Short Story Markets

[girliejones]

benpayne and Jonathan Strahan have been blogging the news of F&SF mag going bimonthly as of April. It has us thinking about the future of short story markets. I wanted to write an article about my thoughts on the topic the other day but my brain is not yet turned on for the year

Comments

[girliejones]

I think I meant in general people are reading less. Across the board. There are anomalies like Harry Potter and the Twilight series but generally, I thought that people were buying less books.

[oldcharliebrown]

Unit sales certainly are down in some categories, but that may be compounded by the fact that both Barnes and Noble and Borders are both counting back orders for this year . . . and returning heavily. It could be balanced, slightly, by the rise of ebook sales, but it's too early to say.

I don't think necessarily people are wanting to read less, but that the opportunities to do so are limited, in the real world. It's getting harder and harder to find short fiction in the chains, but then you have it migrating to the internet . . . and if you can market sufficiently well, and get respectable eyeballs close to what the print magazines are getting, then that's a direction.

[girliejones]

I still meant people reading books in general. As a pasttime. And like, over the last 5 and 10 years. Big publishers are doing smaller print runs. That kind of thing.

But yeah, I do think the way forward is electronic.

[twistedchick]

I haven't seen any decrease in people reading short stories -- online. I have, however, seen fewer short-story anthologies for sale in general, and those that are for sale often aren't very good. The "Best SF and Horror of The Year" series are always good, but they're filled with stories published in magazines the previous year. I don't see a lot of new books of short stories published in fantasy or SF otherwise, barring the occasional book of shorts by a single established writer like Neil Gaiman, who already has a reading constituency.

[girliejones]

I think people reading short stories online though is a recent phenomenon. When I was talking about less people reading, I meant as a whole, across all books and material, not just shorts or specfic.

I think it's hard to get short stories (nonreprints) into big bookstores.

[twistedchick]

Of course everyone sees a different part of the web, but I was reading short stories online in small literary magazines and websites ten years ago. Most of those sites aren't there now, but then a lot of sites from 10 years ago aren't around now.

[girliejones]

I wasn't intending to commentate on online fiction. It was more a look at print publishing and its lifespan - which has for years been declining, as I understand it, apart from the obvious outliers.

[brendanpodger]

I can only comment on my own experience, but with Aurealis I only stopped ordering it when it started to go semi-annual. The first couple of years when it was quarterly were great but when it cut back and buying a four issue subscription meant two years before I needed to reorder, it just ended up with too many opportunities to 'forget' when the subscription was due.

[girliejones]

Its definitely easy to forget something exists if it's not regular enough.

[bluetyson]

Actually, the pdf thing is likely just you getting it for free.

If you subscribe, fictionwise has around a dozen different formats, and you choose the one you want.e.g. the mobipocket desktop reader is about a bazillion times better than reading a pdf, for example. (It will actually even import pdfs to make them nicer to read too, in a lot of cases).

What they do not have is the 'browse online' version like JBU does, if that is what you mean? That is certainly something that is lacking, that people can read from a browser whenever, and link to, etc. Something that also makes their website a destination, rather than fictionwise.

In fact, joining webscriptions as well might be good for them?

[girliejones]

Maybe so. I wonder if we can request review copies in a different format then.

Yeah the website is not somewhere you want to hang out at and I don't think that it brings you in or tells you anything if you don't already know everything about F&SF - thats sort of interesting from a marketing perspective and for creating websites. (for the rest of us)

What's webscriptions?

[bluetyson]

Webscriptions is Baen's electronic book service (that also has some stuff from Subterranean, Night Shade, etc.)

http://www.webscription.net/

[girliejones]

cheers

[girliejones]

And postage