Bittercon: The Current State of Genre Short Fiction Markets
Here's another interesting panel discussion topic from GenCon.
I sent my first works out for professional consideration back in 1985, when traditional publishing was the only game in town (unless you wished to destroy your name forever by turning to a vanity publisher), and everything was handled by postal mail (which could get expensive if you had a lot of stuff out there -- I remembered spending $300 one year for the privilege of collecting rejection slips, and that was in the days when a first-class stamp cost 25 cents). In those days, the standard advice for aspiring writers was to focus on short stories until you had a reasonable track record of professional publication, at which point you could "graduate" to novels.
Part of the thinking behind that advice was practical -- short stories were smaller in scope, and therefore easier for a beginning writer to manage and to actually finish. It was far easier to know where you were going in 4000 words with one POV and three or four major characters tops. You could hold beginning, middle and ending all in your head at once, so you were far less likely to get bogged down in the middle of the storyline or have it fall apart on you. And 100,000 words in twenty 5000-word short stories meant a lot more opportunities to make the sale than a single novel, and thus was perceived as a better investment of your time when you were probably writing in time left over after other obligations like being a student or working a day job.
But there was also the element of established wisdom -- this was the career ladder your mentors had climbed (largely for historical reasons -- when they started writing, periodicals were the primary market for sf and fantasy, and paperback sf was just beginning), so they took it for granted that This Is How It Works. It was also a time when editors worked a lot more closely with their authors, so established authors who were giving advice knew that acquiring editors at the various publishing houses were reading the major periodicals in the field, and were in close contact with their editors. If they saw several stories they liked under your name, and especially if they heard good things about you from those editors, they might just reach out to you about writing a novel for them.
By the turn of the millennium, the publishing world had undergone massive changes. Book publishers had gone through a sequence of consolidations, and many were owned by international conglomerates whose principal product was not books, and who didn't really grasp how the public buy books. To them, books were just another kind of widget, and the rise of computerized sales tracking enabled them to "buy to the net," which killed the midlist (small but reliable sellers that had once allowed publishers to take risks on new authors and build their careers). Shifts in distribution had also moved its center of gravity away from small jobbers filling spinner racks in dozens or hundreds of corner groceries and drug stores to consolidated operations that ordered by the numbers for big-box stores such as Walmart and Meijer. Small bookstores in malls vanished as big-box bookstores appeared in strip malls alongside big-box office-supply stores and the like.
This also affected the periodical markets, since the magazine racks in big-box stores might have more slots, but wanted big winners that sold everywhere, not niche markets that were strong in one community (say a university town) but didn't get much traction elsewhere. The smaller magazines became more and more dependent upon subscription sales, as they couldn't get copies on magazine racks -- and thus were harder to find by happenstance, and thus to reach potential subscribers who weren't "plugged in" to the sf fan scene.
However, the period from the mid-Nineties to the mid-Oughts were also the period in which the Internet first made a major impact on genre periodical publishing. Not so much the established magazines -- Asimov's, Analog and F&SF carried on as they had from the beginning. But there were a variety of experiments in digital publishing as people tried to figure out how to take a medium originally created for the exchange of information among scientists in an academic context and use it for commercial publishing ventures. Should a digital magazine be presented as a series of webpages, or as a digital file that the reader would download to a computer? If the magazine was at least partly advertising-supported, how did you make sure that your advertisers were actually getting value for your money?
A number of the early attempts were laughably clumsy, like the one that made you take a quiz on the ad before letting you read the story, to make sure you'd actually paid attention rather than just "doing your time." Those were primarily attractive only to voracious readers who were struggling financially, such that any way to get more reading material without having to pay money was welcome. There were also e-books and e-zines distributed on floppy disk (remember those?) often with clumsy Digital Rights Management software that frustrated legitimate purchasers while being trivially easy for pirates to defeat.
The big breakthrough came with Amazon's Kindle e-reader, which allowed readers to buy and read books seamlessly from Amazon's online bookstore of digital books, and to sideloadbooks bought elsewhere, using a cable attached to one's computer. For the first time people had an e-book reader that was both portable and easy to use. Any DRM was handled by Amazon, so you only needed to remember your Amazon password to read your books -- and most publishers were deciding to trust their readers and release their books without DRM.
Since an individual issue of a magazine could be treated like a book, periodical publishers (especially small periodical publishers who'd struggled to get into the national periodical distribution networks) were able to release individual issues for sale on what was now effectively a giant worldwide magazine rack. Handling subscriptions was a little more tricky, but later models of the Kindle have included Internet access, which made e-mail based subscriptions possible, if cumbersome (now a number of digital magazines are handled via BookFunnel's digital download system -- I get Pulphouse Magazine that way, and can both download it to my computer (desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone) to read in an e-reader, or read on a web browser from their online library system.
It was also a period when periodical markets began experimenting with digital submissions. Unsurprisingly, the first I recall was an e-zine founded by someone with a strong background in IT, who was willing to look at the difficulties of handling digital submissions as challenges to be overcome rather than obstacles, or worse, Not The Way It's Done. Within a few years, pretty much every major market began accepting digital submissions, particularly once web platforms such as Moksha and Submittable became available to vet submissions that involved formatted files and to provide tracking of the submission process, taking a load of work off both editors and writers. By the mid-Oughts I no longer bothered with any market that didn't have digital submissions.
However, the really big change has been the Kindle Direct Publishing program. KDP made self-publishing respectable, and meant that writers were no longer beholden to traditional publishing for finding an audience. As a result, for a writer, periodical markets (and anthologies) are now primarily a discoverability tool. Get a story in a major periodical of your genre and you're putting your name (and possibly one of your fictional universes) in front of a vast audience, some of whom will want to read MOAR! and hunt up everything you have available, including your indie publications. Even a smaller semi-pro magazine is now easily available online, as opposed to the old days when people discovered them primarily by advertisements in the big magazines or fliers at conventions or in bookstores, so a story published in one of these magazines still can reach a substantial audience of potential long-term fans.
To be honest, once I started selling via KDP back in 2015, I pretty much abandoned the periodical markets. I was tired of the endless stream of rejections, and saw no real reason to endure them any longer. So when one of my perks as a backer of last year's Pulphouse Annual Subscription Drive Kickstarter was monthly opportunities to submit a story, I got an admonishment with each rejection to send the story to all the best markets.
Once I got past Asimov's and Clarkesworld, I realized I had a problem. In former days, I'd relied on Ralan.com to find markets -- but it no longer existed, having been closed by its creator in early 2023. For 26 years it had been the go-to place for sf and fantasy writers looking for markets -- and there was no good replacement. There was Duotrope (paid) and The Submission Grinder (free), but both of them were more general databases of markets, so one had to figure out how to filter out just the markets in your genre. And neither of them really had a good database of anthology markets.
I've found a few static lists of sf/fantasy periodical markets that appear to be reasonably current, and discovered another new wrinkle -- most of the other pro-level markets are closed to submissions. F&SF is apparently having some kind of editorial problems (I'm not sure of all the details), and other standbys such as Lightspeed and Strange Horizons have gone to intermittent reading periods, with no set schedule, just announcing them when they happen -- which would mean constantly checking, or finding a way to plug into the network of people in the know so I could get a heads-up when I can still take action. In any case, it seems like an awful lot of work for very little probable result when I'm already overloaded and drowning in to-dos.
Even a lot of the lower-tier periodical publications are going to this intermittent, unscheduled reading periods system. I'm thinking that at least part of this is a reaction to the recent flood of AI-generated drek by people who've gotten swept up in various "get rich quick with AI-generated text" scams.
Which raises the question of how things are looking from the reader's perspective. Anyone out there who still reads a lot of sf and fantasy periodicals?
I sent my first works out for professional consideration back in 1985, when traditional publishing was the only game in town (unless you wished to destroy your name forever by turning to a vanity publisher), and everything was handled by postal mail (which could get expensive if you had a lot of stuff out there -- I remembered spending $300 one year for the privilege of collecting rejection slips, and that was in the days when a first-class stamp cost 25 cents). In those days, the standard advice for aspiring writers was to focus on short stories until you had a reasonable track record of professional publication, at which point you could "graduate" to novels.
Part of the thinking behind that advice was practical -- short stories were smaller in scope, and therefore easier for a beginning writer to manage and to actually finish. It was far easier to know where you were going in 4000 words with one POV and three or four major characters tops. You could hold beginning, middle and ending all in your head at once, so you were far less likely to get bogged down in the middle of the storyline or have it fall apart on you. And 100,000 words in twenty 5000-word short stories meant a lot more opportunities to make the sale than a single novel, and thus was perceived as a better investment of your time when you were probably writing in time left over after other obligations like being a student or working a day job.
But there was also the element of established wisdom -- this was the career ladder your mentors had climbed (largely for historical reasons -- when they started writing, periodicals were the primary market for sf and fantasy, and paperback sf was just beginning), so they took it for granted that This Is How It Works. It was also a time when editors worked a lot more closely with their authors, so established authors who were giving advice knew that acquiring editors at the various publishing houses were reading the major periodicals in the field, and were in close contact with their editors. If they saw several stories they liked under your name, and especially if they heard good things about you from those editors, they might just reach out to you about writing a novel for them.
By the turn of the millennium, the publishing world had undergone massive changes. Book publishers had gone through a sequence of consolidations, and many were owned by international conglomerates whose principal product was not books, and who didn't really grasp how the public buy books. To them, books were just another kind of widget, and the rise of computerized sales tracking enabled them to "buy to the net," which killed the midlist (small but reliable sellers that had once allowed publishers to take risks on new authors and build their careers). Shifts in distribution had also moved its center of gravity away from small jobbers filling spinner racks in dozens or hundreds of corner groceries and drug stores to consolidated operations that ordered by the numbers for big-box stores such as Walmart and Meijer. Small bookstores in malls vanished as big-box bookstores appeared in strip malls alongside big-box office-supply stores and the like.
This also affected the periodical markets, since the magazine racks in big-box stores might have more slots, but wanted big winners that sold everywhere, not niche markets that were strong in one community (say a university town) but didn't get much traction elsewhere. The smaller magazines became more and more dependent upon subscription sales, as they couldn't get copies on magazine racks -- and thus were harder to find by happenstance, and thus to reach potential subscribers who weren't "plugged in" to the sf fan scene.
However, the period from the mid-Nineties to the mid-Oughts were also the period in which the Internet first made a major impact on genre periodical publishing. Not so much the established magazines -- Asimov's, Analog and F&SF carried on as they had from the beginning. But there were a variety of experiments in digital publishing as people tried to figure out how to take a medium originally created for the exchange of information among scientists in an academic context and use it for commercial publishing ventures. Should a digital magazine be presented as a series of webpages, or as a digital file that the reader would download to a computer? If the magazine was at least partly advertising-supported, how did you make sure that your advertisers were actually getting value for your money?
A number of the early attempts were laughably clumsy, like the one that made you take a quiz on the ad before letting you read the story, to make sure you'd actually paid attention rather than just "doing your time." Those were primarily attractive only to voracious readers who were struggling financially, such that any way to get more reading material without having to pay money was welcome. There were also e-books and e-zines distributed on floppy disk (remember those?) often with clumsy Digital Rights Management software that frustrated legitimate purchasers while being trivially easy for pirates to defeat.
The big breakthrough came with Amazon's Kindle e-reader, which allowed readers to buy and read books seamlessly from Amazon's online bookstore of digital books, and to sideloadbooks bought elsewhere, using a cable attached to one's computer. For the first time people had an e-book reader that was both portable and easy to use. Any DRM was handled by Amazon, so you only needed to remember your Amazon password to read your books -- and most publishers were deciding to trust their readers and release their books without DRM.
Since an individual issue of a magazine could be treated like a book, periodical publishers (especially small periodical publishers who'd struggled to get into the national periodical distribution networks) were able to release individual issues for sale on what was now effectively a giant worldwide magazine rack. Handling subscriptions was a little more tricky, but later models of the Kindle have included Internet access, which made e-mail based subscriptions possible, if cumbersome (now a number of digital magazines are handled via BookFunnel's digital download system -- I get Pulphouse Magazine that way, and can both download it to my computer (desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone) to read in an e-reader, or read on a web browser from their online library system.
It was also a period when periodical markets began experimenting with digital submissions. Unsurprisingly, the first I recall was an e-zine founded by someone with a strong background in IT, who was willing to look at the difficulties of handling digital submissions as challenges to be overcome rather than obstacles, or worse, Not The Way It's Done. Within a few years, pretty much every major market began accepting digital submissions, particularly once web platforms such as Moksha and Submittable became available to vet submissions that involved formatted files and to provide tracking of the submission process, taking a load of work off both editors and writers. By the mid-Oughts I no longer bothered with any market that didn't have digital submissions.
However, the really big change has been the Kindle Direct Publishing program. KDP made self-publishing respectable, and meant that writers were no longer beholden to traditional publishing for finding an audience. As a result, for a writer, periodical markets (and anthologies) are now primarily a discoverability tool. Get a story in a major periodical of your genre and you're putting your name (and possibly one of your fictional universes) in front of a vast audience, some of whom will want to read MOAR! and hunt up everything you have available, including your indie publications. Even a smaller semi-pro magazine is now easily available online, as opposed to the old days when people discovered them primarily by advertisements in the big magazines or fliers at conventions or in bookstores, so a story published in one of these magazines still can reach a substantial audience of potential long-term fans.
To be honest, once I started selling via KDP back in 2015, I pretty much abandoned the periodical markets. I was tired of the endless stream of rejections, and saw no real reason to endure them any longer. So when one of my perks as a backer of last year's Pulphouse Annual Subscription Drive Kickstarter was monthly opportunities to submit a story, I got an admonishment with each rejection to send the story to all the best markets.
Once I got past Asimov's and Clarkesworld, I realized I had a problem. In former days, I'd relied on Ralan.com to find markets -- but it no longer existed, having been closed by its creator in early 2023. For 26 years it had been the go-to place for sf and fantasy writers looking for markets -- and there was no good replacement. There was Duotrope (paid) and The Submission Grinder (free), but both of them were more general databases of markets, so one had to figure out how to filter out just the markets in your genre. And neither of them really had a good database of anthology markets.
I've found a few static lists of sf/fantasy periodical markets that appear to be reasonably current, and discovered another new wrinkle -- most of the other pro-level markets are closed to submissions. F&SF is apparently having some kind of editorial problems (I'm not sure of all the details), and other standbys such as Lightspeed and Strange Horizons have gone to intermittent reading periods, with no set schedule, just announcing them when they happen -- which would mean constantly checking, or finding a way to plug into the network of people in the know so I could get a heads-up when I can still take action. In any case, it seems like an awful lot of work for very little probable result when I'm already overloaded and drowning in to-dos.
Even a lot of the lower-tier periodical publications are going to this intermittent, unscheduled reading periods system. I'm thinking that at least part of this is a reaction to the recent flood of AI-generated drek by people who've gotten swept up in various "get rich quick with AI-generated text" scams.
Which raises the question of how things are looking from the reader's perspective. Anyone out there who still reads a lot of sf and fantasy periodicals?