The Market for Short SFF (Continued)

The reaction to the Neil Clarke editorial continues to roll in. In addition to the posts that I summarized yesterday, today I came across a response by Steve Davidson from Amazing Stories. According to Davidson, Amazing Stories is currently what Clarke would call a hobbyist, in that it does not pay pro rates, but that is in the process of transitioning having recently paid pro rates in its inaugural writing contest.

Most of what Davidson has to say is tangential to the points I am interested in, but a few things stood out:

1. Galaxy's Edge should be added to my list of sugar-parent magazines.
2. Clarke's 'non-profit' category includes magazines that are crowd-sourced or privately funded. I am inclined to regard crowd-sourced magazines as self-supporting as long as there is an indication that the crowd funding source is stable. Privately funded, to the extent that it means some small group of wealthy person is covering the costs, I am inclined to regard as staff funded.
3. Davidson seems to agree that the traditional subscription based model is in its death throws.

   magazines like Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction seem to be proving ... [that] the market has changed so drastically that old school doesn’t work (if it did there’d be a lot more “professional” magazines) and the younger market does not view crowd-funded magazines (and anthologies), or impassioned hobbyist efforts as lesser entities.

   I don't necessarily disagree, and am happy to interpret crowd sourced magazines as self-supporting.
4. Davidson is more concerned about the supply of short fiction declining. Pointing to self-published novels, he notes that

   Most of the new indie authors coming onto the scene these days head right for novel length work – because that’s where they’ll see the most immediate reward for their work, be it the sale of five electronic copies or a blockbuster like Weir’s The Martian. Rather than growing up from short fiction (in the magazines), they’re skipping that whole phase. Because they can, and because they have to. Why have to? Neil has definitely got it right – magazines need to pay more (and I say this despite the fact that endorsing that view is going to make my life more difficult). No aspiring author in their right mind is going to be attracted by 6 cents per word for a hard to write short story when they believe that they can write a novel that they’ll be receiving 70% of $3.99 for each and every electronic copy ($2.79). (Do the math: short story length runs to a max of 7500 words. At 6 cents per word, that’s $450. They’d need to sell 161 copies of their (super-fantastic best, most awe-inspiring SF novel) to earn the same amount, which is a number well within performance levels in the mind of most aspiring authors.
   
   Beyond that equation: new, younger authors are growing up in a culture that tells them that they do not need the vetting, the approval or the gatekeeping offered by a magazine’s submission process. They think sitting around and waiting to be accepted (even if the turn-around time is very short) is nothing but a waste of time. Many of them view the entire rejection process with complete disdain. (Who does that yahoo think they are? The editor of some magazine I never heard of before? Like that means anything.)
   
   It may be a sense of entitlement that’s driving this view, but even if it is, so what? If the vast majority of your supplier base thinks that someone or something else offers a better distribution deal, they’d be foolish not to take advantage.

5. Davidson recommends the hobbyist to aspiring route, although it helps to start by buying a recognizable brand:

   When Amazing started, it was nothing more than me wanting to preserve the name for the science fiction community. My wife and I made a coldly calculated business decision that the money we invested in the trademarks would be recoverable in future if only by selling it (to someone in the field). Finding a partner in the field that wanted to use the name was the initial business “plan”.
   
   But then it took nearly three and a half years for the trademarks to grant, during which time I was able to really survey the market and develop a plan that I believed I had the initial funding for and that would meet the goals of offering professional rates on a sustainable basis.
   
   The marks granted – but too late for me to be able to sell my other business for an amount that would fund the startup of Amazing Stories (the economy was going into its dive). But I’d already announced the acquisition and started getting a lot of pressure to “do something” with the name.
   
   Which necessitated a reversion to a “bootstrapping” strategy, one we are in the final stages of right now. With nearly 25,000 members/subscribers and internet traffic that is on par with all but a handful of the top online fiction sites and just beginning the first stages of purchasing and publishing fiction at professional (albeit unacceptable) rates. We’d not be where we are right now if I’d “known when to quit”.
   
   We’d also not be here right now if authors didn’t see some benefit to themselves in supplying us with copy at no charge; if sponsors didn’t see some value in funding us for specific projects; if a whole heck of a lot of people didn’t see some value in devoting a bit of time to reading the site.
   
   My “business model” (following that initial one) was predicated on the belief that the name of the magazine still carried enough cache and import to become a source of income through licensing. A source of revenue that is atypical and not an option for most competitors (though I do note that some of them sell t-shirts, associated collections and anthologies, posters). I think it safe to say that in the 21st century, a business may find that its flagship offering is not what brings in the majority of its revenue; it may very well be that the short fiction magazine market will need to move in the direction of offering its magazine as a loss-leader, offering other related product lines that have a higher profit margin. (You don’t sell razors – you sell razor blades.)
   
   Do I pay staff or contributors? Only in trade. Is everything we produce of professional quality? No. Are we on the path to addressing those issues and “doing things the right way?” You bet. I’ll not say anything else regarding that other than the fact that my original contention – that the name was capable of funding the magazine largely through licensing – is proving to be correct.

I also came across this older post of an interview with Scott H. Andrews from Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  Among the many points covered:

1. BCS in nearly seven years has published 350 stories
2. The Editor does a lot of work to make this publication go:

   We publish a new issue every fortnight. That two-week publication cycle begins with promoting the new issue on the BCS website and Twitter and Facebook. Then the preparation for the next issue starts immediately. I make the ebooks for that upcoming issue and send the files to our ebook distributors, including Amazon Kindle Store and WeightlessBooks.com. The ebooks go out a week early because our ebook customers and subscribers get each issue a week before it goes live on the website.
   
   I do all the production of the BCS Audio Fiction Podcast, so I coordinate the audio reading for each episode, whether it’s a guest narrator or I do the narration myself, and I spend two to three hours a day editing the audio narration. I’m an amateur musician, so I have a sharp ear for audio quality and the rhythm of the pacing and delivery.
   
   I spend about four hours a day reading submissions. That includes new submissions, whether passed up by my Editorial Assistant Nicole Lavigne, who reads the slush, or automatic pass-ups from writers who have sold to BCS before. It also includes line-editing accepted manuscripts and rewrites, which for me require several readings and writing the editorial emails to the author laying out my issue and some ways it might be fixed.
   
   Other tasks include compiling and releasing our anthologies, like our annual Best of BCS series that’s now in its sixth year or our new Weird West anthology Ceaseless West; promoting the magazine at cons and sitting on panels; submitting material for reviews or awards; etc.

3. There are many challenges to making a short fiction magazine work:

   There’s always the challenge of making F/SF short fiction zines financially viable. Ebook sales and crowd-funding have offered great new tools to help with that, but it’s not as easy as the high-profile success stories make it seem.
   
   There’s also the challenge of getting the stories to readers. The F/SF short fiction audience is much smaller than for novels, but I’m always hoping that we as a field can expand that audience and draw in novel readers; show them that short fiction does exist in the styles they love to read novels in, like epic fantasy, and interest them in reading it.
   
   The two huge pitfalls in F/SF zining are well-known: the huge time commitment it requires, and the need to have a realistic business model that fits your approach.
   
   The time commitment to run a zine in a professional manner, like keeping response times to submissions quick enough that it’s not an insult to writers, is massive, almost suffocating. If you aren’t cognizant of that, you’ll get behind and it can hobble your zine.
   
   There are multiple working business models in practice now–for example, BCS is a 501c3 non-profit, funded by donations; Clarkesworld is funded by ebook sales; others have used crowd-funding. But new zines can’t just copy a model and expect it to work for them as well as it works for the zine(s) currently using it. They need to choose or modify whatever model best fits their own strengths and needs.

Again, plenty more food for thought. The striking thing about these reports is how much the truly dedicated editors of these magazines are prepared to sacrifice to keep them going. As long as there exists a strong supply of these individuals, staff-funded magazines will continue to exist. When this is combined with the apparent abundant supply of authors prepared to publish for little or no compensation, there should be room for plenty of author-funded magazines, and so overall I feel confident in asserting that the market for short fiction in SFF should continue to exist.

But is there another way? Could a magazine along the academic model work for short SFF? I will present my revised calculations tomorrow.