Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas of Uncanny Magazine. 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 Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Publishers and Editor-in-Chiefs of Uncanny Magazine
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?
Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas: We think it’s important that people know the financial margins for magazines to stay in the black are razor thin, and that most of the magazines are unable to generate income for their publishers. (And many aren’t able to pay the editors.) Almost all of the income generated by magazines are going to the writers and artists.
We definitely believe that the writers and artists should come first, but the current publishing financial models are still evolving. We do believe that one day magazines will become more profitable, but the process of getting there is a lot of trial and error with different financial models.
Jason: Uncanny is one of the most successful of today’s genre magazines, having won multiple Hugo Awards for Best Semiprozine along with Hugos for Best Editor, Short Form, for yourself and Michael Damian Thomas plus awards for many of the stories you’ve published. Despite this, you’ve said that as Uncanny has grown in revenue, your expenses have grown at about the same pace. How do the pressures of running your magazine today differ from when you founded Uncanny?
Lynne and Michael: We knew a lot going in, but things keep changing in the industry, and our knowledge has grown with the changes. In order to keep up with other magazines and SFWA recommendations, our pay rates increased. We’ve tried to offer more content to our readership community, especially as the comparable magazines increased their content. We learned the need for accounting software, a web person, accountant, lawyer, and all of the specialists needed to keep the magazine at the level our readers expect.
The biggest change is really now we know better what to expect, so fewer of the pressures of running a magazine come as surprises.
But fundamentally, this is fairly close to what we envisioned when we started the magazine, at least with the nuts and bolts stuff. We knew that this was going to be a marathon.
Jason: Do you think it’s possible Uncanny will eventually transition to a fully professional magazine, with all the staff including the publishers/editors-in-chief being paid? How big a hurdle would this be to achieve, and is it desirable?
Lynne and Michael: All of the Uncanny staff is currently paid except for the publishers/editors-in-chief (Lynne and Michael). We definitely desire this, especially for Michael who puts 60 hours a week into running the magazine. It’s a fairly sizeable hurdle, but we knew that going into this. We expect that we will continue to increase our income and make this happen.
When we first developed our business plan before we launched the first Kickstarter, we prioritized making the quality magazine we wanted to make and developing a readership community over quick profits. We had a lot of knowledge from our previous work at Apex and from our peers. Our main goals at the beginning were to be sustainable (which happened right away), to make the magazine we wanted to make as far as size, content, and presentation (also happened right away), and to build a community of readers (still growing). The ultimate goal has always been to increase our community every year, and eventually that will lead to us earning money for ourselves.
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?
Lynne and Michael: We understand why Neil would say this, but we think the SFF short fiction magazines are just caught in the same market forces as newspapers and other types of magazines. As the Internet flourished, readers have received a great deal of their shorter reading content for free. This is the case for Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, etc., to the New York Times and everyone’s local paper. Online advertising revenue just hasn’t provided enough income, even with periodicals created specifically for the Internet.
With the online SFF magazines, many of the ones that attempted paywalls in the past failed and closed. All of the current SFF magazines are just part of a general Internet trend. We don’t think there was a different way to go.
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 this community?
Lynne and Michael: Uncanny doesn’t exist without its community. We don’t feel that this is anything new to magazines. If you look back in SFF history, a thriving community of readers in the letters’ column was there all the way back to Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. All of the ongoing digests (Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF) are still known for having dedicated communities of readers. For a magazine to succeed, you need readers who are invested in the vision and content of your magazine.
Jason: Why did you originally want to publish a genre magazine?
Lynne and Michael: We absolutely loved our time at Apex. We love short stories. We love essays and poems. We love working creators. We love seeing the responses from readers to these gorgeous works. We thought there was a niche to be served with gorgeous pieces that made readers feel. Uncanny seemed like a good idea at the time, and we’re still having a blast running it.