I’m thinking I don’t get exposure to enough new authors (though I’m trying) on my own.
Recently I’ve read my first novel by Varley and Stirling and want to be exposed to more authors as it’s clearly been established that I can read them faster than they can write them.
I’m not much of a fantasy guy. Magic and Elves (LOTR excepted) generally don’t like my fire. I’m a golden age guy who likes what Beam Piper called ‘Blood and Thunder’ along with good hard science and speculation. My favorite authors are:
Robert Heinlein (above all others)
Larry Niven (and when he works with Pournelle. But Pournelle’s solo stuff leaves me cold)
Harry Turtledove
H Beam Piper
David Brin
Orson Scott Card
So I want to subscribe to one of the SF magazines out there so I can have new stuff delivered to my (remote) doorstep and learn about newbies being published.
Well, it’s not like there are a lot of candidates to sort through:
Analog is the only magazine that claims to run all science fiction. It’s more engineering fiction than science fiction in my eyes, but it’s the home for the writers you mention and their younger compatriots. You have to not care very much about characterization and style and all those fine points of literature, though.
Asimov’s does run some hard sf stories, and routinely dominates the awards for novella-length sf, but also has an eclectic mixture of more literary fare, with some outright fantasies.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is even more eclectic, and is somewhat more likely to carry horror stories. But it still prints any number of science fiction stories.
Realms of Fantasy is all fantasy.
Amazing Stories is about to re-debut for the zillionth time. It traditionally was heavily sf, but it’s still not clear to me what the new incarnation will be like.
Smaller magazines that are probably more difficult to find but oriented almost completely toward sf include Artemis and Absolute Magnitude.
And that’s really about it for the U.S. The print market is almost dead, hanging on by its fingertips.
Oddly enough, the e-market is not really that much better. There are scores of semi-pro and amateur e-magazines, but only a handful are truly professional. The two major ones, SciFiction and Strange Horizons, are not geared toward classic sf, but to more literary speculative fiction.
You could also try looking through the market listings at places like Paula Fleming’s Market List or Ralan to see if any of the descriptions strike your fancy.
Speaking as a magazine God I wonder why the market makes it so tough to make one of these work? Maybe it’s the digest size of most of them. That sort of takes you out of the glossy and slick, advertising driven magazine market.
And I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be sufficient advertisers to justify such a pub. Just the cool high-tech gadgets alone should make it fairly straightforward to lock up some 6 or 12 time ad buys right off the bat.
Hmm.
Hey, Exapno! If I can get a backer (and I know just who to ask and she’s an SF fan of 40+ years) what say you edit it and I run it?
I’m subscribed to both Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I used to also have Analog, but dropped it because it used a significant amount of space on its science fact articles, and the fiction seemed to be strongly oriented towards hard sci-fi. I don’t really mind science fact articles, and I like hard sci-fi, but from a sci-fi magazine I want a variety of styles of stories, and Asimov’s provides that better than Analog.
Well, the slicks are the ones that keep going out of business, while the digests manage to stay around. Amazing is a good example. A lower tier digest that tried to turn into a slick and went belly up.
Since Exapno Mapcase answered your question very fully, I wonder if based on your list of authors, I might suggest one or two?
I’ve been happy with Analog for many years. They definitely stress science over fantasy. But it’s not just hardware-oriented fiction, there’s a lot character-driven fiction, too. Expect the science to be plausible, or at least require only a very few suspensions of disbelief. I always enjoy the science fact article (covers science of interest to sci-fi fans).
But the best advice for someone looking for a sci-fi mag is to go to your local bookstore and pick up one or two issues of each. Read them cover to cover. That way you can see which magazine works for you, style, quality and quantity. I tend to judge a magazine by its best story, rather then the number of good stories.
What I wonder is what happened to Omni, which was (in the '70s and '80s) a glossy, slick, full-sized SF magazine with lots of ads. (I think it was published by Bob Guccione, who also publishes Penthouse, but there was nothing pornographic about Omni. Does anybody know? Why did Omni fold?
Seriously, the digests live only because they have long histories, subscribers who will die before they stop subscribing (and probably soon), and are so cheap to put out.
The slicks cost money. Science Fiction Age was bankrolled by the Sci-Fi channel and was dumped not because it was losing money but because it wasn’t making enough of a profit.
You might think that the deluge of comic book, sf, sci fi, fantasy, and game-based movies would provide an opportunity for advertising. It doesn’t happen. There are any number of magazines that cover media-based sf and that’s where the ads go, never into magazines that specialize in print sf.
For one thing, the demographics are all wrong. The print sf market is skewing older and older. Locus, the sorta kinda trade magazine of the field, does an annual survey of its readership. For the last twenty years the average age of the readers has risen at one year per year. So not only is the main audience 50ish, but no new audience is coming in.
Science fiction is the Oldsmobile of literature.
And distributors don’t want even to touch the stuff.
The publisher of Absolute Magnitude and Weird Tales, who also does several other magazines in the field, just got a big-name distributor to handle his entire line. Why? Because he’s now the publisher of the KISS fan club magazine. I shit you not.
Anyway, John W. Campbell, who edited Astounding/Analog for 40 years, once said that he’d read more bad science fiction than anyone else who ever lived. Such a thing to be your legacy. again.
Well, newsstand distribution is traditionally a loss leader for most ad driven magazines (and it’s getting to be a worse deal for even that mainstream magazines). I wonder if one skewed at a more action oriented brand of SF marketed through school plans and direct mail using say, a three issue forced free trial might not start working.
Interesting. Gardner Dozois, until this year the editor of Asimov’s, has always maintained that he doesn’t do special issues because having six stories that appealed to six audiences, even if weakly, was much better than doing, say, an all-alternate world issue that pleased only a tiny minority strongly. People will slip out of a habit quickly, but don’t need much reinforcement to stay.
Analog succeeds because it has been the same crew for literally 60 years. Jack Williamson is still publishing there. I once described Analog as sf’s equivalent of country music. In my northern city, there is one major country music station and a dozen stations that broadcast a spectrum of the million varieties that rock has fragmented itself into. Obviously, the overwhelming percentage of the audience listens to rock of some kind, usually several of the stations. But the country fans have only one real outlet, and so they are intensely loyal. And in a fragmented market, having 13% can make you the number one station in town.
Same thing in sf. Though Analog publishes a small percent of the total stories in the field, a look at the awards’ ballots will always show a core of 3 or 4 Analog stories, plus a whole bunch of Asimov’s stories, a variable number of F&SF, and the usual miscellaneous others.
But Analog stories win in far smaller numbers than their overall percentage should indicate. Why? Asimov’s readers will read F&SF and maybe Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales and certainly the literary online stuff. But Analog readers read Analog.
What this means, JC is that getting an audience niche may or may not be doable, because a niche of a small field is a small niche. And so it must be intensely loyal and getting something from you that it simply can’t get anywhere else. And so you would have to define what that is, figure out why no one else is presenting it, figure out who you can get to write it, and then figure out how you market it to those who would want it. And then show advertisers that this odd niche market is large enough and cohesive enough to make it worth their while to fling ads at them for anything at all. Remember, even publishers don’t bother to put book ads into sf magazines.
I haven’t been able to expound on the special problems of print sf to a true professional outside the field and I would love to talk jargon with you, so if you want to continue this and think not only outside the box but outside the tesseract, you have my e-mail address.
Exactly. If I want a bunch of stories all related to a theme, the sci-fi shelves at the bookstore are filled with them, often filled with stories culled from Asimov’s, and usually edited by Martin H. Greenberg.
Which isn’t to say that I think there’s something wrong with the approach Analog takes. It just doesn’t fit my style.
I subscribe to all three, but mostly to keep up my collection - which has all F&SFs but vol 1, no. 1, all Galaxies, all IASFMs, and all Analog / Astounding back over half a century. And lots of those umpteen mid-50s digests mentioned before.
It is a miracle they survive. Hardly anyone publishes short stories anymore - they are mostly short stories. Most magazine has a little bit of text and lots of graphics. SF magazines have little graphics and lots of text. As mentioned, they are the wrong size.
Plus, if I’m not mistaken, they don’t pay all that well. My understanding of reading agents sites and some other background is that having a short story published is useful in getting an agent for a novel. Is that true, or a useful fiction to funnel stories into the magazines?
Of course, that would be simpler if your email wasn’t masked in your profile.
In short, I think it’s possible to put together a non-newsstand magazine with some subscription and some advertising revenue elements and make it make sense.
