Warren Ellis leads us to some detailed discussions on the state of the scifi mags, linking off into further discussions of how to do online scifi mags. Feel free not to draw any conclusions between my last post and this one.
My first attempts at real writing were either a MacGyver script involving a hijacked nuclear sub or some sort of college-aged Ellery Queen knock-off which I foolishly submitted to the Ellery Queen short-story magazine. It's all a bit of a blur, jammed in between physics and my second attempt at passing Differential Equations. But at the very least, I feel a seminal connection to the anthology style mystery magazine, in whatever format. They made for good reading when I was on the road. Weirdly, though, I never went for the sci-fi ones. No idea why.
No point to the post except to lead to the discussions, and link so I can refer to them when I attempt the various insane Creative Commons project I hacked out with some friends over the summer. We'll see if it's parallel or perpendicular to the ideas described.
40 comments:
I started Astonishing Adventures! Magazine because of Warren's articles , Bill C, and your posts. I'm a blind man stumbling, but these discussion help a lot.
I appreciate the tips and thoughts.
Editor JDC
Sorry. It wasn't salient. Still mulling all this.
I'm not sure that the "pay a buck for a story you haven't read yet" model is the right one. After all, if a person pays the buck and hates the story a few times, they might stop paying.
You could put them out there for free, and then pay through some large percentage of the advertising revenue to the author of the pages that generated them. Maybe after deducting overhead. And yes, that's technically feasible.
I like the WOWIO model. Free for the audience, paid to the creator and site owner per download via advertising revenue.
I think the real problem is this: the short story, as a commercial art form, is all but dead.
Consider: nobody makes a living at this. Nobody. Not since maybe Bob Silverberg in the early sixties; and even then, when the markets were a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than it is today, you had to be prolific, on top of the field, and have low expectations of your desired standard of living.
We don't know how many people read short stories, but we do know how many people read books, and of the books sold, how many are novels, and of the novels sold, how many go in which genres. Written SF and Fantasy account for about 7% of novels sold, and novels make up about a quarter to a third of books sold, (Don't believe me? Go look at the amazon.com top fifty: it's all self-help, biography, and business until you get down below #40 or thereabouts.)
Just reading novels for recreation is a minority pursuit these days -- and the monthly circulation of the Big Three SF magazines is dipping towards the hardcover print run of a midlist novel. Not the mass-market paperback print run, the hardback print run. (I've had novels in mass market paperback which would have outsold a month of Asimov's SF, Analog, and F&SF combined.)
The print SF short story magazine business -- excluding theme anthologies -- is on its death bed, and I don't see anything reviving it.
Online is another matter -- the two top-selling markets these days are online, and they pay sensible amounts -- but that's another matter. And unless we can get some actual, like, viewer figures out of the publishers, we can't say much more about them (yet).
If you're wondering why you don't see many short stories from me these days the answer is very simple: I write for a living, and unless the short story market pays at least 25 cents a word I'd be making a loss compared to spending the same time working on a novel. But the threshold to qualify as a "professional market" as far as SFWA is concerned is 5 cents a word -- and that's where a lot of the magazines peg their rate.
To tangent the discussion a bit:
Whatever happened to the series character paperback novels? We still see them in westerns (LONGARM)and in action books (THE DESTOYER, THE EXECUTIONER), but nothing in horror or scifi or action-adventure.
To be clear I'm talking about the paperback novel which comes out every month, created by an editorial team and farmed out to several writers in order to meet a deadline. I'm NOT talking about series like the BLOOD TIES novels (once a year?)or anything like that.
Were they simply a product of the aftermath of the pulp market collapsing?
If online is now the home of most short story fiction then couldn't it also make room for the series novel?
Phobos publishing was doing something like that a couple years back with their REALITY COPS series.
They ran it as a sort of bi-weekly competition but it fell off for some reason that I don't know.
Bill: I think the monthly series novel really failed to get a toehold in SF/F because it adds editorial overheads. You need to have those writers on tap and you need to keep some degree of editorial control over the output. In SF, you're dealing with a literature of disruption -- one of the commonest genre tropes is for the protagonists to be at the centre of events which literally disrupt their world, so that it doesn't work the same way afterwards. This is obviously ruled out in monthly series books because you can't let your authors do that -- so you've got extra editorial oversight requirements to maintain a consistent universe.
It can be done -- Star Trek or Dr Who are the classic long-running SF TV series with some degree of plot continuity -- but TV productions generally have more resources (and are more profitable) than books.
I'll now contradict myself by pointing to one example where there is a long-running SF novel series: Perry Rhodan, which is now up to something like volume 2700. On the other hand, Perry Rhodan is the phenomenon that ate German science fiction publishing, from the late 1950s onwards. And that highlights another peril of the monthly collaborative novel format: if it's successful it can turn into a black hole that soaks up the creative efforts of writers who might otherwise be doing something much more interesting. (But that's another rant ...)
Thanks, Charlie. I am familiar with Perry Rhodan from the reprints/translations here in the states (Ace?), and agree completely that Perry has taken a chunk out of the scifi writing energy of Germany.
And of course, there's tons of groshcen romaine of series characters out there in Germany (there was even a continuation of the pulp character The Black Bat from the pulps). Lots of horror series. Go to Curt over at Groovy Age Of Horror blog for more details.
I seem to remember so many character series from my 70's youth that I am interested in how or why the concept died out. Can we 'just' chalk it up to editorial downsizing or was there some other zeitgeist in play? Had readers 'grown up' and demanded more from their fiction, or was it writer-driven? Or a combination of all three?
It's interesting to me that as movies like STAR WARS took hold in the visual media, the same archetypes in print were dying off (or perhaps I'm trying to fit the facts to my theory).
If sf series character fiction were to rise again, do you see online as its womb?
Are you guys aware that there are a slew of people writing so-called media tie-in fiction that follows the paradigm you've just laid out?
The serial novel or shared universe concept didn't die, it just got Hollywood-ized.
Star Wars, even more than Trek, is a perfect example fo this. The difficult part is creating the same sort of fan base for a lit-only version of the same thing.
Clancy has made a stab at it by lending his name and concepts to a couple of lines of books a he doesn't write himself. They have, in theory, the Clancy seal of approval.
Stephen King might do the same with tangential Dark Tower properties if he wished. Even the DUNE series has continued well past the death of its creator.
For the web I think a lot of cross-platforming (or whatever the word is) will ultimately do the trick. I envision a single site with video, games, prose and forums all focused on something like FIREFLY.
You can open source it the way some posit, making money via ad revenue, and write write write to your heart's content.
The model exists in TV writing already. All you REALLY need is a Joss Whedon or John Rogers at the top of the pyramid to make sure style and plot arcs remain internally consistent and you can farm out everything from chapters to entire story lines to freelancers.
You just need a marquee name, either a person or a company that has cache, to sell it.
Create a royalty structure (in addition to an industry competitive advance) and you're gold.
It not only can be done this way, it will be. There are too many sites (not to mention the publishing industry) employing elements of this paradigm now for someone not to combine them later.
Hi John,
I apologize for writing off topic, but I didn't find your contact info and you can always delete my post :) Given your hybrid background, you may find interesting that our Interactive Story, Masq just made PC Gamer’s Top 100 games of All Time. This is unprecedented and may be of interest to your readers too (and you may help us to spread the word!). Masq is pure interactive story, no puzzles, no twitch games, and is getting great reviews worldwide.
Let me know if you want me to send more info.
Thanks, and sorry for the intrusion
Javier
jjm@alteraction.com
Hi John,
I apologize for writing off topic, but I didn't find your contact info and you can always delete my post :) Given your hybrid background, you may find interesting that our Interactive Story, Masq just made PC Gamer’s Top 100 games of All Time. This is unprecedented and may be of interest to your readers too (and you may help us to spread the word!). Masq is getting amazing reviews.
Let me know if you want me to send more info.
Thanks, and sorry for the intrusion
Javier
jjm@alteraction.com
Had a look at Ellis's proposal (well, more of a brain-dump). While unorganised, there are some good ideas there.
However, if he starts comparing to what are happening in other media industries, he should start to see that media is now often been provided for free on the internet. The business model is free content, which equals viewers, which equals audience for advertising. Provided that the content is of sufficient quality and updated regularly, the model works. Note that blogs (which carry advertising) are a good example of this.
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