Crossed Genres To Close

The speculative short fiction magazine Crossed Genres has announced that it will close after its December 2015 issue. According to the announcement, the closure is due to a mixture of personal health and financial reasons:

Two primary factors led to this decision. First, one of Crossed Genres’ co-publishers, Kay Holt, has been dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for more than two years. It’s made it extremely difficult for her to help with the running of CG, leaving the lion’s share of responsibilities on the other co-publisher, Bart Leib, who’s also working a day job. Magazine co-editor Kelly Jennings, ebook coordinator Casey Seda, and our team of first readers have all been heroic in their volunteer efforts, but we’ve still been unable to keep from falling behind.

The second factor is simply that the magazine has run out of funds to continue. In April 2014 we ran a successful Kickstarter to keep CG Magazine going, but once another year had passed, roughly 90 percent of those who’d pledged to the Kickstarter chose not to renew their memberships. New memberships have been no more than a trickle since. We just don’t have the time, resources, or energy to continuously run fundraisers every year, especially when we also have to fundraise any other projects. Running a fundraiser is an entire project in and of itself – it’s an exhausting and overwhelming process, and we have too few hands to accomplish everything even for the actual publishing projects we have.

Although the specifics of the health problems are unique, the closure does focus attention on the fact that SFF genre magazines (as well as literary magazines more generally) rely on either the generosity of patrons, staff and authors, or all of the above. Crossed Genres paid professional rates, but relied on donations and largely uncompensated staff time. With donations running low, and illness limited the available volunteer staff time, the magazine was not sustainable.

Once again, I think this emphasizes the need to explore alternative models for short fiction magazines. One possibility that I have explored before, and that might barely work, is to adopt a submission fee model like those used in some branches of academia in which a loss making magazine is combined with a profit making authors workshop/critique service. You can read about my thoughts on this, and some back of the envelope calculations as to its sustainability, at the following links:

1. Submission Fees for Literary Journals: An Academic's Perspective
2. The Market for SFF Short Fiction
3. The Market for Short SFF (Continued)
4. The Market for Short SFF: Could The Academic Model Work?