The Coming Online SF/F Renaissance
Filed Under: SF Publishers, Speculative Fiction
Tor Will Make a Big Splash
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).
