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Worlds Without End Blog

Subscribe to SF Magazines – Become a Patron of an Art Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

jwharris28

How do you make money on a product given away for free? That’s a problem all websites face, but I’m particularly worried about those that publish science fiction short stories. Let’s say you pay 10-cents a word to writers and offer 100,000 words of quality fiction to your readers each month. That’s $10,000 of overhead just for stories. Advertising won’t cover that. And even generous Patreon donors will tire quickly. What’s a publisher to do? Neil Clarke over at Clarkesworld brought this conundrum up on Twitter the other day and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I love reading science fiction short stories and would hate to see their publishers go out of business. Traditionally, short science fiction was distributed in printed magazines supported by subscriptions. After the internet websites began publishing short SF for free, which competed with the magazines. Their success has steadily grown as more and more awards are given to stories that are first published on the web, as well as seeing a greater percentage of these stories anthologized in the best-of-the-year volumes. It’s now a disadvantage to be published in print.

Magazines have declining revenues while websites struggle for any revenue. This can’t go on. A new monetizing model needs to be discovered.

Free-to-read stories help authors find fans and win awards, but at what cost? Making a profit from selling fiction has always been hard, but it is impossible when the price is free. If I was writing a science fiction story, I wouldn’t picture this in the future. Nor would I predict internet publishing failing and print publishing reviving.

Subscribing to the digital editions of the SF/F magazines seems to be the main hope at the moment. But too many readers still expect SF stories for free. A suggestion was made in the twitter thread that online publishers retain part of their content for exclusive eBook editions, but Clarke replied he doesn’t want to penalize those writers by hiding their stories. What’s needed is for readers to buy subscriptions and let all the stories be published on the net for free. A Zen koan. If a story is published on the net, readers who love it share it with friends. Being free helps a story find readers. But, can publishers find enough paying subscribers to support all the freeloaders?

There are two kinds of readers — casual ones who read short stories rarely, and dedicated ones who cherish short science fiction as a distinct art form. Subscribers will be the patrons of this art. The question is: Are there enough patrons out there to support SF magazines? Could original anthologies completely replace the periodicals? I hope short science fiction doesn’t become like the world of classical music where local symphonies must constantly beg for money from a dwindling patron base. There are really two problems here: declining readership and declining subscriptions.

Rocket Stack Rank regularly reviews 11 SF/F magazines, as well as a significant number of anthologies and other publishers of short SF. There are even more SF/F magazines out there that they don’t cover, just look at WWEnd’s list of over 60+ magazines that cover the SF/F/H genres. Magazines come and go, and whether or not they get to stay depends on making money. For example, Amazing Stories is publishing again. Steve Davidson is doing everything he can to resurrect that legendary title that’s gone out of business many times.

Magazines and websites need income to stay in existence, but finding a revenue stream in an era where everyone expects everything online for free is a big burden. I’m not sure the market can support 11+ magazines. I expect a big shake-out in the near future. Would more magazines be profitable if there was less competition?

I subscribe to 4 magazines (Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed) because I get them for $2.99 a month each through Amazon. I do it this way because it’s so damn convenient. I can read these magazines on my phone or tablet. I can unsubscribe at any time so there’s no real commitment. I consider the $12 I spend each month as my way of supporting short science fiction. Most people think of patrons of the arts as rich folks who give thousands to their favorite orchestra or museum. $12 a month is my way of being a penny-ante patron of an obscure art form.

I would also subscribe to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction if it offered a $2.99 a month subscription. I’d subscribe to other magazines if they offered $1.99 or $2.99 subs through Amazon. Some magazines offer individual issues for sale at Amazon, like Interzone for $4.99 each, and I’ll buy those when Rocket Stack Rank rates one of their stories highly.

For folks who don’t like Amazon, eBook editions of these magazines are available elsewhere.

It doesn’t bother me that two of the magazines I subscribe to offer their stories for free online. It’s easier to read them on my phone, but I like that the stories are there for free. When I find an outstanding tale, I enjoy telling my friends or blog about them, and having that link means there’s a greater chance of folks giving the story a try. I also want internet browsing to always be free.

The science fiction magazines will need several thousand subscribers to keep them going. Is this the ultimate solution to the problem? Can each genre magazine find at least 10,000 patrons? The other day Apple launched AppleNews+ which provides 300+ magazines for $10 a month. If it succeeds it might draw tens of millions of subscribers.

Unfortunately, none of those 300+ magazines are fiction magazines. The reason why I love subscribing to Spotify is it provides for all my music needs in one source. What if AppleNews+ provided for all my periodical needs? I have no idea if these 300 magazines will make money from AppleNews+ but they are still offering their print, web, and eBook editions too. Maybe the solution is having multiple revenue streams.

Can the new Netflix model for magazines work? Would hundreds of magazines sharing a tiny bit from millions of subscribers pay better than thousands of subscribers paying larger chunks of change?

AppleNews+ offers several categories of magazines (Business + Finance, Cars, Entertainment, Food, Health, etc.). Wouldn’t it be interesting if they included a category for Literature? They could offer various genre magazines, literary journals, poetry magazines, and maybe even Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and Poets & Writers. That way all the would-be writers of the world would want to subscribe.

Over the last decade, I’ve tried Zinio, Texture, and other e-magazine services. I subscribed to Texture for a couple of years and then canceled. I went back to paper magazines. I didn’t feel I was using Texture enough. I thought if I had magazines lying around the house again I’d do more reading. But I haven’t. I signed up for AppleNews+ because, at $10 a month, it’s far cheaper, and I won’t have those piles of magazines around the house making me feel guilty. It’s a cheap enough way to have magazines when I do want them.

I’ve come to realize that I have to pay if I want certain things in this world to exist, even if I don’t use them.

I subscribe to four SF magazines that I seldom read. I read when I can, or when I see a story recommended, or when a friend tells me about a story. I subscribe because I want them to exist. I subscribe because I want a place for new SF writers to get published. I subscribe because one day if I can ever get back into writing fiction I’ll have a place to submit my stories.

We have to realize that free content on the internet isn’t free. We’ve got to come up with revenue systems that work. I think the internet needs to remain free, so we can always have instant access to content, but we need to find ways to pay publishers who present free content on the web.

The rising costs of printing and postage are making publishing the old way impractical. I love printed magazines. Last year I subscribed to Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF because I thought I wanted to collect them again. But they all ruined that desire by putting mailing labels on their beautiful covers. If they had shipped their magazines in protective wrappers I would still be subscribing to the print editions. I have a nostalgia for that. But I feel the age of printed magazines is nearly over. It’s actually much easier to read AppleNews+ than the paper magazines. Many of the essays I read from AppleNews+ are free to read on the web or through Flipboard, but AppleNews+ formats the content for eye-friendlier reading. That’s also worth $10 a month.

I’d love if AppleNews+ included fiction magazines. Or if all the fiction magazine publishers allied together and created a monthly subscription service like AppleNews+. I’d be willing to pay another $10 a month for it.

JWH

 

 

 

11 Comments

Rhonda Knight   |   05 Apr 2019 @ 14:47

Dear James,
Thanks for posting this. I was just thinking about all the free fiction available when the Hugo nominations came out. I realized I had read many of the short stories and novelettes already because they were available for free. You inspired me to figure out how to support one of the magazines that I really like, Strange Horizons. (http://strangehorizons.com/). Turns out that it does have a Patreon page, so I signed up to support the magazine for $4 a month, which will gain me an epub of the contents at the end of each month. So, thanks for the nudge.
Rhonda

Greg Hullender   |   05 Apr 2019 @ 16:08

I think the heart of the problem is that people are unwilling to pay for stories they don’t plan to read. There’s a vibrant market in stand-alone novellas, and almost all of those have to be paid for. The difference is that when you buy an anthology or an issue of a magazine, you’re buying a whole bunch of stories, and that doesn’t sit well with people who are only interested in looking at one specific story that someone recommended. I can attest that I’ve had this feeling personally even when I was just paying 99¢ for an anthology!

I sometimes wonder if Amazon could be convinced to support magazines via Kindle Unlimited. What I envision is letting each article and story be a separate “book” in KU with the revenues from readers automatically split between the magazine and the authors. I’d want them to do something similar for anthologies, of course. That way everyone gets paid fairly and no one feels they’re buying something they don’t want.

Regular subscriptions would still work the same as they do now, but people wanting to just read one story would have a way to do it. KU is $9.99/month at the moment, which meets your “$10/month” criterion.

jwharris28   |   05 Apr 2019 @ 20:34

Rhonda, that’s great, and thanks for letting others know too, how to subscribe to Strange Horizons.

Laura   |   06 Apr 2019 @ 07:22

Hear! Hear! I subscribe to F&SF and Beneath Ceaseless Skies through Weightless Books, Apex and Strange Horizons through Patreon, and Uncanny through Kickstarter. F&SF is the only one I *need* to pay for to get the content, but it’s well worth it. I find their stories to be pretty consistently good to great.

Neil Clarke   |   06 Apr 2019 @ 10:19

Glad to have someone else thinking about this one. 🙂

Apple News and their competitors are presently closed ecosystems with no path for smaller publishers (most fiction magazines) to get in. I haven’t been able to find out how revenue sharing works there, but I suspect that it’s based on the number of people reading your content, much like Amazon does for Kindle Unlimited. If that’s the case, someone like you (subscribe, but don’t always read) wouldn’t be helping anyone but Apple.

Apple’s program is focused on the magazines that are generating the bulk of their income from advertising. As such, this increased exposure (even if it means losses in subscription revenue) is a smart move for those publications. With the exception of Tor.com, which is part of Tor’s marketing budget, none of the genre magazines are driven by advertising/marketing. Their budgets are very dependent on subscription revenue or other recurring support (like Patreon, which is really just a different form of subscription.) It’s very likely that joining a service like this would do more harm than good for those genre fiction magazines, particularly if some of their regular subscribers shifted over to this platform.

As for KU, the exclusivity clause would require the online editions to be completely shut down. Amazon isn’t stopping publishers from launching magazines in that ecosystem. It’s more that no one (so far) wants to.

I’m not convinced that discounting or pooling subscriptions would increase revenue. People driven by a bargain already drift to free editions. In fact, I’d argue that the subscriptions are already discounted and that’s hurting as well.

jwharris28   |   06 Apr 2019 @ 12:53

Greg, I subscribed to KU for a while but didn’t really like it. However, if they did offer the magazines that would be different. I switched to Scribd, which I love, and is far superior to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. It does carry some SF magazines. I just discovered that after seeing your suggestion of KU carrying them. Need to investigate. I’m thinking they are carrying back issues of Clarkesworld and Apex. Plus people are uploading PDF issues of old SF magazines and books. That seems iffy regarding copyright.

jwharris28   |   06 Apr 2019 @ 13:04

Neil, that’s information good to know. I’ll stop considering that avenue. So are ebook and Patreon subscriptions the future of revenue for SF/F magazines?

I just saw that Clarkesworld back issues are on Scribd – does pay anything worthwhile?

Do you think there will be enough Patreon subscribers like Rhonda to support the SF magazines?

Neil Clarke   |   06 Apr 2019 @ 22:26

I’d call digital subscriptions and Patreon the two best options at the moment. I’m an advocate of embracing as many revenue streams as possible, so the lesser ones shouldn’t be entirely ignored either (advertising, PayPal gifts, back issue sales, anthologies, etc.). Recurring streams are best though. The stability those provide is a blessing.

As for the future, who knows what will be next. I’m always keeping an eye on what’s coming down the line and trying out new things. Our two largest sources of income (Amazon digital subscriptions and Patreon) didn’t exist when we launched in 2006, but when they arrived, I jumped right in. It’s what has allowed us to survive and grow.

We’ve also tried things that didn’t work, like the back issues you spotted at Scribd. I’ll probably pull those from there at some point. We’ve played with back issues in Overdrive as well, but we’ve been forced to treat issues like standalone ebooks there rather than be a part of their magazine options. (I’m trying, but we’re probably too small for them to consider, which is a problem we often face.)

As for whether or not there are enough people… The supporting rate for your average online magazines is below 10% of their total readership/listenership. Right now the system only works with the number of markets it has simply because so many are willing to do the work for little or no compensation. That isn’t sustainable or fair. (Yes, it’s a choice people make, but it can still be taking advantage of them.) Something will eventually give and the response can’t always be a “save this” or “kickstart that” campaign. That just kicks the can down the road. It doesn’t solve the problem.

Would the business side of short fiction be healthier if there were fewer markets? Probably, but we’d likely lose something of value in the process. We need to look at why supporting rates are low, learn whether or not our subscription rates are too low, find out if we’re missing out on other potential audiences that could bring additional revenue into the field, and so much more. I’m not the type to wait for the problem to run us down. I want to get ahead of it, and if possible, find a way to move past surviving and into thriving.

Greg Hullender   |   06 Apr 2019 @ 22:48

@Neil
I fear that the free-online model is ultimately unsustainable, though. If ads won’t work, there needs to be some way to make subscriptions work.

When I try to go back to first principles (i.e. this will be a flight of fancy), it seems to me that there are really four partners involved in delivering the works.

1) The supplier, such as Amazon, who needs to get a cut.
2) The author, who probably should get most of the money.
3) The editor, assuming someone did make editorial fixes to the story.
4) The promoter, and I’d include magazines as promoters because that’s what they’re really doing.

In the ideal solution, readers would contribute money based on how much they read and the four partners would split the take (based on some agreed-upon formula) based on what was read.

This would do away with advances and per-word payments, but it would mean an author could, in theory, get paid for the same story indefinitely.

But this would only be interesting to readers if a single system gave them access to essentially everything. And, as you say, it would make no sense to ever charge readers for what they could get online for free.

Anyway, one can play with the parameters of this quite a bit (e.g. readers could buy fixed monthly subscriptions rather than paying per word read); this isn’t meant to represent a complete solution but to point at where we might like to be if only we could get there.

jwharris28   |   09 Apr 2019 @ 10:09

Saturday Evening Post has an interesting approach. Subscribers get digital copies and web access to the complete back issue archive with their print subscriptions. Their archive goes back to 1821. That’s quite a dealing to entice me to subscribe.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/subscribe/

James W. Harris   |   12 Apr 2019 @ 08:33

What’s interesting is we pay a monthly bill to use the internet each month that’s often equal to a cable bill, but all of the revenue goes to the pipe and none to the content. When we pay for cable some goes to the pipe and some money goes to the content providers. I wonder if some of our cable bill shouldn’t be distributed to what we use on the internet.

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