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Jordan Lapp
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 2:59 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
I know we had a conversation a while back about whether or not magazines publish their circulation figures.
 
Well, apparently the Big Three do--every year--in Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.
 
Here they are:
  Asimov's:                        15117 (Subscription only, no newstand figures).
  Analog :                          23732 (plus 4587 newsstand)
  Fantasy & Science Fiction: 14575 (plus 3691 newstand)
 
Interzone's monthly circulation is between two and three thousand.

Jordan Lapp
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Bill Ward
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 4:33 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
And they are only going down.

I'm surprised Interzones is so low, I thought it would have been closer to the others.
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Jordan Lapp
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 4:40 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
According to John O'Neil's posting in Daniel's thread, Black Gate's circulation is well over 4K... but he wasn't very precise.

Jordan Lapp
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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 5:34 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Wow, that's a *lot* lower than I'd thought.

Interesting.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 5:40 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
As far as I know all of those "big" pubs also include non-fiction of some stripe or another. I wonder what the largest circulating purely fiction pub is, if one, indeed, exists at all.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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Jordan Lapp
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 6:00 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
I've bought Asimov's a couple of times and never seen any non-fiction outside of the editorial.

As for circulation, I hear Realms of Fantasy is doing pretty good. I'd love to know their circulation numbers.

Jordan Lapp
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darkbow
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  		   Posted 10/26/2007 8:25 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Honestly, of the Big Three, I haven't bought a copy of any of them in at least a decade. The last time I tried any of them, the stories seemed weak and most of the informational text was stuff I already knew or didn't care about. But that's just me. The Three have their circulations, so they still have their fans.

I have my own, personal, Big One. And that's Weird Tales. I'm not sure yet what direction the magazine is planning to move in since they've changed editors around some this past year, nor do I know their circ. figures, but I still love Weird Tales. That's the magazine market I'd love most to break into.

www.tyjohnston.blogspot.com

"Hot Off the Press" now available in Ray Gun Revival #25.

"Deep in the Land of the Ice and Snow" upcoming in the Flashing Swords anthology, "The Return of the Sword: A New Age of Heroic Adventure."

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/27/2007 10:02 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Weird Tales was always my favorite print SF mag. I wrote short fiction reviews here for SFReader for a couple of years. During that time, I had the chance to read plenty of the pubs including some of the "big" pubs like F&SF, Realms, the old SCI FICTION, etc.

I nearly always found the content of the so-called "big" pubs fairly strained and pathologically boring. It was difficult to not yawn oneself to the Sandlands whilst reading F&SF or Realms of Fantasy.

Asimov's and Analog I couldn't even get past the first few pages most times.

What's really odd is contrasting the slow-mo, no-mo, movement of the print SF pubs with...real world lightning speed of *all* other media.

I'm not surprised the circulation numbers for these pubs are so low; if you cut off the subscribers who are over 50 years of age from these stats, I wonder how many readers you'd have left?

I think print fiction magazines have less of a cultural or artistic influence these days than a toss-off You Tube video made on some high school kid's phone.

Sad but true.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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Jordan Lapp
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  		   Posted 10/27/2007 12:21 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Daniel said...

I think print fiction magazines have less of a cultural or artistic influence these days than a toss-off You Tube video made on some high school kid's phone.
You know I'm the first guy to leap to the defense of the Bigs, but sadly you may be right here. Damn.

Jordan Lapp
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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/27/2007 12:48 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Well, pubs like EDF may be the ticket to ride. Your stats seem good; maybe it is all matter of distribution and proximity as the "big" editors have been saying all along.

I've seen nothing in my experience to disprove this idea. I don't intuitively feel that that's the case, but intuition, just like rational linear thought, can have its "misses" too.

Only time and tech will tell.

Meanwhile, thank God for Rowling, at least people are still reading paper SF of some kind.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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Jordan Lapp
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  		   Posted 10/27/2007 4:48 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
I certainly hope so. EDF just got page rank too! We're out of Google's sandbox and off to a flying start (PageRank of 3 for a two month old mag! ! !) Now we're REALLY going to start advertising this ting!

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UnclePete
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  		   Posted 10/27/2007 11:42 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Those are actually about what I would have thought - I would have guessed ~20k a piece. I'd be interested to see what the other digest style magazines have - Ellery Queen, Hitchcock, etc. Most lit journals only have a circulation of around 500-2k, and half of those subs are industrial and alumni. It's amazing to me that people think in terms of 30-50 bucks being expensive for a subscription, but just fine with that price on a hard cover book (or a bargain for a text book, for god's sake.)

____________
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." --Thomas Jefferson
www.creativeguypublishing.com

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/28/2007 11:53 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Poetry Magazine has a circulation of 30,000. I think it is the largest circulating poetry mag. No alumni for that particular pub.

Interestingly enough, "The magazine prints about 300 poems a year and gets about 90,000 submissions," (Wiki).

No matter what happens to its circulation rates, POetry Magazine will be around for a while: "Poetry is financed, since 2003, with a two hundred million dollar grant from Ruth Lilly," (Wiki).

Here's some other circ rates for literary magazines:

Zoetrope Circ. 20,000.

Glimmer Train 16,000

Paris Review 10,000.

Ploughshares 6,000.

Those are "top tier" literary pubs. The biggest difference between lit print pubs and SF print pubs is: lit pubs aren't *supposed* to be commercially successful and most pubs rely on patrons and subsidies to continue running. If SF pubs are moving in that direction by design, the editors of the "big" pubs ar doing a spectacular job, asssuming they can secure financing; if, on the other hand, they or anyone else was looking to make money selling fiction, they are going to be working with an almost infinitismal (and still shrinking) demographic for potential sales.
 
One other difference: there are dozens of prestige lit journals and hundreds of "little" lit journals -- there are a handful of "pro" SF pubs and a few dozen 4 the luv operations.
 
 

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/28/2007 12:15 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
In contrast, here's a few pages from YouTube. I tried to find obscure and really boring topics. None of these have had any profesional publicity or traffic-driving other than simple word of mouth:
 
1) Amateur Brazilian guitarist shredding, unknown name, unknown song.
 
Views: 672,462 Comments: 2,985.
 
 
2) Watching paint dry. Literally. 
 
Views:18,309  Comments: 148.
 
 
 
Views: 768,225 Comments: 403. 
  
4) Screenshots from an obscure, quite dated video game called "Panzer General" submitted by an unknown gamer.
 
Views: 2,984 Comments: 29.
 
5) Someone being bored. Literally.  
 
Views:115,406  Comments: 24.
 
"Watching paint dry" beats all of the SF print pubs except Analog. But Analag has been around for decades and You Tube's audience will only grow. One can then assume "watching paint dry" in six months will have far surpassed the circulation rates of all the SF print pubs. Since it is an agregate view-count, in six months, the "watching paint dry" video may have more views than all the readers of all the "prestige" SF print pubs combined.
 
"Cute girl doing her laundry" snags more viewers than all the print pubs combined already!
 
And that's without actual nudity ;-)
 
  

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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gwthomas21
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  		   Posted 10/31/2007 9:29 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
In the book biz, 50,000 copies is considered a SF bestseller. A big publisher comic book that sells less than 100,000 copies gets cancelled. I had a chance to pitch a book to a New York agent at the Surrey International Writers' Conference earlier this month. She wasn't interested in the least if I had published with any SF magazines. The two worlds are not really linked like they were. I always thought it was important to sell to magazines to get enough cred to sell to book publishers or get an agent. Not so much. They are more interested in the pitch.

GW

G. W. Thomas has appeared in over 350 different books, magazines and ezines including Writer's Digest, The Armchair Detective and Black October Magazine. He draws the web comic CHUCK THE PENGUIN. His website is www.gwthomas.org

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 10/31/2007 1:23 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
When you mention the names of prominent SF magazines to professional publshers and editors, distributors and agents, in my personal experience, they all say "What?"

You're better off approaching important people with solid marketing ideas and leads than any number of publications in the SF mags.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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ScrewMoonshine
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  		   Posted 11/1/2007 11:27 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
gwthomas21 said...
In the book biz, 50,000 copies is considered a SF bestseller. A big publisher comic book that sells less than 100,000 copies gets cancelled.


This is dead wrong. In fact, it's so far from the truth that I can't imagine where you got such information. In the contemporary comic book scene, 1,500 copies is enough to get into the Diamond Top 300. Take a look at the numbers for the Top 300 selling comics this past June: www.icv2.com/articles/home/10906.html Only the top 10 titles crack the 100,000 mark. The "Big Four" comic publishers are putting out a heck of a lot more than 10 titles. And keep in mind as well that this chart is for ALL comic books, not just SF titles.

If the state of the market for novels is getting you down, the state of the comic book market will make you positively suicidal.

Robert Orme

Out now:
"Time in a Capsule" in Unparalleled Journeys II (www.journeybookspublishing.com/)
"On the Tree Top" in Ultraverse vol.3 #5 (www.ultraverse.us)
"The Scab, the Man, and the I.V." in Mount Zion Speculative Fiction Review #3 (www.mountzionpress.com)

Coming soon:
"Replacing Someone" in Aoife's Kiss #26, September 2008 (http://samsdotpublishing.com/aoife/main.htm)
"More Than One Way to Protect" in Lords of Justice (www.carnifexpress.net/blogs/)

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peadarog
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  		   Posted 11/1/2007 3:30 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Daniel said...
When you mention the names of prominent SF magazines to professional publshers and editors, distributors and agents, in my personal experience, they all say "What?"


While this is true, the idea that you have 'sold' a 'lot' of stories to 'professional' magazines will make it far more likely that they'll lift you out of the slush long enough to read a few pages. That's a vital advantage these days. Not to be sniffed at.

Peadar O Guilin

Available now:
"Twig" From Adventures of Sword and Sorcery #7
"The Bag" in Reckless abandon
"The Mourning Trees" in Black Gate #5
"Fairy Fort" in A Walk on the Darkside
"Hair" in www.feralfiction.com
"Hurdy-Gurdy" in Dark Arts
Coming Soon:
"The Drain" in Weird Tales
"Where Beauty Lies in Wait" in Black Gate

The Inferior from David Fickling Books. Coming 6 September 2007.

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 11/1/2007 3:47 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Not to be sniffed at.

***
Not sniffing. Just trying to keep perspective.

OTOH if you approached any publisher with a manuscript that had a celebrity or maven tie-in of any stripe they'd probably be much more interested than if you had a dozen short-fiction sales. or if you had a single publication in Zoetrope or the New Yorker. A pub of some reputation and substance.

If you can demonstrate marketing potential (you're a radio talk show host; you're a former actor or pop star or son or daughter of a prominent person) you're going to be better off.

Finally, it takes sooo long to assemble even a reasonable amount of *rejections* from print magazines that you are going to intrude upon the topicality of both your writing style and your specific projects trying to learn to write for them.

If you happen to have a knack for writing short fiction that sells to pro magazines, since they are so obviously out of step with the popular taste, as is evidenced by the circulation figures, you may actually be in a bad position as a potential novelist.

I don't know how many novels a typical contributor to the prestige pubs sells, or all of them together for that matter; I can guess off-hand that the number of sales by SF writers who have never bothered with the short-ficiton markets is in the hundreds of millions just from Rowling and Paolini alone.

Going back a ways, other SF writers who dominated earlier on: Piers Anthony, Stephen . Donaldson, Terry Brooks, making gazillions of dollars, never wrote for the SF pubs and certainly didn't start there.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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Nicholas
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  		   Posted 11/6/2007 1:22 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Hey, if the circulation figures for MF&SF are roughly 18,000 per issue, why do they claim on their Classifieds page that your ad will be seen by like 200,000 people?

http://ozment.livejournal.com
 
 

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Jordan Lapp
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  		   Posted 11/6/2007 1:28 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
It's possible they're part of a group, like you can purchase one ad that will show up in many magazines (F&SF included). Or maybe they include people that browse the magazines, not just buy them.

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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy



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  		   Posted 11/6/2007 5:09 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Hey, if the circulation figures for MF&SF are roughly 18,000 per issue, why do they claim on their Classifieds page that your ad will be seen by like 200,000 people?

***

It *is* a magazine of *fantasy* after-all.

Who'da thunk it.

 

 

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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MichaelEhart
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  		   Posted 11/6/2007 8:08 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Big magazines use a complex formula that calculates "pass-along" factor--- as a great number of them are in libraries, and many more are shared by their readers. Its a Madison Avenue thing, but seems to be accepted as legitimate.

Buy my book!
The Servant of the Manthycore available Nov. 17th from DEP
Illustrated by Rachel Marks, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock
Read me in 2007!
"The View From the Shotglass Floor" Ray Gun Revival, Feb 2007
"Voice of the Spoiler" The Sword Review, June 2007
"Servant of the Manthycore" The Sword Review, July 2007
"Darkling I Listen; and for Many a Time" Fear and Trembling, coming soon!
"Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" The Sword Review, August 2007
"Six Zombies Doing That Mick Jagger Strut" Damned in Dixie, Summer 2007
"Nothing But Our Tears" The Sword Review, September 2007
"Night of Shadows, Night of Knives" Magic and Mechanica, Fall 2007
"The Scarlet Colored Beast" The Sword Review, October 2007
"The Stars by Law, Forbidden" Unparalleled Journeys II, November 2007
"Who Comes for the Mother's Fruit" Every Day Fiction, November 2007
"Stand, Stand, Shall They Cry" Flashing Swords, November 2007
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Dragon Angel
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  		   Posted 11/7/2007 2:13 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
These statistics are far worse than I imagined. I thought they'd be in the hundreds of thousands, not the "in a few years it will sell less than a first time novelist's book" category.

read free fiction and poetry at http://www.geocities.com/davidolson22/index.html
 
Part dark, part light. And gooey in the middle.

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Daniel
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  		   Posted 11/7/2007 1:31 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Big magazines use a complex formula that calculates "pass-along" factor--- as a great number of them are in libraries, and many more are shared by their readers. Its a Madison Avenue thing, but seems to be accepted as legitimate

***

I wonder how long it's been since the stat-model for this has been recalibrated. I do not have the impression that people pass along short-fiction magazines like they used to, or read them in libraries, or recommend them to their friends.

Scholarly presses use a similar configuration: your boook will be in x number of libraries and will be referenced x number of times per year.

And yet, I am sure there are many obscure monographs in libraries all over the world that have never been cracked open or cited even once. I know there are because I've run into books like this while conducting my own research, some with pages still *uncut* from over 80-100 years ago and never even read through in all those years. Happens a lot w/ poetry and poetry related criticism.

"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."

Daniel

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