Jason Sanford

My review of Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer

My review of Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer is now up on SF Signal.

The review's bottom line: Even if it's been years since you bothered reading a "how to" book related to writing, check out Booklife.

Circulation of online SF/F/H magazines

In response to my recent post Online Genre Magazines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I received several emails asking about my circulation estimates for these magazines. Now circulation is a dated term, only truly applying to print magazines. But the question is still valid. How many people actually read online genre magazines?

As I said in that post, it's difficult to determine the readership of online magazines. If online magazines even report the number of visitors they receive, there is a tendency to inflate their numbers. I've seen this happen several times over recent years, where an online magazine proclaims one public set of readership numbers but have admitted to me in private their traffic is actually much lower.

Based on my experience with online magazines, I believe top online genre publications like Strange Horizons likely have between 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Most other top markets will have 400 to 1000 visitors a day, and obscure markets will have 10 to 100 visitors a day at most. For a site like Tor.com, which has an active online community and an extensive offering of unique content, their numbers will obviously go much higher. But I'd still bet the number of people who access the Tor.com fiction each day is no more than 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors. If that.

While these numbers may pale beside high traffic websites like Boing Boing, the numbers aren't too bad. If an online genre magazine averages 1,000 visitors a day, that means they have 30,000 readers a month, which is more than the biggest SF magazine in the United States, Analog.

Still, the weak point in my analysis is I don't have access to much current data. I'm looking for a few  editors of online genre magazines to share their traffic data with me. I'll keep quiet about the who and where, and if enough places share the info, I'll use it to more accurately update my estimates above. You can find my contact information here.

Interzone 225

Issue 225 of Interzone (Nov./Dec. 2009) will be out November 12. In addition to stories by me, Lavie Tidhar, Rebecca Payne, Colin Harvey, Shannon Page and Jay Lake, the issue features an amazing wrap-around cover by Adam Tredowski.

I mean, that cover is flat-out a work of art.

I can't remember the last time I saw a SF magazine with a wrap-around cover. For those who don't know, wrap-around covers used to be more common in books and magazine, but have largely disappeared due to the pressures of marketing information and advertising. And in a Twitter post, TTA Press admits (with a tongue-in-cheek comment) this wrap-around cover is "a treat that disguises a major failure by the Advertising Manager." But it's still beautiful, so pick up a copy next month.

BTW, the last issue of Interzone, which contains my novella "Sublimation Angels," is now available for download as a multi-format ebook at Fictionwise.

Submit your stories, not your idiocy

When submitting your work, don't be an idiot. As a proof, two examples from my in-box:

• One author submitted a story to storySouth by way of me back in March. I responded immediately, stating that yes, I am still listed on the masthead in that vague "founding editor" role, but I have nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the magazine. To submit a story, check out their guidelines. The idiot's response: Wait seven months then ask me for an update on his submission. When I repeated above info and also sent my earlier email, the submitter explodes in anger because I "wasted his time."
   
• Another person is making the rounds in my in-box after submitting a story using the cc function. That is, he copied the emails of fifty magazines and sent the submission to all of us at once. This means not only does he look like an idiot, every time a rejection is sent back, every other editor also sees the message and is reminded of said idiocy.

I would not suggest either method as a path toward publication.

Update: Once the snail mail oozed its way into my mailbox today, lo and behold the snail had deposited a submission. For the record, storySouth never accepted mailed submissions, only electronic ones. So this person not only ignored the current storySouth guidelines, he ignored the old guidelines too and tracked down the physical address of the person who is no longer the storySouth editor. End result is I opened the sub, wrote note on sub, placed sub in SASE. A waste of one minute of my life and $3 postage on the submitter's part.

Don't Panic: 42 Reasons Not to Read the New Hitchhiker's Book

I've read all of Douglas Adam's original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. They rank among my favorite novels, with the first 3 being some of the most influential SF books of all time and ones you should read before dying. But the new "authorized" sequel And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer, err no. No insult intended to the author, who has created some great works of his own, but here are 42 reasons not to read this book.

1. It's not funny.
2. Why pay $25.99 to read (in the author's words) "very authorized fan fiction"?
3. "Why bother letting a CLASSIC piece of work stand on it's own merit when there are dollars to be made for retailers." (fan comment from SciFi Wire)
4. No one should "hitch a ride to a sci-fi legacy."
5. Even Douglas Adams wouldn't tempt the literary gods with the sixth book in a trilogy. (Okay, maybe he would, but let's pretend otherwise.)
6. I don't want to live in a world where an author ends his series by killing all the characters and destroying every possible earth that exists, and someone can still find a way to revive the franchise.
7. Because we don't want to replace Douglas' clipped and precise humor with humor that "is more rounded and anecdotal, and a little warmer."
8. "I'd rather have a lightly grilled weasel on a bun, please." (One Amazon review)
9. I don't like "extraterrestrial purple prose."
10. Because naturally the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most amazing electronic book to ever come out of the editorial offices of Ursa Minor Beta, isn't available on its wanna-be cousin the Kindle.
11. If you can't make a decent movie off an amazing franchise, don't expect a second chance with a new book.
12. "Give it a chance" isn't a reason to read a book--it's a plea for literary attention.
13. The book is "Almost, but not quite, entirely UNLIKE Douglas Adams."
14. Because I have no desire to breathe "a sigh of relief" when I finish a book.
15. When you expect a book to be bad, having it be "20 percent better" than bad would still be ... bad.
16. Imagine the uproar if someone besides Stephenie Meyer wrote another Twilight novel. Actually, that would be a selling point to me, but I digress.
17. DON'T PANIC must be the catch-phrase of corporate publishers these days, who are milking every cash cow to death (along with their industry).
18. When Time magazine proclaims a book "good," intelligent readers should run the other way.
19. Because obviously we live in a world where good stories can't simply have an ending.
20. Mostly Harmless should be a book title, not a review summary.
21. Because this book feels like a cheap shot. It would be like me promising 42 reasons not to read a book, then delivering only 21 and telling people to double the number to reach 42. It's a shame when people do cheap stuff like that.

Best American Short Stories 2009 Lives Down to Its Old Reputation

So the other day I was in the bookstore flipping through the new Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold—and notice I said flipping, not buying, a distinction which will become clear in a moment—only to discover the stories were from the usual suspects. You know, The New Yorker, The New England Review, The New Yorker again, The Southern Review, and again and again with The New Yorker.

Detecting a pattern?

None of the stories interested me, so I didn't buy the edition. However, more surprising than the low quality of the stories is that the selections were only from well-known literary magazines. No genre or online magazines were represented (except for Narrative Magazine, which is fully embraced by the old-guard literati as the only online journal worth including with the usual suspects). Still, these selections didn't bother me too much until I looked at the list of the "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008." Once again, no genre magazines listed. Almost no online magazines.

Guess these places didn't publish any stories last year which were worth noting.

This is shocking because in recent years the BASS series had been much improved by its guest editors widening the net, so to speak, to include stories from outside the usual suspects. Michael Chabon began this process with his brilliant 2005 edition of BASS, and the trend continued with guest editors Ann Patchett, Stephen King, and Salman Rushdie. By widening the net, these editors once again made BASS both relevant to the discussion of short fiction in this country, and fun to read.

Thanks to the 2009 edition of BASS, the series is back to being the laughing stock of anthologies.

Scoring (in the used book sense) at Barnes and Noble

Here's something I discovered the other day: select Barnes & Noble brick and mortar stores are selling used books. According to the clerk I spoke to at their Easton branch, this is a pilot program in a few places which isn't doing too well.

But from my point of view, the program is great! By way of background, I'm a bit of an amateur book scout, which is probably why I wrote a story about people who love to hunt for used first editions. Well, at this Barnes & Noble I recently found a number of hardback first edition books in great condition, including:

• Strange Horizons by Sam Moskowitz, a 1970s collection of his SF essays
• City of Glass by Paul Auster, volume 1 of his famed New York Trilogy as originally published by Sun and Moon Press
• The Best Laid Schemes by Larry Eisenberg, a SF collection from a tragically forgotten author which includes his well-known story from Dangerous Visions "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?"
• and Anthony Burgess' groundbreaking translation of Cyrano de Bergerac.

I also picked up some first editions by David Brin and Hal Duncan. Because B&N wanted to get rid of these used books, they were only a dollar each. Unfortunately, they each have a small remainder ink mark on the bottom pages, but that's minor and who cares. The Paul Auster book is almost impossible to find in a first edition and sells for hundreds of dollars in most used bookstores (at least, the bookstores which know anything about used books).

My suggestion: Get to a B&N and see if they are taking part in this used book program.