association-list

My super belated chime in on the whole death of the SF mag­a­zine market thing.

I think that Paolo’s and Erin’s com­ments are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because they actu­ally pro­pose some for­ward move­ment in the market. The short SF market has shrunk so much that there’s almost noth­ing going on there, in terms of market diver­sity. I like some of the sto­ries in the cur­rent mag­a­zines, but the return on invest­ment is some­what low: I don’t really like enough of them to keep buying them, although I con­tinue to do so (at cover price) out of some sense of dogged loy­alty to a kind of fic­tion that I love, at least for F&SF and Asimov’s. At the same time, none of the edi­tors of the big three really speak to me, taste-​​wise, and their focuses aren’t my own. What I’d like to see are more mag­a­zines out there, with dif­fer­ing focuses and rep­re­sent­ing a wider vari­ety of edi­to­r­ial tastes. For one thing, I’d like to see more ideas out there, more people think­ing of var­i­ous con­cepts for mag­a­zines, so that some­one might actu­ally get excited enough to take the plunge (or one of the exist­ing mag­a­zines might get inter­ested enough to launch a spin off).

So in that spirit, I present Energy States.

ES would be a mid-​​length monthly focus­ing entirely on over­lapped serial short novels. The target length would be 30-​​50k words, too long to get pub­lished in most mag­a­zines, and too short to land a novel deal these days. The mag­a­zine would run these in 10-​​15kw chunks, aiming to put each novel in 3 – 5 issues. After each month, the first sec­tion of every story would be put online as a teaser for the rest of the story, and the entire story could be pur­chased stand-​​alone online for two dol­lars, once its print run was com­pleted. Note that buying the story gives you access to pre­vi­ously pur­chased install­ments if the whole thing is not out yet, so the cus­tomer could catch up on a story that they’re par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in with­out buying back issues. Bun­dles of pop­u­lar sto­ries could also be sold, and I imag­ine that you could make a deal with a PoD house for custom antholo­gies and chap­books. Sub­scrip­tions, as a bonus, would get you access to all of the con­tent, includ­ing back issues, online. For all indi­vid­u­ally sold items, the author would get a cut.

I’m not sure how well it would work out, hon­estly. I don’t know that there’s a reader’s market for this kind of thing, or if a start­ing mag­a­zine could pos­si­bly pay well enough to con­vince people to sell good work that they could pos­si­bly expand into a more prof­itable novel. This idea is mostly meant to address what I per­ceive as a gap in the writer’s market for story sales, allow­ing authors to get works out there that are cur­rently con­sid­ered unsalable.