Interview with Troy L. Wiggins (Executive Editor), L. D. Lewis (Art Director, Web Master, POB Coordinator), and Brent Lambert (Social Media Manager & Reviews Coordinator) of FIYAH! The Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction
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?
L.D. Lewis: Marketing and promotion? Absolute hell on a shoestring budget. Coming up with methods of leveraging your social media presence because it’s what’s available to you for free takes persistence, labor, creativity, and a love for one’s own voice because you’re going to repeat yourself a lot in order to stay visible.
Brent Lambert: The time away from your own personal pursuits. None of us are doing this because we’re making exponential amounts of money and most of us have plenty of goals outside of the magazine. As L.D. mentions, this takes a lot of persistence and a lot of labor. So I find that many of us have to slow down or put aside our own goals in order to keep the magazine running at an optimal level.
Troy L. Wiggins: All of the incidental responsibilities that have nothing to do with the magazine’s final product. We knew that publishing a magazine would be a massive responsibility and a lot of work. And, of course, we have programming and projects outside of the magazine that affect our output, but there are several responsibilities that come with positioning yourself as a publisher that you just don’t anticipate. Managing partnerships with other publishers, vendors, and other industry resources like reviewers, maintaining data on submissions and stories, working with other editors of best of collections and collaborative issues, managing advertisers, non SF/F media requests, convention requests (often with little or no funding attached) all of this contributes toward making sure that our product – the magazine – has the reach and scale it needs to, but it’s a heavy lift.
Jason: FIYAH! is a relatively new genre magazine, with your publication’s third anniversary approaching. What are the challenges of starting a new magazine and connecting with readers and writers? Any particular insights you wished you’d known before you started FIYAH?
LDL: I think it’s probably easier, actually, when you have a mission. Ethical consumption is more a thing now than it’s probably ever been. People want to grant patronage to causes, so if you’re trying to innovate or expand the reach of marginalized voices, or if your proceeds fund charitable efforts, these are messages readers will get behind financially (even if they don’t always read). I’m not sure about challenges because I think we’ve always just done what makes sense to us. We are the community we represent in our work, so we know where and how to find our contributors. Our collective experience allows us to speak authentically on our mission, and our genuine interest in creating community removes the obligation feeling of interfacing with our audience. I’ll say I wish we had more readers, but I think that’s true of every venue.
Brent: I have to say that for us, I don’t think staying connected with the readers and writer is hard. The audience we have on both those fronts is staunchly in support of us. One of our biggest points as a Black SFF community is that we’re out here and we’re getting ignored. FIYAH’s existence was birthed from a need to have this whole swath of people be allowed to be represented. So far that has brought people to our door who have been ready to uplift us wholeheartedly.
Troy: Brent and L.D. say it perfectly here. We knew what we wanted to do and who we wanted to do it for, in a very intentional way, from the beginning.
Jason: What percentage of your magazine’s financial support comes from subscriptions and what percentage comes from fundraisers? Would your magazine be able to exist without significant volunteer time from yourself and your staff?
LDL: We’re mainly sustained by subscriptions (about 70%) with the rest made up in independent donations, merch, and back issue sales. We don’t really do any major fundraising aside from our subscription preorder campaigns in the fall of each year, during which subscriptions are sold at discount rates. Thus far, we operate entirely on a volunteer basis, but we’re making moves to change to a paying model in the next couple of years.
Troy: FIYAH has an amazing staff. Everything you see from us, from our website, to our social media, to our amazing covers and magazines, to our voice and vision, all of that was built and is maintained on volunteer labor. As awesome as that is, it’s also worrying. The prevailing business model we have in this field, our overreliance on volunteer labor and crowdfunding is dangerous and, as we are seeing from these recurring conversations about the health of the field, unsustainable. It’s been a goal of mine from the start to figure out a way to pay our staff for their time, expertise, and labor because their work is worth that, but to do that we need to think of a different business model. I’ve heard rumblings of a co-operative business model for SF/F magazines, and I believe there are a few magazines out there that use this model. I’d be interested to see how a model like that would work in the larger SF/F field.
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?
LDL: I’m not sure who the “we” here is, but I think if you're going to identify that as the issue, you have to own your role in its inception and then work toward its solution. Any new zine is going to look to its predecessors for how to structure itself successfully. So if you're one of the most prominent, highly respected outlets in the field and you're offering free content or functioning on volunteer labor or employing a crowdfunded approach to cover operating costs, the 10, 15, 20 zines who come after you are going to take that as gospel. That said, I do think a lot of digital venues operate in that space where you’re either literature or you’re web content, and people who consider you web content even on a subconscious level are going to be deterred by a paywall when so much of the internet is free reading. If you’re a print market or print+digital, you have that physical entity advantage and it’s sometimes easier to justify paying for something physical. I don’t know that that’s anyone’s fault, though. Cultural landscapes shift constantly. We’re still having the frustrating conversation about e-books not being “real” books. Who knows when we’ll finally get that point across?
I think the issue is one of exhaustion on the part of volunteer staff and a strained supporter base. In my observation, the people who contribute to zine crowdfunds also contribute to crowdfunds for individuals in emergency situations. There are a lot of emergencies or people in general need, just within the SFF community and funds are finite. If you’re supporting your four favorite zines every year, donating to three medical funds, two Kickstarters, a moving fund, and also taking on costs associated with at least one fandom-related convention every year, it’s not sustainable for a lot of readers, especially the marginalized ones.
Brent: I do think, in general, there’s a cultural conversation to be had about the devaluation of art, but as L.D. pointed out (I always defer to her lol) there are expectations that are set for readers when you offer free content. And don’t get me wrong, I think free content is perfectly fine but I see it as hard to offer that and then bemoan patronage. There’s this self-deprecating thing I see in the industry where we constantly have to remind each other that our work has value and that people should pay for it. I’m going to paraphrase something I saw a day ago, but one $100 client is less work and more valuable than five $20 clients. Yes, demanding your worth may mean losing some of the audience but the ones who stay are there because they appreciate what you’re doing.
Troy: This is complicated. Like L.D. pointed out, the people who support magazines are exhausted, and likely don’t have all of the funds needed to support every crowdfunding or donation request that comes around in the SF/F field. And Brent’s point that there is a cultural component here is spot on – the who of who has devalued short fiction absolutely needs to be considered and unpacked in order to get to the truth of this conversation – especially considering that there publications who are certainly not part of the SF/F field publishing SF/F short fiction and doing really interesting work there. What does seem to be true is that people are looking for visionary strategies and new ways of seeing how to live and be on our flaming little planet, and SF/F helps with that. Seen that way, this is a moment of great promise.
Part of this is definitely a shifting media landscape that SF/F has been kind of behind the curve on. The internet, especially in the last twenty years, has torpedoed the attention economy, which has deeply impacted how much supporters notice and how much they spend. I look at the difficulties of our field, but then I look at the larger landscape: the SF/F field has to compete with every other thing seeking to get into people’s eyeballs, and that’s before you start thinking deeply about marketing strategy – the difficulties of which have been pointed out already.
With that in mind, it’s hard to run a magazine, or really, a media platform, in this attention economy period. I get fundraising emails from Bitch magazine every month. Magazines and online verticals – even massive ones – shut down or layoff staff daily. Being a freelance writer or a contributor in this economy is difficult, and dangerous. Readers and subscribers don’t have enough money, but they also don’t have enough time to engage with the thing they’re spending money on or look deeply for things. Like I said, complicated.
Jason: I was really impressed by FIYAH’s successful fundraiser to host a staff meetup in honor of your magazine’s first nomination for a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. To me this ties in with how important it is for a magazine to build its own community and support it. How do you see FIYAH both supporting and building a community?
LDL: Our social media presence in critical to this work. It’s largely where we find our writers, where we check in on our people and lift them up in their work. Our editors send out personalized feedback in rejections to support their evolution as writers. We keep an eye on the conversations around Black presences in genre spaces and we author studies that illustrate those changes to keep the entire field fertile for the voices we want to see. And we’re accountable to the people who support us. When you cultivate a joyful space that’s focused on everyone’s growth, people want to be part of that, and they follow the tone we’ve set for them. It keeps us rich in positive engagement and new ideas.
Brent: We made sure from the jump to declare our social media space as something more than just about the magazine. I knew from the moment I got assigned the Social Media Manager gig that I wanted to give writers a place to express themselves, interact with each other and just have a space where they could “let their hair down”. I think for the most part we’ve succeeded with that. I’m forever in awe of every time someone has told us they decided to write again because of our existence. Writers, especially Black writers, need to know that they’re loved, wanted and appreciated.
And to be frank, the larger SFF world has been doing a piss poor job at that. So honestly, this was low-hanging fruit in terms of building such a dedicated audience. We’re just lucky people decided to trust us and actually stick around.
Jason: Why did you originally want to publish a genre magazine?
LDL: We saw a need. The field swore we (Black SFF writers) didn’t exist and that was the reason we weren’t being published. We knew they were mistaken. And now they do, too.
Brent: As is so often the burden of Black people, if we need something we often have to build it ourselves. Representation was and continues to be (despite improvements) lacking in the short SFF field.
So sadly, want doesn’t really get to come into play for Black creative ventures. We’re often boxed in to having to do it in order to be allowed to exist. Or in the case of critiques previously delivered by some SFF venues, “prove” we exist at all.
Troy: When I first started writing and submitting, it seemed to be that the SF/F field was content to ignore black SF/F writers, even when they said they were hurting. Like, people heard you yelling about your pain, but little was actually changing. The aftermath of the #BlackSpecFic report definitely contributed to our being here, but there was always a need for a space that centers black speculative genius in conversation with the rest of the field, that showed that “hey, we can do this as well as a Clarkesworld or an Analog, and our work is just as brilliant.”
We’re not the first black-focused SF/F magazine in the world. But we try to bring the black perspective, through the work of authors, and through our other programming, to contribute to the conversations that shape the field. We wanted to show the field that black writers existed, but we also wanted to create a space to give black SF/F writers voice and a pathway to success that didn’t require them to have a first touch with a publication that didn’t understand them or didn’t care about them. I shudder to even consider how many black writers have quit writing SF/F because of the kinds of difficulties and traumas that come with submitting to, at best, race-blind or at worst, racist magazines and editors.