There have been a few blog articles lately about the last days of Science Fiction. Bob Sawyer wrote about it and several editors have been blogging reactions and opinions. Warren Ellis blogged about in the link above. He writes that there is some hard data about SF magazine circulation from 2006 in Garner Dozois’ Year’s Best anthology. Analog, the largest paper magazine, has a circulation down around 25,000. When John W. Campbell edited Analog, its peak circulation approached a million. F&SF is down around 15,000 and Asimov’s is about the same. In a world where about a billion people read English as a first or second language, it is obvious that SF is either dead or dying. My harmonica sites get three times the readership of the combined circulation of the top SF magazines. This blog gets more unique readers than the paid circulation of Interzone. My pages are all growing about 15% a year. SF magazines are all dying at 15% a year.
Technology is changing our reading habits. I am gradually getting used to reading stories on a monitor. I still prefer print for reading, and I buy used books when I see ones that I like. Audio is rapidly becoming my favorite medium for fiction because I can drive or walk or wait on the grocery checkout line and enjoy a novel at the same time. There is never enough time to read, but there is plenty of interstitial moments that can be filled with audio fiction. The last few times that I bought Analog or F&SF I was disappointed with the quality of the stories. I subscribed to F&SF in the 1960s and I have about 200 back issues of Astounding, and I learned to expect more for my money.
If I were one of the editors of the print magazines I would create audio downloads at 99 cents a story and post them on iTunes or Amazon. It is actually quite cheap to get a story produced in audio.
The pulps are dead. Publishing has killed off the 60,000 word novel that was the meat and potatoes of the market for 50 years. New novels are padded with crap to the point where they are unreadable in order to make fat books in three part series. Kids don’t get that kick of finishing stimulating books that can be read in a few days. The kick has been removed and reading these bloated tomes is dull and uninteresting compared to the high tech alternatives.
It is the same thing that is happening to all the legacy publishers. Newspapers and magazines are dying off. Sales of CDs and DVDs are dropping. Hard copy will be totally gone in 50 years. Even broadcasting is becoming fragmented and distributed as much online as via the ether.
As we switch to new physical models of publishing there are economic hurdles. A print magazine might cost as much as half its cover price to produce, but an electronic publication is virtually free to produce. A web zine with 40,000 words that pays 10 cents a word costs about $4000 plus the time of an editor to publish. Analog costs all of that plus about $100,000 (just a guess) worth of paper and salaries for each issue. The electronic zine with the same quality can break even on advertising revenue giving away content for free. The hard copy zine is almost guaranteed to lose money. Part of the slow change from print to pixels is the lack of understanding of the economic model. It is a good sign that the New York Times is dropping its subscription service because it is finding it makes more money from ads on free content than it makes by charging admission to its archives.
The barriers to zine publication are low, so the market is saturated. According to duotrope there are seven e-zines that pay professional rates and specifically publish SF. Several of these are primarily concerned with gender issues or do not publish Classic SF. Duotrope also lists about 90 zines that claim to pay for SF and another 100 that don’t pay. I once calculated that there are around 500 new spec-fic stories a month and writers produce as many as 5,000 new stories a month that are not published. From my own experience publishing an e-zine I figure that there are 2 million spec-fic readers or about 2/10 of a percent of the English speaking world.
It’s not just SF, but all of traditional publishing and broadcasting that is coming to an end. That doesn’t mean that SF will be dead. The proliferation of online zines obviously points to genre fiction as growing. It is up to us as SF writers and publishers to find the right economic model that will take SF writing from a poor man’s hobby to a real job capable of supporting anyone that is good at it.