The difference between successful genre magazines, and failures

Over on io9, K. Tempest Bradford continues her weekly reviews of short stories by asking:

"How does the average reader discover magazines? Assuming that people who like science fiction, fantasy, and horror are just as interested in short stories as novels, do they know how much short fiction is out there and available? Do they stick to the most familiar outlets or go in search of more?"

Sadly, I don't believe most people are as interested in short stories as they are in novels. That's been a pattern in our genre for a few decades and I've yet to see it change. But there are still many people who love short stories and seek them out.

As for how people discover genre short stories, I believe most readers still do this through magazines. Yes, book anthologies are a great way to also discover short fiction. However, most original anthologies reach relatively few readers, while the anthologies with the biggest readerships tend to be reprint anthologies such as Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction series. But since these reprint anthologies depend mostly on magazines for their stories, we've come full circle to magazines again being the place where short fiction truly lives in our genre.

But that raises the question of how people discover genre magazines, and how successful they truly are. In Tempest's column she quotes a Warren Ellis post on the state of today's genre magazines. Ellis laments the death of the new version of New Worlds after only two issues and the near simultaneous passing of Rudy Rucker's Flurb. Ellis then lumps the British magazine Interzone in with these two, declaring that "NEW WORLDS was never a nostalgic enterprise. But, perhaps, publishing a speculative fiction magazine is."

Which goes to show that Warren Ellis doesn't know much of anything about today's genre magazines.

I say this because anyone who paid attention to the revived New Worlds knew it was always a pointless exercise in nostalgia which would end up dying a totally predictable death. And while Flurb published some good fiction, it was very much a fanzine published merely through the love of its editor Rudy Rucker.

But the successful magazines of our genre — wow, they are of an entirely different level of creation. Successful genre magazines don't merely publish stories. Instead, they cultivate authors and readers. They build movements and styles. They stand astride the genre and chart our genre into new and unpredictable directions.

Among the magazines doing this are amazing digital publications like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed and Beyond Ceaseless Skies. In addition, some traditional print magazines like Asimov's continue to rework the genre with their stories (although it's difficult to call Asimov's merely a traditional print magazine — over half their subscribers are now digital only).

But of all the magazines doing influential work in our genre, perhaps the most successful is Interzone.

I'm sure Warren Ellis and others will sputter at this comment — after all, Ellis says people laugh at Interzone because they don't know what its exact circulation is. But circulation isn't a great indicator of a magazine's success and influence, at least with regards to short fiction.

For example, I'm sure Ellis wouldn't debate that Michael Moorcock's run at New Worlds was extremely influential and successful. But New Worlds' circulation during the 1960s and early '70s was never that great, especially compared to the earlier years of the magazine. At times Moorcock and company could barely pay the magazine's bills (and they wouldn't have been able to do so by relying merely on magazine sales and subscriptions — they received a number of arts grants).

But just as Moorcock's run at New Worlds reworked the entire SF/F genre, I likewise predict that Interzone will eventually be seen as doing the same through the stories and authors they publish. There are stories being published in Interzone today which you won't find anywhere else. There are many authors who have been published in Interzone in recent years — including Nina Allan, Aliette de Bodard, Chris Beckett, Eugie Foster, Dominic Green, Will McIntosh, Mercurio D. Rivera, Suzanne Palmer, Gareth L. Powell, and Lavie Tidhar — who wouldn't have found a home for their stories without Interzone or wouldn't be where they are today without the magazine.

And that's not even counting the influence Interzone's sister magazine Black Static has in the horror genre, or the other publishing projects released by Interzone's publisher TTA Press, such as their innovative novella series. 

Speaking both as a reader and writer, Interzone has been extremely influential and successful for me. Without Interzone, I don't know where I'd be with my fiction writing. Without having Interzone to challenge me as a reader, I wouldn't be able see the exciting future our genre has stretching before it.

For all of this, I thank Interzone and the magazine's editor Andy Cox. 

The difference between successful genre magazines, and failures, is in how the magazines recreate our genre. Interzone is doing precisely this.

When Warren Ellis laments the passing of the new New Worlds, he is complaining that a magazine which recycled pointless nostalgia somehow didn't thrive. But that's precisely the type of genre magazine which is doomed to failure. I want genre magazines which will challenge me. Which will encourage the up-and-coming and innovative authors of our genre.

And in these areas, Interzone is one of the most successful genre magazines around.

 

Back when the Hugo Awards were "pure"

When a certain high-profile author and others organized a vote-campaign to place certain stories on this year's Hugo Award ballot, one complaint I heard from people across the ideological divide is that stories were no longer being considered for the Hugo based solely on their merit.

Which, of course, was total BS. Most Hugo voters vote for what they consider to be the best stories. In addition, as Rose Lemberg so amazingly said, the controversy was about much more than simply which stories "merit" being on the award shortlist.

But another issue which didn't receive a lot of discussion back then was how truly "pure" the Hugo Awards selection process actually was in the olden days. 

Well, here's an interesting tidbit which definitely casts doubt on the awards ever being a paragon of SF/F purity. On October 18th File 770, a six-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine, published an article titled "How The Lucite Was Won."

The article discussed the 1967 Worldcon and raised a fascinating point about how the Hugo Award finalists were selected that year. The history lesson was presented by Andrew Porter, who was the 1967 Worldcon Secretary.

Want to read about this fascinating bit of genre history? Well, you can't, at least not on File 770. The article was published on Oct. 18 and removed later that same day, with the following note being published instead:

"1967 Hugo Story Withdrawn. The story from Andrew Porter I published earlier today about the 1967 Hugos was denied by Ted White, chair of Nycon 3 and will receive no further attention here."

Fortunately, Google cached the page here. Check the page out before it disappears. 

I can't vouch for the accuracy of what Andrew Porter said. But since he was an active participant in that year's Worldcon, his account obviously merits some attention. And if his account is true it would call into question any belief that the Hugo Awards were ever "pure."

When authors stalk

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my outrage yesterday over author Kathleen Hale's Guardian essay about stalking one of her online critics.

Yes, the bad reviews Hale received from this Goodreads critic were way more than simply bad — they were hateful. But that's still no excuse for stalking someone. And that's what this was. Hale repeatedly uses the term almost as if she doesn't truly know what it means.

  • "So instead I ate a lot of candy and engaged in light stalking..."
  • "I absent-mindedly returned to stalking Blythe Harris..."

Hale uses the term stalking in a light-hearted way, almost as if she believes laughing about her actions makes them okay. And this wasn't only online stalking — Hale lies to get the critic's home address and runs a background check on her before showing up at the critic's house and contacting her at her workplace.

Perhaps my horror at what Hale did was influenced by my personal situation — I've been stalked before by a fellow author. But I wasn't the only one outraged by what Hale did.

I'd hoped the backlash against both Hale and the Guardian over this article would force them to realize the wrongness of what Hale did. But unfortunately, some people — both authors and readers — have come out in support of Hale. I won't link to their support, but it's out there.

 

What Mikki Kendall says is very true. I also suspect part of the reason some people applaud Hale's stalking is they support the ongoing Stop the Goodreads Bullies campaign, which I wrote about a while back. Many of the authors behind STGRB have been targeting their Goodreads critics, so obviously some of them have no issue with taking this stalking to the next level.

Perhaps Hale will realize the wrongness in what she's done. But with her receiving some praise and support, this appears doubtful. So I hope other authors will take note of this and avoid doing as Hale did. I also hope readers will remember that not all authors are like Hale, and also note which authors supported her.

After all, why should readers support an author who might show up at your house if you ever say something bad about her book?

The lesson in all this — aside from never stalking anyone —  is to not be so consumed by the haters of the world that you become a hater yourself. Authors need to focus on their writing and not on those who hate what you are writing.

 

 

 

Goodbye, Yahoo

We are gathered here today to bury Yahoo!, which now joins MySpace and AOL as examples of WWW pioneers which couldn't change as the world evolved around them. 

What can we say about Yahoo? In it's time, Yahoo was groundbreaking. Yahoo was the web portal every other portal wanted to be when it grew up. Yahoo was the hip kid everyone turned to for tips on the best the web had to offer. Remember when the Cool Site of the Day was actually cool? Well, back then Yahoo was cooler than that. Yahoo was the king of cool.

But cool is no longer cool. No one cool says cool anymore. Except for the people at Yahoo. Which is majorly uncool.

As the world changed Yahoo struggled to remain relevant. Unable to create their own halfway decent search engine, they used Google's until realizing that might not be a solution to their coming death spiral. Once a pioneer in webmail, they allowed Yahoo Mail to be eclipsed by Gmail.

And now Yahoo is the living dead of websites. While they're still visited by more people than almost any other site in the world, it's doubtful these people actually care whether they're visiting Yahoo or some other generic website. No, they visit out of rote habit, returning day after day because it's what they've done for years and they might as well visit one more time.

But that's not a recipe for success. Yahoo has become the web's equivalent of an outdated strip mall on the rundown edge of suburbia. People still visit but the visits are joyless and slightly disturbing. Everyone knows that any day now the bulldozers will arrive and flatten this piece of ugly, pointless nostalgia. But until that happens they figure they might as well keep coming.

I've known for many years that Yahoo was dead but I couldn't bring myself to bury the poor bastard. Even though I preferred my Gmail account, I'd had my Yahoo Mail account for so long that I couldn't stop using it. For the sake of nostalgia I ignored the continually intrusive updates and poorly thought out designs, all reflecting Yahoo's greater and greater desire to turn me into someone who cared about their products. I also ignored the hateful news stream on Yahoo's homepage, which highlighted the worst crackpot articles and rants and theories you could find online.

But yesterday, I finally stopped caring and buried Yahoo. I arrived as I usually did to find Yahoo forcing me to change my password. Sure, they'd say this was for security reasons but I knew that once I changed it everything would go bad. And it did. Yes, I could log in and see my emails, but every email I sent bounced back to me as undeliverable. Except for a few which didn't. There was no sense to the pattern.

But there hasn't been sense to anything about Yahoo in years.

Goodbye, Yahoo! Goodbye Yahoo Mail, which could no longer be trusted to actually deliver your mail. Goodbye Yahoo Messenger, which opened your life to hordes of spambots and unwanted strangers. Goodbye Yahoo defunct services, of which there were so very, very many.

Goodbye, Yahoo! I would say we'd miss you. But we won't.