may call for a different type of fiction, something shorter and leaner. The use of multimedia and artwork is going to grow. A simple site like the Fortean Bureau looks like an Amish buggy compared to the hot rods we’ll be seeing in the next couple of years. I don’t know about you, but I’m very optimistic and excited about the things that are to come. We may not get paid much in the short fiction world, but there are more and more opportunities to connect with audiences. And for readers, there’s never been so many options for your reading experience (which presents its own set of problems).

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.