The State of Pulp is … Pulp

Posted on February 19th, 2008 by Carlos

This article, courtesy of Simon Owens, proprietor of Bloggasm, is easily one of the best reviews of the current state of short genre fiction, from the perspective of the magnanimous, masochistic magazines that, despite the fact that they go into the endeavor knowing they probably won’t be probable, sedulously fight for survival. Turn a profit? Ha! Pay their editors? Double-ha! It’s enough that they offer their writers a paltry 5¢ word and thereby qualify as a professional market. Never mind that they often need to pay writers out of their own pockets….

Among the many disheartening points of the article:

• Ellen Daltow is having much too hard a time finding a full-time editing gig! :) (Though she’s doing just fine as an anthology editor and as co-curator of the KGB bar’s Fantastic Fiction monthly reading, so maybe she doesn’t want to edit a magazine right now.)
• Isaac Asimov didn’t consider a pulp magazine “successful” unless it had a minimum of 100,000 subscribers. Holy shit.
• Even the most important pulp magazines of the day (Asimov et. al.) hover around subscriptions of circa 20,000. (Asimov apparently the highest at 23,000).
• Online journals, especially ones that don’t publish something every day, just can’t seem to land a number of advertisers to make them self-sustaining. (One of the comments of the article points out, however, that a flash magazine that utilizes RSS feeds can make use of things like Google AdSense and perhaps do a little better.)
• Nonprofit magazines like Strange Horizons depend of fund-drives that in turn depend on the deep pockets of a few generous donors. This may be changing — Strange Horizons seems to be attracting more small donors — but for now, a few philanthropists are bearing the lion’s share of the burden for keeping it and magazines like it running.
• Simon Owens suggests that the single-advertiser model, where one business/organization/whatever bears the costs of publication in exchange for exclusive advertising, may be one of the best ways for magazines to sustain themselves in today’s market. He sites Chizine as one of the biggest success stories for this method, and, indeed, it sounds like a pretty sweet setup for editor Brett Alexander Savory: his sponsor, Leisure Books, doesn’t interfere with the editorial process and covers the publishing costs.
• Number of dead magazines, according to Ralan.com: 649. /weeps openly

Can short fiction turn a profit? Maybe — but the numbers will be a helluva lot smaller than they used to be. I think there are plenty of obvious reasons why: the flood of entertainment options, especially “push” entertainment like movies and TV and YouTube, coupled with the advent of interactive entertainment, most likely lead the pack. Reading just takes a larger initial investment in terms of mental energy than a lot of other art forms require up front.

At the same time, more books are being published than ever before, and books still have the power to take possession of the public imagination (The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, even the His Dark Marterials Trilogy and the controversy it caused [though it really only caused a controversy when the first book was made into a movie … sigh]). In short, writing still matters. So why is it so hard for magazines to pay authors anything more than slave wages, or their hard-working editors anything at all? There’s got to be a way, dammit! There must be a way!