|
|
|
|
|
| SFReader Forums > Writing > Juicy Rumors and Other News > Space & Time shutting down | Forum Quick Jump
|
| 
PaulMc
Adept
      
Date Joined May 2005
Total Posts : 992
| Posted 7/25/2006 9:21 AM (GMT -5) |   | | | |
 |
Dragon Angel
Lord Dragon
Date Joined Sep 2004
Total Posts : 1066
| Posted 7/26/2006 12:06 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
|
Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2006 1:37 PM (GMT -5) | | How many people here other than Erazmus have a sub to any of those pubs?
I'm a reviewer and I've never heard of several of them..... I mean you could surf Ralan.com and pull names.... But that doesn't mean these ppubs will be there tomorrow!
*Forgotten Worlds, Grendlesong, Black Satellite,Cthulhu Sex, City Slab, Dark Discoveries, Dark Animus,*
Is anyone here a subscriber (not a submitter/contribitor OR reviewer) to these pubs? Just curious.
Erazmus, can you name a *healthy* print SF magazine that is currently expanding its readership and is publishing on a quarterly or more rapid schedule and prints more than a couple hundred copies?
Not trying to pick a fight.... Just saying: print SF pubs (other than micro-press, highly targeted infrequently published models) are a dying breed. All print magazines are.
Daniel
| | Back to Top | | |
|
Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2006 1:49 PM (GMT -5) | | Since, we're bringing up Ralan.com ---
The "semi and pro" markets have been *combined* over there and there are few of *those* who aren't backlogged, on hiatus, or closing. The note attched to DNA pubs, that leads to the fiasco in their discussion forums should tell you everything you need to know about print pubs. For years I heard everyone say how DNA was rejuvinating the print SF industry, and how they were poised like a giant over the market, etc etc.
It seems they are in *deep* distress. Unless *you* want to defend their practice of combining the four pubs into one and ripping off their subscriber base? If you can, please do.
Also, though no-one other than myself has responded to it here at SFReader, John Jospeh Adams of F&SF is now running a "Slush God" site. Would that be necessary or even advisable for a thriving pub? That had better things to do like *sell* their magazine? Instead of selling rejectomancy.
Just thinking outloud.
I think the traditional world of short fiction publishing has been shaken up beyond recognition. Humpty-dumptied as it were. Print pubs were never a good risk for anyone, but they are a toxic risk now especially if it is your ambition to pay pro rates to writers and artists and get distributed to retail stores.
Almost all of the pubs on your list are *semipro* print pubs. They are micro-published and are barely staying alive. Does Black Gate put out issues on time? Does anyone?
My 2 cents....
Daniel
| | Back to Top | | |
|
Nicholas
Sage
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 1061
| Posted 7/26/2006 2:08 PM (GMT -5) | | | Whooooo. (Nick breathes sigh of relief)
I know, it's a shame to see another venerable (for this industry) publication bite the dust, and this topic has brought us back to lamenting the state of the speculative small-press...
But when I saw the thread topic--Space and Time shutting down!--I was REALLY worried for a second. I thought all those Armageddon junkies were right and it was curtains for us all!
"Wirtzley's Warehouse: A Very Bad Day at Wirtzley's" in the July issue of Afterburn SF: The hottest Speculative Fiction site on the web! http://www.afterburnsf.com
"Sarah's Spring: A Fable" December 2006 issue Raven's Electrick
"Gandalf's Staff, Prospero's Books: Magic in Tolkien and Shakespeare" in Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language from McFarland & Co., spring 2007
Poems forthcoming in Surreal Magazine and Weird Tales | | Back to Top | | |
|
Rob Santa
Sage
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 1485
| Posted 7/26/2006 2:20 PM (GMT -5) | | I have subscriptions to both Cthulhu Sex (did it immediately after reviewing it for Firebrand) and Andromeda Spaceways (it's very good). Black Gate I buy at a local shop (along with the latest issue of Paradox - oops, forgot to renew my subscription). I currently have submissions out to Cthulhu Sex, Dark Discoveries, Apex, Fantasy, Black Gate, ASIM, and Forgotten Worlds (plus several others not on that list). I am waiting for Paradox to reopen its doors and am working on four manuscripts for Pitch-Black's pubs. I have two manuscripts aimed at Clash of Steel, but they both need revision.
I sub to everybody.
I feel the burden to publish spec-fic used to belong to only a handful of powerhouse markets. Some of those disappeared, and in their wake arose dozens of smaller markets. These wax and wane, but there will always be someone there to carry the ball (in some form). Ask the editors/publishers here: it's a tough job.
On a somewhat related note, the debut of the Espresso Book Machine holds the potential to catapult small publishers into an otherwise dominated market. In a nutshell, this is a $100,000 POD machine that can print a 300 page perfect bound book with color cover in about four minutes, for a cost of less than four dollars. It is being targeted at poorer nations to help with educational woes. But can you envision one of these sitting in a Starbucks? A quick flip through an online catalog, a swipe of your ATM card, stand in line for a venti mocha, and by the time you're blowing the froth off you have a warm book in your hands. POD paperbacks would drop from $15 to half that, maybe less.
A penny a page. That's what the Espresso Book Machine is touting. It would work nicely for a quarterly pub with 100 pages or so. That's a one dollar print cost, baby. One dollar more to mail it and a dollar profit makes an annual subscription twelve clams. Who wouldn't sign up for that? Maybe that tough job would get a little easier. I hope it works.
Rob Santa | | Back to Top | | |
|
Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2006 2:33 PM (GMT -5) | | have subscriptions to both Cthulhu Sex (did it immediately after reviewing it for Firebrand) and Andromeda Spaceways (it's very good). Black Gate I buy at a local shop (along with the latest issue of Paradox - oops, forgot to renew my subscription). I currently have submissions out to Cthulhu Sex, Dark Discoveries, Apex, Fantasy, Black Gate, ASIM, and Forgotten Worlds (plus several others not on that list). I am waiting for Paradox to reopen its doors and am working on four manuscripts for Pitch-Black's pubs. I have two manuscripts aimed at Clash of Steel, but they both need revision
***
I asked for someone who wasn't a writer, a reviwer, or a submitter to the markets. You're all of those! 
***
On a somewhat related note, the debut of the Espresso Book Machine holds the potential to catapult small publishers into an otherwise dominated market. In a nutshell, this is a $100,000 POD machine that can print a 300 page perfect bound book with color cover in about four minutes, for a cost of less than four dollars. It is being targeted at poorer nations to help with educational woes. But can you envision one of these sitting in a Starbucks? A quick flip through an online catalog, a swipe of your ATM card, stand in line for a venti mocha, and by the time you're blowing the froth off you have a warm book in your hands. POD paperbacks would drop from $15 to half that, maybe less.
A penny a page. That's what the Espresso Book Machine is touting. It would work nicely for a quarterly pub with 100 pages or so. That's a one dollar print cost, baby. One dollar more to mail it and a dollar profit makes an annual subscription twelve clams. Who wouldn't sign up for that? Maybe that tough job would get a little easier. I hope it works
***
You are right.
That kind of tech is what is presently enabling the *survival* of small press print publishing. No-one is -off-set printing anything anymore that I know of. We did for our print anthos, but how long can that continue?
Tech is great, that's why I don't see any reason to cling to outdated models. It's not just how you make stuff or publish it, it's how you sell it, too. Mass marketing in *print* publishing is pretty much left to the big boys, but targeted print is viable and mass electronic. Democratizing tech. Short SF needs a sea-change in *fiction* itself and promotion thereof to really take off.
Daniel
| | Back to Top | | |
|
erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 7/26/2006 2:44 PM (GMT -5) | | No, no, Daniel, I'll not quibble over this. But I have been watching the "print magazines are dying" thing on the web since people discovered it. I've been listening to it in conversations with fans since the _Seventies_.
What electronic magazine is making money? Most don't have a profit built into their business plan, if they have a business plan. What are the electronic publishers selling? Good stories? So many places give away stories I don't see how anyone can make money selling them on the web.
In print you are selling your customers a magazine, with a cool cover, ads for things, stories and editorials and all of that. Once they buy it its theirs, they can keep it or throw it away or leave it at thier dentist's office. They can put it in a trunk, stick that in the attic and wow thier grand-kids with it in fifty year, or they can line the bird cage with it, use it to swat flies, whatever.
What can I do with an e-pub? Print it out? That'd cost me a fortune and I won't do it, niether will most non-contributors. Save it to disc? Yes, and I go through my old discs so often. I guess that can be done.
I have discs I saved back in the day that I can't read anymore, because no system has or can support that ancient a drive. Where do I play my eight inch floppys? Hell I can't run computer games I got my kids when they were in middle school. My systems too fast for them.
And I don't buy magazines just for the stories. I don't even buy them mostly for the stories and I never did. I buy them for the gestault experience of reading them. Heck I subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland for seventeen years, and every issue was pretty much the same. But every issue delivered what I wanted and I can't get that over the internet.
enough, you've heard this rant from me before.
The way to make a magazine, print form, last these days is by not worrying about how much you pay your writers, just put together a kick ass package. Remember your customer isn't your reader, its your distributor. My local news stand (its a B&N bookstore) sells every issue of every spec fic magazine they get in. Which is never more than seven or eight titles, ten to twenty issues per title. Despite the distributor hiding them in the back of the middle shelf behind the structural post that blocks access to that part of the rack. They even say they decided to put the fic mags there because they sell anyway. But they don't bring more, just what they decided to "buy" this month. (They actually expect to be paid to carry the magazines, up-front. And B&N has no control of whats on the racks, thats contracted and if you make a request they just pass it on to the distributor who may act on it or not. My point, if the (two) magazine distribution companies like you, you sell everywhere, money will flow, (well, trickle steadily) and your magazine will thrive. Amazing was an example, it was every where and selling and making money, unfortunatly that wasn't what the publisher had expected, it was requirering more of his time than he wanted and he shut it down in a fit of pique, which he's famous for (he also publishes EasyRider).
But it can be done. If you aren't trying to impress the writers with how professional you are, or the fans at the SF conventions with how cutting edge you are. There aren't enough 14yo SF fans these days to fill a high school football stadium but there are millions buying WotC card games and supporting and entire industry of game stores, magazines etc. Same with anime fans. You think a kid that'll drop fifty bucks to pick up a set of -The Fist of the Northstar_ won't enjoy and _buy_ John Hocking and Rob Santa? In print?
No one is trying to sell to him (if they were, Black Gate would be shelved next to GamePro). But sooner or later, they will. (even if I have to drag some . . .mumble, mumble). They are trying to sell the SF mags to the same ten year graduate student in a ratty T-shirt that they've been pitching too since 1977. They ones that do go to Cons, and vote for the Hugos and attend panels on world building and getting published. You want to see the people who spend, collectively, Real money at a big convention, go to the game room. Ours has two or three hundred people, many in costume, who never come out to the rest of the Con at all. Every one of the reads several game mags a month, buys rule books and minatures and card packs all based on what you sell at Flashing Swords, which they've never heard of. And they are young, younger by an average of twenty years than the fans outside the game room. Get in front of them and watch out!
Christos, maybe I should go back to game designing. Maybe story telling really is dying. Except thats what at least some of those GM's in the hall are doing, telling stories interactivly. If I was still GMing, I'd be basing adventures on stories I read in FS (when I was too rushed to write my own). I think print is a long way from dead but I do think its changing and a challenge to publishers to find the path to profits in a very changed market. I don't think the internet alone is the path.
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 | | |
|
Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2006 2:55 PM (GMT -5) | | And I don't buy magazines just for the stories. I don't even buy them mostly for the stories and I never did. I buy them for the gestault experience of reading them. Heck I subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland for seventeen years, and every issue was pretty much the same. But every issue delivered what I wanted and I can't get that over the internet.
***
You're talking to a man who is passionate about print magazines! I wish you could see how many of them are stuffed into the room I am in right now. I've probably subscribed to 100 magazines in my life or had contributor copies. Including poetry journals, for god's sake, and you can't get any more "in danger of extinction" than say, the Petrarchan sonnet -- yet I am holding a copy of Poet's Forum Magazine in my hands right now which has articles not only on the Petrarchan sonnet form, but on dozens of other poetic forms as well. It also features a lot of feedback from its readership and etc. It's cheaply printed, staple bound as coolas hell! One of my faves. But I doubt it could ever make money.
I also sunscribe to Chess Life magazine and The Atlanta Review, Harp Strings Poetry Journal, Moon Reader, Poetry Depth Quarterly, the Lyric, -- I won't go into SF pubs! I don't think any of tehm amke money for their publishers; they are loss leaders or done 4 the luv.
***
enough, you've heard this rant from me before.
The way to make a magazine, print form, last these days is by not worrying about how much you pay your writers, just put together a kick ass package. Remember your customer isn't your reader, its your distributor. My local news stand (its a B&N bookstore) sells every issue of every spec fic magazine they get in. Which is never more than seven or eight titles, ten to twenty issues per title. Despite the distributor hiding them in the back of the middle shelf behind the structural post that blocks access to that part of the rack.
***
Mike, the number of copies of a magazine sold at the retail level does NOT unfortunately mean a heck of a lot for the poor SOB publishing said magazine.
It takes so much sweat equity just to *produce* a magazine, let alone huff it around and find a readership.
Do you have any idea how retiurns work and how long of a lag time there is before nay publisher sees a penny of profit from a distributor? The markdown is 55% for starters.
Unless you are independently wealthy, running a print pub at the retail level is just not feasible, no matter what content or PR model you use.
Takes an Oprah to make a print pub fly and even then it is probably losing money for her corp on paper: hence it is a "loss leader."
Daniel
| | Back to Top | | |
|
erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 7/26/2006 3:09 PM (GMT -5) | | Daniel,
I know, I got ramped up. I feel like Mr. Douglas on the old green acres show sometimes.
I buy what I can. I've bought every S&S anthology you've put out. Unfortunatly, reading is getting to be an expensive habit. I support a family of five on less than twenty five K a year, so right now I don't subscribe to diddly. My car broke and I fixed it with the money I was going to use to suscribe to a grit load aof magazines with (including Talebones, along with Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft's, Black Gate, Apex, City Slab, Dark Wisdom, Paradox and SF Chronicle.)
I have an expensive book habit. Its like crack, except I can't make money selling it on the street corners.
Oh and Baen's Universe is an on-going concern, not shut down, just filled for the next six issues. Jim was the only one not surprised by his passing, he made araingments.
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 | | |
|
Nicholas
Sage
Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 1061
| Posted 7/26/2006 3:31 PM (GMT -5) | |
Daniel said...
There may be just as much short SF published, probably more -- but much less of it will be in printed magazine form. It already *is.*
And he said...
I agree 100%. I thinnk a savvy short Sf publisher would run an e-zine to cover their Internet side as well as a series of print anthologies for trade distribution to cover their retail bases! And maybe run a targeted quarterly print magazine (that they won't let any retail distributor touch!) just for good measure! LOL And some e-anthologies and specialty print titles to boot.
Boy, I wish someone would do that...... ;)
This reminds me of an analogy (which I can't take credit for; Gabe Dybing made the connection): e-zines are our present-day equivalent to the pulps of yesteryear. Pulps were printed on cheap paper, so more people could afford to publish them. They had a built-in mass readership. Likewise, ANYONE can go online and put up a webzine for practically nothing. And there is a built-in online readership. The parallels break down, however, when you get to making a profit. How many e-zine publishers have figured out a way to make any money doing this? But that is surely coming: we live in a country of entrepreneurs, and if there's a way to do it, somebody'll figure it out.
BUT, whether for nostalgia or merely practical reasons, most of us hold a special place in our hearts for the print mag, and would not want to see that become a relic of the past. Which speaks to Daniel's point: one must have a Web presence, even if one is putting out a print magazine. Hell, I'll go ahead and let a cat out of a proverbial bag, because it pertains to the topic at hand. I will soon be launching a new print mag--very small press, probably only available through online outlets like Shocklines and Clarkesworld. Green Sun Magazine will actually be a revival, under a new name, of a mag Gabe and I published from 2000-2002 as MOOREEFFOC: Fiction in the mythic tradition, so the debut ish will be numbered 7. Right away when I expressed my mad intent, Gabe advised me, "Go e-zine." "No, I want a physical copy," I protested, "even if it's cheaply-printed and staple-bound, that we can hold in our hands." "Then do both," he rejoined. Which, he's got a point...if you do a start-up print mag with no distributor and no web presence, who's ever going to hear of it? Your family, friends, and the local coffee shop? Your magazine, for all intents and purposes, might as well not exist. But a web presence is easily doable, and also, it seems, more and more a necessity. The fan base is plugged in. Most of them are not even looking for new material on magazine racks or in classifieds anymore; they're searching online, in discussion boards and blogs etc. They do a web search for "sword-and-sorcery" and maybe come across Flashing Swords. Then they order a Pitch Black anthology...
Nick
"Wirtzley's Warehouse: A Very Bad Day at Wirtzley's" in the July issue of Afterburn SF: The hottest Speculative Fiction site on the web! http://www.afterburnsf.com "Sarah's Spring: A Fable" December 2006 issue Raven's Electrick
"Gandalf's Staff, Prospero's Books: Magic in Tolkien and Shakespeare" in Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language from McFarland & Co., spring 2007
Poems forthcoming in Surreal Magazine and Weird Tales | | Back to Top | | |
|
Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2006 3:37 PM (GMT -5) | | Boy, I wish someone would do that...... ;)
This reminds me of an analogy (which I can't take credit for; Gabe Dybing made the connection): e-zines are our present-day equivalent to the pulps of yesteryear. Pulps were printed on cheap paper, so more people could afford to publish them. They had a built-in mass readership. Likewise, ANYONE can go online and put up a webzine for practically nothing. And there is a built-in online readership. The parallels break down, however, when you get to making a profit. How many e-zine publishers have figured out a way to make any money doing this? But that is surely coming: we live in a country of entrepreneurs, and if there's a way to do it, somebody'll figure it out.
BUT, whether for nostalgia or merely practical reasons, most of us hold a special place in our hearts for the print mag, and would not want to see that become a relic of the past. Which speaks to Daniel's point: one must have a Web presence, even if one is putting out a print magazine. Hell, I'll go ahead and let a cat out of a proverbial bag, because it pertains to the topic at hand. I will soon be launching a new print mag--very small press, probably only available through online outlets like Shocklines and Clarkesworld. Green Sun Magazine will actually be a revival, under a new name, of a mag Gabe and I published from 2000-2002 as MOOREEFFOC: Fiction in the mythic tradition, so the debut ish will be numbered 7. Right away when I expressed my mad intent, Gabe advised me, "Go e-zine." "No, I want a physical copy," I protested, "even if it's cheaply-printed and staple-bound, that we can hold in our hands." "Then do both," he rejoined. Which, he's got a point...if you do a start-up print mag with no distributor and no web presence, who's ever going to hear of it? Your family, friends, and the local coffee shop? Your magazine, for all intents and purposes, might as well not exist. But a web presence is easily doable, and also, it seems, more and more a necessity. The fan base is plugged in. Most of them are not even looking for new material on magazine racks or in classifieds anymore; they're searching online, in discussion boards and blogs etc. They do a web search for "sword-and-sorcery" and maybe come across Flashing Swords. Then they order a Pitch Black anthology...
Nick
***
Well said, Nick! IMHO.
Congrats on "Green Sun Magazine" -- please keep us appraised of your progress there!
Daniel
| | Back to Top | | |
| | |