PHOSPHORescence and Beyond
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, if you wrote science fiction and your name wasn’t Wells or Burroughs, you wrote exclusively for the magazines.
By the 1950s there was a growing book market, and by sometime in the 1970s the dominant form of science fiction had probably become the novel rather than the short story. And that’s the way things stood until the late 1990s: novelist or story writer, you sold to books and magazines, and that was the ball game.
But a lot can happen in a decade, and all those things science fiction had been predicting for years starting coming to pass.
By the late 1990s writers were being solicited by start-up electronic publishers, usually with a proposal that translated as “Give me your story (or book) for free today, and I’ll make you rich tomorrow (or next week, or next year).” Not a lot of established writers were enamoured of such proposals, not a lot contributed their work, and not a lot of those early e-publications lasted out their initial year.
There were a few with special circumstances, of course. Omni, with Penthouse’s millions behind it, went online and paid exceptionally generous (for this field) rates…but Omni also folded its tent in a few years. Another well-funded e-zine was sci-fi.com, also a handsome payer (and still around, though without any fiction in it), but it was essentially a loss leader for the wealthy Sci-Fi Channel, and hence another exception.
The first major success that did not rely upon other publications or venues for money or expertise was, strangely, not a publisher of new fiction at all, but rather a reprint house: Fictionwise.com. They began with a small coterie of science fiction writers—Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, myself, a few others—and when they offered double the going rate for reprint fiction we felt like thieves in the night. We took the money and ran—but we slowed down precipitously after three months, when the first of their quarterly royalty reports was issued, and despite the front money we’d received most of us had earned royalties (and those stories have continued earning royalties—from 30% to 40%—for years.)
Why? The best bet is that there was so much free junk on the internet at the time that people were willing to pay for known commodities. Nine years later Fictionwise.com is still around, they’re up to around four thousand authors now (including Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, and that whole crowd), and they’ve sold something like 100 billion words. Even some of the printzines saw the handwriting on the wall and have begun selling digital versions to Fictionwise.com and Kindle.
It still took awhile for the more competent entrepreneurs to move over to the internet and make a go of it, but eventually they did, and things began looking up, especially for short story writers. One by one the magazines had been dying—Science Fiction Age, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Aboriginal SF, the resurrected Amazing, the resurrected Argosy, others, and suddenly we were down to just the three traditional digests: Asimov’s, Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction. Even after Warren Lapine bought Realms of Fantasy and brought it back from the dead, there were only four magazines in print.
As much as the book field has changed, the world of the short story has changed even more radically in the intenet age. There are still only four printed magazines. The change has come on the internet, where there are 15 electronic magazines paying what SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) considers a professional word rate—and three of them, Jim Baen’s Universe, Subterranean Magazine, and Clarkesworld, pay more than any of the printed magazines and are attracting more major writers every day. Jim Baen’s Universe, for its first three years, was paying 25 cents a word at the top, and its rock-bottom beginner’s rate was a dime a word, still more than the top rate of tie digests. Clarkesworld pays a dime a word, and Subterranean pays at least that.
So who are the others? I’m reluctant to list them, since in the natural evolution of thing four or five may be dead by the time you read this (as will Jim Baen’s Universe; more about that in a moment), but if they die, you can be sure an equal or greater number will take their place. So, as of Thanksgiving, 2009, these are the e-zines that are paying a nickel a word or more: Subterranean, Clarkesworld, Jim Baen’s Universe, Cosmos (Australian), Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brainharvesting, Cemetery Dance, Fantasy Magazine, Heliotrope, Flash Fiction Online, Futurismic, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Shock Totem, Strange Horizons and the newest entry, Lightspeed. Most keep all or almost all their stories from previous issues available, and since the standard e-contract calls for a one-year electronic exclusive (and allows the writer to sell reprints to print magazines and anthologies from the get-go), there is a plethora of stories available on the e-zines’ sites, and it’s growing almost weekly.
One of the problems facing the magazines is that the business model keeps changing. I know a little something about the model for closing-up-shop-in-April-of-2010 Jim Baen’s Universe, because I co-edited it starting with its second year. And it was a hell of a magazine: it paid the top rates, it was running 200,000 words an issue, every story was illustrated, it was buying at least one first story an issue—and none of that mattered enough to keep the magazine in profit, because it was conceived as a rival to the digests—those were our competition, or so we thought, and all we had to do was pay more and print more words—and it turns out that the model was doomed from the first issue.
Why? Because we charged $30.00 a year for a six-issue subscription. A price just about equal to the digests, offering more words, more names, more everything…
…and for a couple of issues we did pretty well. We were the only e-zine paying pro rates. But then one day, after a year or so, we looked around, and there was Subterranean running John Scalzi and Joe Lansdale and Elizabeth Bear and myself in just about every issue, and it was free. There was Clarkesworld, with nowhere near as many words or stories, but paying more than the printzines, and they were free. And so was damned near every other professional-level e-zine. We had some money behind us, and we had a lot of talent in each issue, but the handwriting was on the wall: we simply couldn’t charge $5.00 an issue when our competition—our real competition, the other e-zines—was giving it away for free.
As for other problems: I don’t think Jim Baen’s Universe or any e-zine has yet fully realized that we’re in the electronic age. We don’t have to run traditional art; we can have art that moves, as our first two covers did, or art that simulates three dimensions, art that actually speaks to the reader. We don’t need to run print interviews, not in this era of podcasts and webcams; why not be face-to-face with your columnist or editor/ We didn’t make sufficient (or in most cases, any) use of chat rooms and all the other methods of becoming interactive with our readership. (We will, of course; it’s only a matter of time.
Anyway, we put out a hell of a magazine. The contents were right…but because of the phenomenal speed of change in the field, the business model was wrong.
I think the model for the immediate future will be for the better e-zines to pay more per word than the printzines—after all, they have no printing, shipping, or distribution expenses, most have just about no overhead, and they don’t give bookstores a cut of the cover price. But the other half of the model is that they will charge nothing for reading it on their web page. The revenue will have to come from a sponsor, from ads (maybe trailers from upcoming movies, which they can do and the print media can’t), from making P.O.D. copies and CD copies on demand and selling them piecemeal, and ultimately from the digital readers that have recently emerged.
Asimov’s, for instance, found itself a little gold mine in the Kindle, a move that kicked them back into profitability. Jim Baen’s Universe couldn’t do that, because it was felt it would abrogate Baen Books’ distribution agreement with Simon & Schuster, but you can bet that every future e-zine will make sure they can sell to Kindle, and the Sony Reader, and the Nook, and whatever other digital readers come along.
Now, while all this was going on, other people learned to use the internet too. Back in early 2006, luddite that I am, I did not even know the meaning of the word “podcast.” Then one of the many podcast operations, Escape Pod, bought podcast rights to the five 2006 short story Hugo nominees, including mine. I didn’t think much of it until a French producer, a man who understood English but couldn’t get the magazine my story had appeared in, contacted me and offered me 75 times as much for a French television option as the $100.00 fee I’d received for the podcast rights. You can be sure that made me an instant podcast fan, and I began urging some of my friends to seek out podcasters as well.
(Two months later I sold a Hugo-winning story to a podcast. The magazine in which it had appeared had sold less than 17,000 copies, and it’s reasonable to assume a few thousand buyers didn’t read my story. After a couple of months I asked the podcaster how many people had listened to it. The answer: 54,000 thus far—and that was three years ago. Today you can only find the magazine in a few second-hand stores…but you can still go to the web page and order up the story, which strikes me as an excellent way to reach thousands of new fans who hadn’t previously encountered my work, some of whom will eventually part with their money for my books.
And while we’re on the subject, when they do buy my books, they don’t have to just buy the hardcovers or the paperbacks. They don’t even have to buy digital copies for the Kindle, or the Sony Reader, or the Nook. Walk into any bookstore, and the one section that gets bigger every month is the audio book section. And as I write this, the 900-pound gorilla in the audio field doesn’t even make and distribute CDs for bookstores. It’s Audible.com, it’s been paying four figures per reprint novel, it bought a couple of hundred science fiction titles in 2009 and plans to buy even more in 2010, and all it sells are downloads through your computer. (Is it viable? Amazon.com thinks so; they bought it for $300 million last year, and have not expressed any regrets to date.)
So okay, there’s audio CDs and audio downloads and podcasts and e-zines and e-reprints. We have to be nearing the end of it, right?
Nope. We’re just starting to realize the potential of the digital age. The latest innovation—four companies are fighting it out as of this minute, so I can’t really predict who will be around next year (but you can bet the farm that someone will be)—the latest innovation, as I say, is electronic delivery of digital books and stories to mobile media: i-phones and the like, not just here but in multiple languages and multiple continents. The ones duking it out for market share are worldwide organizations, so if you or your agent have been shut out of a certain country when trying to sell your foreign rights, here’s another way to get in and establish a readership.
And you can bet that science fiction writers will evolve with the field. For a long time it was felt that if your story wasn’t in one of the top three digests, or one of the two or three big-money anthologies of the year, you had no chance for the awards. That’s no longer the case. The Nebula has already gone to electronic stories, and the Best Editor Hugo has gone to an editor of electronic stories. I don’t believe an e-story has won the Hugo yet, but it’s only a matter of time; I know I’ve had two e-stories nominated out of Jim Baen’s Universe, and as more readers realize how many top writers are being bought away by the e-zines, I would anticipate a sea change in the voting patterns.
Me, I’m a dinosaur. My family bought the first television set on our block when I was 6 years old, so all this innovation is a little frightening—but I’m a dinosaur who is at least trying to evolve, and I think it is more of a necessity than a choice. I suspect the day is not too far off when a journeyman writer will make more money from media and platforms that didn’t exist a generation ago than he will from the printed page.
Good thing? Bad thing? Actually, what it is is a science fiction thing.