Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Vanessa Rose Phin of Strange Horizons. 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 Vanessa Rose Phin, Editor-in-Chief of Strange Horizons
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?
Vanessa Rose Phin: The answer that tends to give writers the most comfort is to let them know that our not selecting their work isn't necessarily because it is bad. It could be that we got 400 submissions and could only choose two, and those two happened to resonate at that moment or for that issue. We get far more good stories than we could ever use. And given that most of our editors are writers, they understand getting rejections suck.
From my standpoint, the most exhausting thing about running a zine is social media. I love it and it has always buoyed me as an agoraphobe, but maintaining several evolving social media accounts in the voice of a zine, in addition to my own accounts as a face of the zine, can be quite taxing, as anyone who is familiar with the gig economy and marketing yourself understands. It's especially intense during fund drive season. And of course the broader the reach, the larger the population of trolls.
Jason: Strange Horizons is the longest-running digital genre magazine and pioneered many of the fundraising methods now used by other publications. How have things changed since the founding of Strange Horizons? Would you say it’s harder or easier to raise funds for and financially support a genre magazine these days?
Vanessa: Strange Horizons was founded on what we then called the museum model, running on donations and grants. The founding editors were told that a magazine on a website would never be taken as seriously as a print zine, and that they wouldn't last, which is amusing to consider in hindsight, but it shows both the dedication they had in those first days and how society has changed in what it values. SH rode the wave that saw, at the same time, the demise of so many print publications, including many newspapers, and it isn't a pleasant thing to consider. Short genre fiction has always been a robust little market, but it still feels starved in terms of how little social support there is for the arts. There seem to be fewer grants with more red tape these days for publications. At the same time, crowdfunding has expanded in ways we couldn't have considered 20 years ago, and folks with good social media presence can capitalize on that. As for ease of funding, SH has it easier than newer zines because we're known, and we can't help noticing that big branches tend to soak up most of the rain. What we really want to see is a large, diverse market, not a tiny market narrowed to a few giants.
Jason: Strange Horizons also helped pioneer the idea that a genre magazine could be run as a nonprofit with assistance from a staff of volunteers. What are the pros and cons of this publishing model?
Vanessa: With volunteer staff, the con is simple: no pay. Generally, working for no pay privileges people who can afford to volunteer time, and devalues the work we do as editors. I'd like to think that at SH, we have partially balanced the former by making our staff so large and so international that no one need put in many hours, and folks can cover for you regardless of time zone. Despite having 50+ folks, we're a close group. Our Slack is a social space, and we bring our worst and best days there for each other. Several members (including me) have volunteered right through periods of un- and underemployment because of the love of the zine and our community.
We have looked to add pay several times, but given the amount of money we raise, we would have to both double our funds and become a tiny 1-3 person crew, instead of a 50-member operation. Think of the narrowing of scope and perspective that would bring. When we did try for an honorarium during one fund drive; sadly, we received very little interest from donors. It isn't out of the picture, though.
Jason: Do you pay any of your staff? How many hours of volunteer time does it typically take to create each issue of Strange Horizons?
Vanessa: We are all volunteer, including me. We don't track our hours, but it is easy to say that it takes hundreds of combined hours to create an issue. We are open to submissions every week, and we get hundreds of them, which the first readers and editors review; there's the back-and-forth of the editing process; podcast creation; contracts and payments; art and layout; technical issues; reviews discussions and assignments and scheduling; columns and articles to be solicited and galleyed. There are the copyediting passes, content warning passes, and my pass before publication, as well as social media announcements and updating the e-book for our Patreon supporters. That's for just one week, and we publish weekly.
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 that community?
Vanessa: We do feel it is extremely important to engage with communities – plural, because SFF isn't one big happy family. We have always preferred to prioritize marginalized voices – it makes the genre bigger, better, and truer to humanity. And not only for writers and artists but in the gatekeeping roles of the publication itself. Getting that editing experience is important in publishing.
I wouldn't consider any of those communities ours, though. More like we've organically created a friendly, mutually supportive population by constantly reaching for new hands and new ideas. I don't think it's particularly important that we cultivate an in-group to thrive as a zine. We'd much rather look outward than inward.
Jason: Next year is Strange Horizons's 20th anniversary. Any thoughts about where you'd like to see Strange Horizons go in the next 20 years?
Vanessa: This is my first year as editor in chief, so many of these thoughts are what I hope to bring to the zine in the next few years. Primarily, I'd like to see our international presence increase. With Samovar and our regional special issues, we've seen an uptick in submissions from folks outside the US-UK axis, and that's been great. We co-published pieces with a Brazilian genre zine, Trasgo, for our Brazilian special issue – they did theirs in Portuguese, ours in translation – I'd like to do that with other zines. I'd also like to get into print, put out some SH-sponsored anthologies during my tenure. In the long view, I hope Strange Horizons stays true to its historical focus on SFF at its most expansive. And I hope it stays hella queer.