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| SFReader Forums > Writing > Juicy Rumors and Other News > Amazing Stories folds | Forum Quick Jump
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PaulMc
Adept
      
Date Joined May 2005
Total Posts : 992
|  Posted 3/24/2006 10:26 AM (GMT -5) |   | | | |
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 3/25/2006 8:01 PM (GMT -5) | | I don't think it's meaningful to compare this with F&SF and Asimov's
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Care to elaborate?
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That doesn't mean to say that I believe those magazines are safe.
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I think it's pretty obvious all professional print pubs that specialize in fiction are facing an even rougher time now than they have historically. And it's never been an *easy* task to keep a print pub going.
Believe me, I want print SF to continue, but I'd love to see where anyone is making enough profit on magazines to show real growth. In business, lack of growth is as bad as diminished or diminishing profits. When your subscriber base hits a certain level, it actually becomes more expensive to keep things running. Ergo, a true "small press" magazine with a low operating budget can often stay in business longer than a pro magazine that attracts name writers, and spreads a lot around on advertising.
The operating budget for BLACK GATE (as disclosed by John O' Neill in issue#7's "Letters" column), a quarterly -- not monthly -- semipro magazine is about 10-11 THOUSAND dollars per issue, NOT including postage and advertising and distribution.
There is a very big wholesale mark-down when a publisher distributes to retailers, there is a fee for distribution and there are returns. It would be remarkable, with a subscriber base of under 20,000, that BG could ever break even per *issue,* let alone draw a profit quarterly or annually.
Start factoring up $$$ for a pro pub like F&SF, which pays salaries to their staff and whatnot, and you are facing potential bankruptcy way more often than your local "Popeye's" chicken, even if their food sucks and they can't keep any dependable workers on staff.
With the # of subscribers going down, the competiing media becoming more available, I think all the print SF pubs are in for a rough ride.
Daniel
www.pitchblackbooks.com | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 3/25/2006 8:34 PM (GMT -5) | | Daniel,
So do I, but I don't think it is inevitable that they go the way of the Dodo. I remember twenty years ago comic book companies were facing a similar problem. Tradition distribution was down, they were no longer carried in most places except specialty stores and specialty distribution produced almost no profit, traditional subscriptions had dropped to almost nothing and the major companies were all losing money. Marvel comics changed ownership five times in eight years, once changing hands for less than twenty five million dollars, less than the value of its physical assets.
Then the industry decided they needed a new approach. they looked at ways outside the products themselves to generate real revenues. They took some risk, alienated a lot of core customers (like myself) but revitalised their industry, generating huge revenue streams from Toy sales, Movie liscences, TV projects, Media tie-in books, graphic novels, role playing games, electronic games of all sorts. Today, marvel comics still seldom sees a profit from their comic line directly but they have huge profits overall from properly exploiting their assets.
Now I don't think F&SF can revitalize itself with Toy deals and Saturday morning cartoons, but I do think it can revitalize itself by thinking outside of its own box, as can all the others. It would mean taking a gamble certainly, probably risk angering the remaining core customer base, and would possible involve comprimises in content and policy that the editors would not like personally. And of course it might not help and could hasten the magazines demise, that's the gamble.
But soon enough it won't _be_ much of a gamble. Then it will soon thereafter be too late.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Two Ravens" in Amazing Journeys Magazine #9 Sept. 05
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises | | Back to Top | | |
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 3/26/2006 12:15 AM (GMT -5) | | This is a problem effecting the entire genre. When SF grew up and got semi-respectable they tried to leave childish things behind them and ended up leaving their children. I want the children back.
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Never been a better time to try to do so. "Harry Potter" "Paolini" et al in some ways symbolize a whole generation of YA readers who weren't getting any fantasy fiction (or enough of the right quality) to quench a market. When people get bitter about this fact (and they do) it just makes me laugh really. The kids are already back, but they are in JK Rowling's pocket.
Savvy SF publishers will have to make good on transforming these YA readers into adult readers and they're not going to get there by indulging in literary allusion or by "experimental" prose along the lines of Mallarme's calligrames. Or by publishing the same twenty writers (who are not, usually, successful and popular novelists) over and over. Or by embracing their distinction as "The Graying Science-Fiction" set. (And, by the way, maturity doesn't equal negativity, but stories that are slanted toward educated, mature readers, are by definition, not usually appealing to younger readers.) Or by ignoring sword and sorcery and adventure fantasy.
Pitch-Black has about one-percent of the resources (both monetary and otherwise) that any of the big magazines you mention has. We're not going to be buying anyone out, I promise you that!
Daniel
www.pitchblackbooks.com | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 3/26/2006 12:32 AM (GMT -5) | | Daniel said...
Pitch-Black has about one-percent of the resources (both monetary and otherwise) that any of the big magazines you mention has. We're not going to be buying anyone out, I promise you that!
Ain't that a sad fact! The next five years will be the breaker on that rekindling of youth thing and I don't know that anyone is going to get off the pot and do anything in that time. Other than Jim Baen.
Now don't get me wrong, I love Jim. He's probably the only publisher in the industry with a personal fan base. Its a little much for me to expect or even hope he can save the SF short fiction industry all on his lonesome.
Of course he isn't all on his lonesome, he's got you, Daniel, and he's got his fans and he's got us. (That is, all right thinking fans of action/adventure speculative fiction). And he has Eric Flint, who edits the new magazine as well as having a bout a bazillion books under contract. Flints about the smartest writer in the SFWA in terms of understanding markets and marketing (which is rich as he's a trotskyist, but a clear thinking trotskyist!). But I doubt even a fellow of the prooven worth of Eric Flint can edit a bi-monthly magazine in its infantcy, oversee the most ambitious alternate history writing project ever undertaken and still produce six top-flight novels a year (you guys need to check out his latest collaberation, Boundry) for very long.
I'd like to see someone step up to the plate and give print magazines one more good, well thought out honest effort. That is, someone all ready publishing and getting magazines distributed going into the market like it wasn't dying. Because it doesn't have to be. It is, in fact, ripe for someone with a better idea to exploit the huge, untapped audience for exciting, fast paced, action packed SF.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Two Ravens" in Amazing Journeys Magazine #9 Sept. 05
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises | | Back to Top | | |
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R David Skinner
Stablehand
Date Joined Apr 2006
Total Posts : 42
| Posted 4/28/2006 5:30 PM (GMT -5) | | | Mr. Turner,
Let me first state that I love reading your posts. Your writing truly speaks to me.
And then there is the content: "I live by one simple rule in this area. If you don't have a hard copy, it didn't happen." That is total poetry for a bibliophile of any caliber! I couldn't agree more. There's just no substitute for the feel of a good book. Reading online gets to my eyes a lot sooner than hard-copy reading. There is also something ultimately satisfying in the musty smell of a 20-year-old text with yellowing pages. Reading for many of us is much more sensory than merely the visual sense of black on white; there's the feel and smell of the book that enhances it. It's also very tedious to curl up with electronic print in a secluded place and enjoy the solitude of fading into the pages.
As far as the commerce of it goes, I have to concede Mr. Blackston's point about revenues generated by low-to-no overhead e-books. But for the life of me, I just don't see fiction as viable for e-books. Short fiction, sure, but novels, no. Too hard on the eyes. I prefer books that use low brightness or natural stock for their pages any more.
Mr. Blackston,
Have you and Pitch ever discussed breaking Arcadia out of Prism? Would there be enough interest in Arcadia as its own quarterly or semi-annual? Just a question.
R David SkinnerIndependent Scholar, Philosopher, Reviewer | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 4/30/2006 4:00 AM (GMT -5) | | David,
Thanks.
The objections I have are more or less hubris. After the world-wide collasp of western culture that will start in X-y years, with its stonings and burings and the actual digging up of the 'satanic' physical structure of the internet and a general falling backward of the standard of living toward neolithic times, long afterwards when man manages to rediscover free market capitolism and once again climb out of the cave and achieve true civilization, I want my writing, carefully stored away in atmosphere-proof containers in caves in the desert by my descendants, do be desiphered and diseminated once again, much like the dead sea scrolls.
Plus I figure Disney will have secured my copyright through eternity by then and I'll be collecting royalties in the afterlife.
I don't think ancient file readers will make it. Hard copy. Thats the only lasting thing. If the greeks had had the printing press, how many more plays, how many more philosophical treatsies, how much more knowledge would we have of them? Even when printing technology is lost, the print itself remains.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Two Ravens" in Amazing Journeys Magazine #9 Sept. 05
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 5/1/2006 2:31 PM (GMT -5) | | Then again, the whole e-zine line of thought is spurrious. Baen is publishing an e-zine, yes, but the man makes his money putting out books-hard copy books. And the contract for Jim Baen's Universe has provisions for print publication. The forerunner of the zine, The Grantville Gazzette, has two editions out in print- one hard-bound!
Moreover, Jim Baen has twice headed up 'magazines' that were printed like, and distributed as, books. Destinies and New Destinies, both from a long while back now. He is savy enough not to go with the over-the-counter distribution methids the other major markets are using- he did that when he edited Galaxy and Worlds of If. It is a shrinking market that is not interested in us. Book distribution, on the other hand, has been very good to him and he knows how to get the most out of it.
In short I've no doubt we will be seeing issues of Jim Baen's Universe at our local bookstores, eventually. Not that I'm willing to wait until then to read it.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Two Ravens" in Amazing Journeys Magazine #9 Sept. 05
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises | | Back to Top | | |
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BarbT
Acolyte
Date Joined Feb 2005
Total Posts : 394
| Posted 5/1/2006 6:09 PM (GMT -5) | | |
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