Below is my #SFF2020 interview with interview with Pablo Defendini of Fireside 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 Pablo Defendini, Publisher and Art Director of Fireside 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?
Pablo Defendini: By far, it’s the role that good, engaged editors play in the creation of quality work. A good short story (or a novel, or a play, or an illustration, or anything, really) usually doesn’t just spring forth fully formed from the mind of a lone author toiling away in their garret – it takes the work of a compassionate and thoughtful editor to take the initial draft and help the author hone it into its most effective shape.
And once the developmental editing process is done, it then takes a fastidious copyeditor to review the work and make sure there’s no inconsistencies, errors, omissions, or other little details that can take a reader out of the experience of enjoying the work. As well, there’s proofreaders, line editors, etc., all of whose work is crucial to ensuring a final story of superlative quality – better than a lone author can achieve on their own.
All of this work is meant to be invisible to the reader, so there’s a real lack of understanding out there about the work that goes into this stuff. A good editor doesn’t just pick a story from a submissions pile and calls it a day – that’s just the first step!
Jason: You said Fireside pays its editors a fee for each issue of the print magazine, with the fee based on Fireside’s word rate and the revenue to pay for this coming entirely from subscribers. Was there a break-even point with subscribers where this started to work? Do you still rely on any fundraising to support the magazine?
Pablo: I think using a word like ‘fundraising’ is misleading. Fireside is not a non-profit, and it’s not a charity – so we’re not ‘raising funds’ for anything. Using vocabulary linked to non-profits and charities implies that the people who support us are doing so out of the kindness of their heart, without receiving any direct value in return. The stories, artwork, and publications that Fireside publishes have value, our customers recognize that, and are willing to pay money for it.
But I digress. To answer your question:
Since its inception, Fireside has been sustainable. That is: our operations have always been fully funded by the money we bring in, first via our annual Kickstarter campaigns, later via Patreon, and most recently our direct subscriptions. And this works well for an online-only publication, since there’s very few up-front costs associated with publishing online. But when we decided to get into print, I had to invest some money up front in order to pay for printers, shipping, fulfillment, and other costs associated with physical inventory. The financial plan for the print magazine called for a grace period during which we needed to reach a certain number of subscribers in order to regain that ‘sustainable’ status, and I’m happy to report that we reached that goal at the beginning of this year. I had forecast that we would be able to reach it in December of last year, and it actually happened in January of this year, so we cut it close, but we got there.
Jason: Even though you pay your editors, does your magazines still require significant volunteer time from yourself and your staff?
Pablo: No. Everyone who works on Fireside – from our first readers through to our editors, copyeditors, illustrators, etc – gets paid, period. Even I get compensated. Since I’m the owner of the company that publishes Fireside, my compensation happens in ways other than a cash payment for services rendered, but it happens.
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?
Pablo: I agree with Neil’s analysis, here. And Fireside obviously shares in his ‘complicity,’ as he puts it. Since my days at Tor.com, I’ve been – and continue to be – an advocate for free-to-read content online. It brings in new readers, helps to raise the profile of the publication, and helps take advantage of the network effects of social media.
But I also agree with Neil in that perhaps we’ve seen the pendulum shift too far in the direction of free-to-read online. Fireside, in particular, has done an okay job in articulating the value of the work we put out there – the proof is in our subscription revenue. But as a whole, I think we’ve decoupled the work from its perceived value, and that’s a problem.
Like any problem worth solving, it’s complicated. We can do a better job communicating the value that we provide, and we also can come up with better models that combine the positive attributes of both the free-to-read model and the paywalled approach. We’re working on some stuff in this area now, and we hope to make some announcements early next year.
Jason: Fireside also publishes a number of genre books. Books generally have better profit margins and sales numbers than individual magazine issues. Do you also experience this? Any thoughts on why this might be the case?
Pablo: Books and magazines are very, very different businesses – it’s apples to oranges, despite superficial similarities. A direct comparison is not a useful exercise, in my opinion.
Books rely on revenue from individual sales. Periodicals rely on either advertising (which is a slowly dying model, in my opinion), or on direct subscriptions (or crowdfunding campaigns, which for the purposes of this question are another flavor of ‘subscription’ revenue) to generate revenue. The way you market each product and build your audience is very different.
With periodicals, the key is consistency over time, in the aggregate, as you cultivate your audience, which is why the successful periodicals out there are the ones that have created and fostered a community. With books, each one is a separate product, that needs to have its own P&L. So in terms of profit margins and sales numbers, it’s hard to generalize about books, in the way that I can be much more confident in our magazine numbers, since I have the historical data to extrapolate future performance from.
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?
Pablo: It’s essential! See above!
But I would add that it is also essential for any publisher to own the relationship with its customers. Platforms and service providers like Patreon, Kickstarter, Amazon, Ingram, Diamond, and others insert themselves in between publishers and their customers, even as they provide valuable services. The more control they have over the customer relationship, the more vulnerable you are to any changes they may make.
Jason: Why did you want to publish a genre magazine?
Pablo: I believe in the power of stories to shape our culture. It’s truly that simple.
Jason: Any final thoughts you’d like to share with people?
Pablo: So many. But I’m gonna save those for my own blog. ;)