Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. For the complete #SFF2020: The State of Genre Magazines report, including other interviews, or to download the report in Kindle, Epub and PDF formats, go here.
Interview with Scott H. Andrews, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Jason Sanford: I suspect most people in the SF/F genre don’t understand the difficulties of publishing a magazine. What’s one aspect of running a genre magazine you wish more readers and writers knew about?
Scott H. Andrews: I wish more readers and writers realized how tenuous the financial situation still is for magazine publishing in our field today. I know that that fact seems counterintuitive because short fiction is currently thriving, with dozens of new indie zines launching in the last ten years, hundreds of great short fiction writers, and innovative new formats for short fiction like e-books and audio podcasts. Several prominent ezines have increased revenues to the point that they can pay their staffs enough to place out of eligibility for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award, and some run very successful funding drives. But many zines use staffs that are mostly or all unpaid volunteers, and those ones that do pay their staff still as far as I know are paying their editors far less than novel or freelance editors get for the same amount of work, or they're paying the staff but the head editors are contributing their work for free.
Artificial cost-suppression measures like that are what's keeping those zines afloat. For BCS, I've put in about 30 hours a week for over eleven years, for free. Without that work done for free – if BCS had to pay me for that time, even at a token rate like half of the per-word pay rate the writers get for the stories – BCS would have gone out of business many years ago.
I also wish more writers realized that the situation in current indie ezine publishing is a shared ecosystem of writers, readers, and publishers. It's not the old-fashioned situation of magazine publishing businesses run by businesspeople to make profit. Today's short fiction ezines are not making profit; most of them are only surviving because they artificially suppress their costs by things like paying their staff little or nothing. Ezine editors also have a much more altruistic motive than businesspeople in old-fashioned publishing. All the zine editors I know were either writers themselves or big fans of short fiction and zines. We put so much of our time and emotional energy into editing and running our zines because we love short fiction, we love writers, we love our field and want to contribute to it.
I put so much time into writing every BCS rejection with personalized comments – over 25,000 personalized rejections in eleven years – because I appreciate writers and the struggle that writing takes (I know that struggle acutely; I was a SF/F short fiction writer myself); I love working with writers, I love teaching and learning myself, and I want to do everything I can to help writers break in and get their work to readers. I put so much time into rewrite requests and working with authors on rewrites – probably 75% of the 600+ stories in BCS have had some level of revision that I worked with the author on – because I see the seeds of greatness in stories all the time, I want to help the author make that story great, and I love doing everything I can to bring great stories into the world. I put so much time last summer into the BCS Patreon and fundraising to raise revenues so we could afford to pay the new higher SFWA-qualifying pay rate because I believe that writers, and artists of all fields, deserve much higher pay for their art than they get.
I understand that the relationship between authors and publishers in past eras was often adversarial, with publishers classically being parsimonious or exploitative. I understand that negligent magazine publishers still exist, and writers must always look out for their own interests. Most writers are tremendously supportive of indie zines; many writers donate to BCS and other zines, and I'm certain they do it not out of self-interest but because they love short fiction and they appreciate the hard work and commitment of indie zines and their staffs. But I see the outdated mindset of that old-fashioned adversarial relationship persisting among some writers, and it's false and makes it harder to keep this shared short fiction ecosystem going.
Jason: What percentage of your magazine’s financial support comes from subscriptions and what percentage comes from fundraisers?
Scott: For BCS, less than 1% of our support comes from e-book subscriptions and the rest from donations. We're a 501c3 nonprofit approved by the IRS, so donations to BCS are tax deductible. I think part of the reason we get so little revenue from our e-book subscriptions is that I have priced our subscriptions and single-issue e-books too low; well below what most magazines charge. Multiple other major ezines charge $36/year for a subscription; the BCS e-book subscription is $20/year since summer 2019, but for years it was $16/year and even $13/year. Because BCS is a nonprofit, part of my ethos for serving the public is making the fiction available to readers as conveniently and cheaply and widely as possible, but in hindsight I took that approach too far and made a mistake in pricing the BCS subscriptions so low that they are providing the magazine with only token revenue.
Jason: Would your magazine be able to exist without significant volunteer time from yourself and your staff?
Scott: Definitely not. For BCS, I do all the editing, rewrites, and copyediting; sort the slush, reply to about 25% of it (with all rejections personalized), manage the website, format the e-books, do all the social media, handle all the promotion, do all the payments and keep all the books, coordinate and engineer and master the audio podcasts, and narrate many of them; everything except reading 75% of the slush, which is done by my wonderful First Readers Kerstin Hall, Deirdre Quirk, and Rachel Morris, and former First Readers Christine Row, Nicole Lavigne, and Kate Marshall. All that work has been about 30 hours a week for over eleven years, as a volunteer. Without that work done for free, BCS would not be able to exist.
I do pay my First Readers a token honorarium, which they deserve every bit of, for reading slush and writing personalized rejections to every submission. I wish I could pay them more, and I hope to make that possible soon.
Jason: How much of an increase in your budget would be required to pay all editorial and publishing staff a living wage?
Scott: Estimating using a salary of $15/hour for the work our staff does, we would need a $45,000 increase in our annual budget to pay all staff a living wage. That's double what our annual budget is to pay for the stories we publish. To cover that, our monthly donations through Patreon would have to increase by 7000%.
Jason: Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld has said some of the problems experienced by genre magazines come about because “we’ve devalued short fiction” through reader expectations that they shouldn’t have to pay for short stories. Do you agree with this? Any thoughts on how to change this situation?
Scott: I absolutely agree that online publishing of short fiction, available for free on the web, has devalued short fiction in the mindset of the readership. I think it relates to online culture in general; the online usership expects articles or podcasts or music downloads or software to be free, and that attitude extends to online fiction too. Online zines in my opinion have exacerbated this attitude by providing the fiction online for free whereas in paper magazines, readers had to pay for it.
However, I think this issue is more complicated than just that we've devalued short fiction in general. I think most regular short fiction readers and short fiction fans understand that it costs money for short stories to get published, and those readers are not opposed to paying something for them. I think this devaluing that's happened is a devaluing of the amount that the readers who are willing to pay think they should pay or think short fiction is worth.
For example, the BCS e-book subscriptions I mentioned above: multiple other major ezines charge $36/year for a subscription; the BCS e-book subscription is $20/year but used to be $16/year and $13/year. We struggled even at $13/year to get readers to subscribe, and many of them did it out of charity, wanting to help the magazine. We offer the slight premium of giving e-book subscribers every new issue a week early, but that doesn't seem to lure many subscribers. Our web readership in 2018 was 76,000 unique IPs per month, increasing by 15-25% every year for the past four years, yet our e-book subscription numbers have held static in the low hundreds all that time.
A significant part of that is my own fault; I am not a good salesperson, and I prioritize the editing and podcast work over marketing and drumming up sales. But I think BCS's experience shows that there's a disconnect between an e-book price that provides a sustainable income for a zine and an e-book price that readers think the fiction is worth.
Jason: It seems to me that many of the genre magazines which have succeeded in recent years have built up a strong community of readers and writers. How important is to for a magazine to build its own community and support it?
Scott: I think a community or fanbase definitely helps a magazine succeed. Not just helping it succeed financially, with the community or fanbase members making donations or backing a fundraising campaign; a community or fanbase also is a huge way that word spreads about a magazine and its stories, shared online or through social media, or on sites for writers, or on review sites, or at conventions or writer's groups.
Spreading the word is crucial, especially for an indie zine, which may not have any name recognition at the start. It introduces readers to the stories, the zine, and the authors. It also introduces them to other indie zines; many short fiction writers submit to and publish in multiple different zines.
It draws in new fans. I see readers on Twitter often who have just discovered BCS, even though we've been publishing for eleven years, because of word they heard. Now those readers have ten years of back issues, 600+ stories, to feast on.
It also reaches authors. Every magazine is only as good as the stories authors submit to it. Word of mouth helps authors learn about a zine, read its stories, see what other authors it has published; see what elements and themes the zine favors. I've had numerous new BCS authors tell me that they started submitting to us because they read a great story that we'd published, or they saw us publish an author they admired or respected or had read before.
Jason: Any final thoughts you’d like to share with people?
Scott: I'm very pleased and reassured to see discussion about these issues surfacing in recent months, including the Readercon panel about the effect of the new higher SFWA-qualifying short fiction pay rate on zines, the subsequent discussions on Twitter about editors deserving pay too and many zines surviving only because their staffs contribute time for little or no pay, and your interview series here. In an editorial in 2014 I called for discussion on some of these issues; I'm very glad to see it finally happening. I hope it continues.
For me, because I see the current ezine scene as a shared ecosystem of writers, readers, and publishers, this sort of discussion is vital to us keeping this ecosystem afloat and working to make it better; make it more sustainable for all of us. We're all in this together, all reaping the wonderful benefits of this new golden age in short fiction and ezine publishing. It will take input from all areas of the field to keep things going and find ways to improve.