Jason Sanford 1/2/20 Jason Sanford 1/2/20

Interview with Pablo Defendini of Fireside Magazine

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. ;)

Jason Sanford 1/1/20 Jason Sanford 1/1/20

Interview with Vanessa Rose Phin of Strange Horizons

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

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.

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.

Jason Sanford 1/1/20 Jason Sanford 1/1/20

Interview with Sheila Williams of Asimov’s Science Fiction

Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Sheila Williams of Asimov’s Science Fiction. 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 Sheila Williams, Editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction

Jason Sanford: I suspect most people in the SF/F genre don’t understand the difficulties of publishing a genre magazine. What’s one aspect of running a magazine like Asimov's that you wish more readers and writers knew about?

Sheila Williams: Many people know I have a fun, intellectually challenging job. It’s also a lot of work. We have a very small paid staff. Other than the occasional college intern, we do not use unpaid labor. (Our college internship program conforms to the DOL’s FLSA seven-factor test.) I read every submission. My managing editor, Emily Hockaday, and I are responsible for editing, copyediting, and almost all of our production work. I’m responsible for the editorials, the next issue page, introductory notes, and most other interstitial writing in Asimov’s. In addition to her other duties, Emily manages most of our social media. Deadlines never change, regardless of vacations, illness, maternity leave, and whatever other challenges pop up. We just have to find ways to work around these challenges.

Jason: You've worked at Asimov's since nearly the magazine's founding. How have things changed since the founding of Asimov's? What would you say is harder or easier for your magazine to do these days?

Sheila: It’s a lot easier to produce a magazine than it used to be. I’m very happy that we said good-bye to repro around 1996, which was probably before some of our readers were born. In addition, I greatly prefer digital submissions to print submissions.

Jason: In addition to paying your writers, Asimov's also pays all of your staff, something which is not common among many of today's newer genre magazines. Is it possible to publish a magazine like Asimov's without the support of a larger company, in this case Penny Publications?

Sheila: An anecdotal review of the American market doesn’t really bear that out. F&SF is published by a small company. Analog and Asimov’s are published by a larger (though not huge) publishing company. Being published by a larger company does have its advantages, though. While only one and a half people are dedicated to each of the genre magazines, we do benefit from a support staff of art, production, tech, contracts, web, advertising, circulation, and subsidiary rights departments. I’m probably leaving some people out of this list. While the support of this infrastructure cannot be underestimated, Asimov’s revenue covers our editorial salaries, and our production and editorial costs. We contribute to the company’s general overhead as well.

Jason: An increasing number of Asimov's readers are using digital e-book platforms to read the magazine. Do you see a day coming when Asimov's will transition to e-editions only instead of publishing in both print and digital formats?

Sheila: Many of our readers prefer to read print editions. Also, print editions are much more visible. They do a lot of our promotion for us. It’s also easier to connect with many of our print subscribers because a lot of them subscribe directly through our online subscription portal. We can send renewal notices directly to them and stay in touch in other ways. For these and other reasons, I don’t see any need to transition to an e-edition format only. Also, note that online magazines benefit from print formats as well.

Jason: According to this year's Locus Magazine survey, Asimov's total circulation was up nearly 10% over the previous year, as was the circulation of your sister magazine Analog. To what do you attribute this increase?

Sheila: Our social media presence is growing. In addition, we continue to benefit from the strong boost we received in the early days of B&N’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle.

Jason: Why do SF/F magazines matter to the genre? What do SF/F magazines bring to the genre which can't be found anywhere else?

Sheila: Magazines are a great place for new writers to break into the SF/F field. They also provide writers with a mechanism for pretty direct interaction and feedback from their readers. Our readers engage with writers on our Facebook pages, they seek out their novels. They look for their favorites and they discover new writers in the magazine. Readers also get a smorgasbord of traditional and nontraditional story telling in each issue.

Jason Sanford 12/31/19 Jason Sanford 12/31/19

Interview with Troy L. Wiggins, L. D. Lewis, and Brent Lambert of FIYAH! The Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction

Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Troy L. Wiggins, L. D. Lewis, and Brent Lambert of FIYAH! 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 Troy L. Wiggins (Executive Editor), L. D. Lewis (Art Director, Web Master, POB Coordinator), and Brent Lambert (Social Media Manager & Reviews Coordinator) of FIYAH! The Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction

L.D. Lewis: Marketing and promotion? Absolute hell on a shoestring budget. Coming up with methods of leveraging your social media presence because it’s what’s available to you for free takes persistence, labor, creativity, and a love for one’s own voice because you’re going to repeat yourself a lot in order to stay visible.

Brent Lambert: The time away from your own personal pursuits. None of us are doing this because we’re making exponential amounts of money and most of us have plenty of goals outside of the magazine. As L.D. mentions, this takes a lot of persistence and a lot of labor. So I find that many of us have to slow down or put aside our own goals in order to keep the magazine running at an optimal level.

Troy L. Wiggins: All of the incidental responsibilities that have nothing to do with the magazine’s final product. We knew that publishing a magazine would be a massive responsibility and a lot of work. And, of course, we have programming and projects outside of the magazine that affect our output, but there are several responsibilities that come with positioning yourself as a publisher that you just don’t anticipate. Managing partnerships with other publishers, vendors, and other industry resources like reviewers, maintaining data on submissions and stories, working with other editors of best of collections and collaborative issues, managing advertisers, non SF/F media requests, convention requests (often with little or no funding attached) all of this contributes toward making sure that our product – the magazine – has the reach and scale it needs to, but it’s a heavy lift.

Jason: FIYAH! is a relatively new genre magazine, with your publication’s third anniversary approaching. What are the challenges of starting a new magazine and connecting with readers and writers? Any particular insights you wished you’d known before you started FIYAH?

LDL: I think it’s probably easier, actually, when you have a mission. Ethical consumption is more a thing now than it’s probably ever been. People want to grant patronage to causes, so if you’re trying to innovate or expand the reach of marginalized voices, or if your proceeds fund charitable efforts, these are messages readers will get behind financially (even if they don’t always read). I’m not sure about challenges because I think we’ve always just done what makes sense to us. We are the community we represent in our work, so we know where and how to find our contributors. Our collective experience allows us to speak authentically on our mission, and our genuine interest in creating community removes the obligation feeling of interfacing with our audience. I’ll say I wish we had more readers, but I think that’s true of every venue.

Brent: I have to say that for us, I don’t think staying connected with the readers and writer is hard. The audience we have on both those fronts is staunchly in support of us. One of our biggest points as a Black SFF community is that we’re out here and we’re getting ignored. FIYAH’s existence was birthed from a need to have this whole swath of people be allowed to be represented. So far that has brought people to our door who have been ready to uplift us wholeheartedly.

Troy: Brent and L.D. say it perfectly here. We knew what we wanted to do and who we wanted to do it for, in a very intentional way, from the beginning.

Jason: What percentage of your magazine’s financial support comes from subscriptions and what percentage comes from fundraisers? Would your magazine be able to exist without significant volunteer time from yourself and your staff?

LDL: We’re mainly sustained by subscriptions (about 70%) with the rest made up in independent donations, merch, and back issue sales. We don’t really do any major fundraising aside from our subscription preorder campaigns in the fall of each year, during which subscriptions are sold at discount rates. Thus far, we operate entirely on a volunteer basis, but we’re making moves to change to a paying model in the next couple of years.

Troy: FIYAH has an amazing staff. Everything you see from us, from our website, to our social media, to our amazing covers and magazines, to our voice and vision, all of that was built and is maintained on volunteer labor. As awesome as that is, it’s also worrying. The prevailing business model we have in this field, our overreliance on volunteer labor and crowdfunding is dangerous and, as we are seeing from these recurring conversations about the health of the field, unsustainable. It’s been a goal of mine from the start to figure out a way to pay our staff for their time, expertise, and labor because their work is worth that, but to do that we need to think of a different business model. I’ve heard rumblings of a co-operative business model for SF/F magazines, and I believe there are a few magazines out there that use this model. I’d be interested to see how a model like that would work in the larger SF/F field.

LDL: I’m not sure who the “we” here is, but I think if you're going to identify that as the issue, you have to own your role in its inception and then work toward its solution. Any new zine is going to look to its predecessors for how to structure itself successfully. So if you're one of the most prominent, highly respected outlets in the field and you're offering free content or functioning on volunteer labor or employing a crowdfunded approach to cover operating costs, the 10, 15, 20 zines who come after you are going to take that as gospel. That said, I do think a lot of digital venues operate in that space where you’re either literature or you’re web content, and people who consider you web content even on a subconscious level are going to be deterred by a paywall when so much of the internet is free reading. If you’re a print market or print+digital, you have that physical entity advantage and it’s sometimes easier to justify paying for something physical. I don’t know that that’s anyone’s fault, though. Cultural landscapes shift constantly. We’re still having the frustrating conversation about e-books not being “real” books. Who knows when we’ll finally get that point across?

I think the issue is one of exhaustion on the part of volunteer staff and a strained supporter base. In my observation, the people who contribute to zine crowdfunds also contribute to crowdfunds for individuals in emergency situations. There are a lot of emergencies or people in general need, just within the SFF community and funds are finite. If you’re supporting your four favorite zines every year, donating to three medical funds, two Kickstarters, a moving fund, and also taking on costs associated with at least one fandom-related convention every year, it’s not sustainable for a lot of readers, especially the marginalized ones.

Brent: I do think, in general, there’s a cultural conversation to be had about the devaluation of art, but as L.D. pointed out (I always defer to her lol) there are expectations that are set for readers when you offer free content. And don’t get me wrong, I think free content is perfectly fine but I see it as hard to offer that and then bemoan patronage. There’s this self-deprecating thing I see in the industry where we constantly have to remind each other that our work has value and that people should pay for it. I’m going to paraphrase something I saw a day ago, but one $100 client is less work and more valuable than five $20 clients. Yes, demanding your worth may mean losing some of the audience but the ones who stay are there because they appreciate what you’re doing.

Troy: This is complicated. Like L.D. pointed out, the people who support magazines are exhausted, and likely don’t have all of the funds needed to support every crowdfunding or donation request that comes around in the SF/F field. And Brent’s point that there is a cultural component here is spot on – the who of who has devalued short fiction absolutely needs to be considered and unpacked in order to get to the truth of this conversation – especially considering that there publications who are certainly not part of the SF/F field publishing SF/F short fiction and doing really interesting work there. What does seem to be true is that people are looking for visionary strategies and new ways of seeing how to live and be on our flaming little planet, and SF/F helps with that. Seen that way, this is a moment of great promise.

Part of this is definitely a shifting media landscape that SF/F has been kind of behind the curve on. The internet, especially in the last twenty years, has torpedoed the attention economy, which has deeply impacted how much supporters notice and how much they spend. I look at the difficulties of our field, but then I look at the larger landscape: the SF/F field has to compete with every other thing seeking to get into people’s eyeballs, and that’s before you start thinking deeply about marketing strategy – the difficulties of which have been pointed out already.

With that in mind, it’s hard to run a magazine, or really, a media platform, in this attention economy period. I get fundraising emails from Bitch magazine every month. Magazines and online verticals – even massive ones – shut down or layoff staff daily. Being a freelance writer or a contributor in this economy is difficult, and dangerous. Readers and subscribers don’t have enough money, but they also don’t have enough time to engage with the thing they’re spending money on or look deeply for things. Like I said, complicated.

Jason: I was really impressed by FIYAH’s successful fundraiser to host a staff meetup in honor of your magazine’s first nomination for a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. To me this ties in with how important it is for a magazine to build its own community and support it. How do you see FIYAH both supporting and building a community?

LDL: Our social media presence in critical to this work. It’s largely where we find our writers, where we check in on our people and lift them up in their work. Our editors send out personalized feedback in rejections to support their evolution as writers. We keep an eye on the conversations around Black presences in genre spaces and we author studies that illustrate those changes to keep the entire field fertile for the voices we want to see. And we’re accountable to the people who support us. When you cultivate a joyful space that’s focused on everyone’s growth, people want to be part of that, and they follow the tone we’ve set for them. It keeps us rich in positive engagement and new ideas.

Brent: We made sure from the jump to declare our social media space as something more than just about the magazine. I knew from the moment I got assigned the Social Media Manager gig that I wanted to give writers a place to express themselves, interact with each other and just have a space where they could “let their hair down”. I think for the most part we’ve succeeded with that. I’m forever in awe of every time someone has told us they decided to write again because of our existence. Writers, especially Black writers, need to know that they’re loved, wanted and appreciated.

And to be frank, the larger SFF world has been doing a piss poor job at that. So honestly, this was low-hanging fruit in terms of building such a dedicated audience. We’re just lucky people decided to trust us and actually stick around.

Jason: Why did you originally want to publish a genre magazine?

LDL: We saw a need. The field swore we (Black SFF writers) didn’t exist and that was the reason we weren’t being published. We knew they were mistaken. And now they do, too.

Brent: As is so often the burden of Black people, if we need something we often have to build it ourselves. Representation was and continues to be (despite improvements) lacking in the short SFF field.

So sadly, want doesn’t really get to come into play for Black creative ventures. We’re often boxed in to having to do it in order to be allowed to exist. Or in the case of critiques previously delivered by some SFF venues, “prove” we exist at all.

Troy: When I first started writing and submitting, it seemed to be that the SF/F field was content to ignore black SF/F writers, even when they said they were hurting. Like, people heard you yelling about your pain, but little was actually changing. The aftermath of the #BlackSpecFic report definitely contributed to our being here, but there was always a need for a space that centers black speculative genius in conversation with the rest of the field, that showed that “hey, we can do this as well as a Clarkesworld or an Analog, and our work is just as brilliant.”

We’re not the first black-focused SF/F magazine in the world. But we try to bring the black perspective, through the work of authors, and through our other programming, to contribute to the conversations that shape the field. We wanted to show the field that black writers existed, but we also wanted to create a space to give black SF/F writers voice and a pathway to success that didn’t require them to have a first touch with a publication that didn’t understand them or didn’t care about them. I shudder to even consider how many black writers have quit writing SF/F because of the kinds of difficulties and traumas that come with submitting to, at best, race-blind or at worst, racist magazines and editors.

Jason Sanford 12/31/19 Jason Sanford 12/31/19

Interview with Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Scott H. Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 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 Scott H. Andrews, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Scott H. Andrews: I wish more readers and writers realized how tenuous the financial situation still is for magazine publishing in our field today. I know that that fact seems counterintuitive because short fiction is currently thriving, with dozens of new indie zines launching in the last ten years, hundreds of great short fiction writers, and innovative new formats for short fiction like e-books and audio podcasts. Several prominent ezines have increased revenues to the point that they can pay their staffs enough to place out of eligibility for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award, and some run very successful funding drives. But many zines use staffs that are mostly or all unpaid volunteers, and those ones that do pay their staff still as far as I know are paying their editors far less than novel or freelance editors get for the same amount of work, or they're paying the staff but the head editors are contributing their work for free.

Artificial cost-suppression measures like that are what's keeping those zines afloat. For BCS, I've put in about 30 hours a week for over eleven years, for free. Without that work done for free – if BCS had to pay me for that time, even at a token rate like half of the per-word pay rate the writers get for the stories – BCS would have gone out of business many years ago.

I also wish more writers realized that the situation in current indie ezine publishing is a shared ecosystem of writers, readers, and publishers. It's not the old-fashioned situation of magazine publishing businesses run by businesspeople to make profit. Today's short fiction ezines are not making profit; most of them are only surviving because they artificially suppress their costs by things like paying their staff little or nothing. Ezine editors also have a much more altruistic motive than businesspeople in old-fashioned publishing. All the zine editors I know were either writers themselves or big fans of short fiction and zines. We put so much of our time and emotional energy into editing and running our zines because we love short fiction, we love writers, we love our field and want to contribute to it.

I put so much time into writing every BCS rejection with personalized comments – over 25,000 personalized rejections in eleven years – because I appreciate writers and the struggle that writing takes (I know that struggle acutely; I was a SF/F short fiction writer myself); I love working with writers, I love teaching and learning myself, and I want to do everything I can to help writers break in and get their work to readers. I put so much time into rewrite requests and working with authors on rewrites – probably 75% of the 600+ stories in BCS have had some level of revision that I worked with the author on – because I see the seeds of greatness in stories all the time, I want to help the author make that story great, and I love doing everything I can to bring great stories into the world. I put so much time last summer into the BCS Patreon and fundraising to raise revenues so we could afford to pay the new higher SFWA-qualifying pay rate because I believe that writers, and artists of all fields, deserve much higher pay for their art than they get.

I understand that the relationship between authors and publishers in past eras was often adversarial, with publishers classically being parsimonious or exploitative. I understand that negligent magazine publishers still exist, and writers must always look out for their own interests. Most writers are tremendously supportive of indie zines; many writers donate to BCS and other zines, and I'm certain they do it not out of self-interest but because they love short fiction and they appreciate the hard work and commitment of indie zines and their staffs. But I see the outdated mindset of that old-fashioned adversarial relationship persisting among some writers, and it's false and makes it harder to keep this shared short fiction ecosystem going.

Jason: What percentage of your magazine’s financial support comes from subscriptions and what percentage comes from fundraisers?

Scott: For BCS, less than 1% of our support comes from e-book subscriptions and the rest from donations. We're a 501c3 nonprofit approved by the IRS, so donations to BCS are tax deductible. I think part of the reason we get so little revenue from our e-book subscriptions is that I have priced our subscriptions and single-issue e-books too low; well below what most magazines charge. Multiple other major ezines charge $36/year for a subscription; the BCS e-book subscription is $20/year since summer 2019, but for years it was $16/year and even $13/year. Because BCS is a nonprofit, part of my ethos for serving the public is making the fiction available to readers as conveniently and cheaply and widely as possible, but in hindsight I took that approach too far and made a mistake in pricing the BCS subscriptions so low that they are providing the magazine with only token revenue.

Jason: Would your magazine be able to exist without significant volunteer time from yourself and your staff?

Scott: Definitely not. For BCS, I do all the editing, rewrites, and copyediting; sort the slush, reply to about 25% of it (with all rejections personalized), manage the website, format the e-books, do all the social media, handle all the promotion, do all the payments and keep all the books, coordinate and engineer and master the audio podcasts, and narrate many of them; everything except reading 75% of the slush, which is done by my wonderful First Readers Kerstin Hall, Deirdre Quirk, and Rachel Morris, and former First Readers Christine Row, Nicole Lavigne, and Kate Marshall. All that work has been about 30 hours a week for over eleven years, as a volunteer. Without that work done for free, BCS would not be able to exist.

I do pay my First Readers a token honorarium, which they deserve every bit of, for reading slush and writing personalized rejections to every submission. I wish I could pay them more, and I hope to make that possible soon.

Jason: How much of an increase in your budget would be required to pay all editorial and publishing staff a living wage?

Scott: Estimating using a salary of $15/hour for the work our staff does, we would need a $45,000 increase in our annual budget to pay all staff a living wage. That's double what our annual budget is to pay for the stories we publish. To cover that, our monthly donations through Patreon would have to increase by 7000%.

Scott: I absolutely agree that online publishing of short fiction, available for free on the web, has devalued short fiction in the mindset of the readership. I think it relates to online culture in general; the online usership expects articles or podcasts or music downloads or software to be free, and that attitude extends to online fiction too. Online zines in my opinion have exacerbated this attitude by providing the fiction online for free whereas in paper magazines, readers had to pay for it.

However, I think this issue is more complicated than just that we've devalued short fiction in general. I think most regular short fiction readers and short fiction fans understand that it costs money for short stories to get published, and those readers are not opposed to paying something for them. I think this devaluing that's happened is a devaluing of the amount that the readers who are willing to pay think they should pay or think short fiction is worth.

For example, the BCS e-book subscriptions I mentioned above: multiple other major ezines charge $36/year for a subscription; the BCS e-book subscription is $20/year but used to be $16/year and $13/year. We struggled even at $13/year to get readers to subscribe, and many of them did it out of charity, wanting to help the magazine. We offer the slight premium of giving e-book subscribers every new issue a week early, but that doesn't seem to lure many subscribers. Our web readership in 2018 was 76,000 unique IPs per month, increasing by 15-25% every year for the past four years, yet our e-book subscription numbers have held static in the low hundreds all that time.

A significant part of that is my own fault; I am not a good salesperson, and I prioritize the editing and podcast work over marketing and drumming up sales. But I think BCS's experience shows that there's a disconnect between an e-book price that provides a sustainable income for a zine and an e-book price that readers think the fiction is worth.

Scott: I think a community or fanbase definitely helps a magazine succeed. Not just helping it succeed financially, with the community or fanbase members making donations or backing a fundraising campaign; a community or fanbase also is a huge way that word spreads about a magazine and its stories, shared online or through social media, or on sites for writers, or on review sites, or at conventions or writer's groups.

Spreading the word is crucial, especially for an indie zine, which may not have any name recognition at the start. It introduces readers to the stories, the zine, and the authors. It also introduces them to other indie zines; many short fiction writers submit to and publish in multiple different zines.

It draws in new fans. I see readers on Twitter often who have just discovered BCS, even though we've been publishing for eleven years, because of word they heard. Now those readers have ten years of back issues, 600+ stories, to feast on.

It also reaches authors. Every magazine is only as good as the stories authors submit to it. Word of mouth helps authors learn about a zine, read its stories, see what other authors it has published; see what elements and themes the zine favors. I've had numerous new BCS authors tell me that they started submitting to us because they read a great story that we'd published, or they saw us publish an author they admired or respected or had read before.

Jason: Any final thoughts you’d like to share with people?

Scott: I'm very pleased and reassured to see discussion about these issues surfacing in recent months, including the Readercon panel about the effect of the new higher SFWA-qualifying short fiction pay rate on zines, the subsequent discussions on Twitter about editors deserving pay too and many zines surviving only because their staffs contribute time for little or no pay, and your interview series here. In an editorial in 2014 I called for discussion on some of these issues; I'm very glad to see it finally happening. I hope it continues.

For me, because I see the current ezine scene as a shared ecosystem of writers, readers, and publishers, this sort of discussion is vital to us keeping this ecosystem afloat and working to make it better; make it more sustainable for all of us. We're all in this together, all reaping the wonderful benefits of this new golden age in short fiction and ezine publishing. It will take input from all areas of the field to keep things going and find ways to improve.