There are some interesting discussions going on around the web about which direction publishing — specifically the publishing of genre short fiction — may be headed. It’s no secret that many of the smaller print magazines are closing down, something I wrote about in Vanishing Print Zines, and that the ‘big three’ have been limping along with ever-declining circulation numbers for over a decade now, facts which leave readers and writers of short fiction asking the obvious question of ‘what’s next?’

A recent article in the Baltimore City Paper, Neverending Stories, takes a snapshot of SF short fiction then and now, noting that the business end of things has been in decline for quite some time, but that writers are drawn to the form nevertheless. A few writers comment that the short story magazines are the equivalent of the club scene in music, a proving ground, a place where new talent is seen for the first time — and Robert Charles Wilson memorably draws a comparison between short SF and garage bands.

But the writing is on the wall, and the article can’t help but note the declining number of readers for the SF short story magazines, and off-offhandedly concludes that maybe one day when we are all reading stories online (the article specifically mentions ‘Twitter,’ which doesn’t make any sense to me) the short form may return to its former glory. But that conjecture has of course been at the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking about the future of short fiction, though with the recent closing of Jim Baen’s Universe there seems a lessening of some of the surety with which some declared the internet would usher in a short fiction renaissance.

The problem, of course, is how does anyone make money with online short fiction? Jay Garmon’s idea for a web 2.0 SF magazine seems a step in the right direction. Simply stated, this type of magazine would allow the online audience to essentially commission the stories they wanted to read by voting with their cash on story pitches vetted by an editorial staff. It’s an elegant solution, though not without its own problems as Garmon is well-aware — for one thing it would depend on already having a sizable audience, and for another it would heavily favor known writers (but, really, so does every form of publishing).

Addressing the first concern of growing an audience is something Cory Doctorow knows a hell of a lot about. Doctorow is, of course, a famous champion for the creative commons copyright and has enjoyed a lot of success energizing and expanding his audience by offering his work for free online. A recent Locus column from Doctorow, Special Pleading, examines the marketing potential of ‘giving it away for free’ in some detail, and offers an overview of his own career. He also hints at his planned ‘With a Little Help’ project, which will be a “short story collection that tries every imaginable income-generating technique for open publishing in order to get some data about which avenues hold the most promise.”

One means of generating support that worked in spades was John Scalzi’s recent call for donations for e-zine Strange Horizons‘ fund drive. In a little over a day Scalzi’s readers donated more than 7,000 dollars to Strange Horizons, which more than exceeded their goal. At a time when the average fiction e-zine is hard pressed to raise a couple of hundred dollars, this sort of thing is extraordinary, and suggests further avenues of potential fund-raising for online venues. Namely, patronage.

So, Is Patronage the Answer?, asks Futurismic in its look at ‘profitable post-web publishing.’ The article notes the Doctorow and Scalzi material I’ve linked to above, but concludes that, so far, there is no clear path to success — only indicators of potential. But on the issue of patronage (whether it be endorsement or actual underwriting) the question is not about its existence or potential, but how best to harness it:

. . . what is becoming obvious is that patronage is crucial to supporting niche publishing – be it direct financial patronage from readers, or the patronage of a vocally supportive figurehead (the patronage of publicity, if you will), or the patronage of an animal further up the publishing foodchain. Underpinning all these is the need to cultivate a supportive audience – turning a percentage of your free readers into donors or buyers, in other words.

The article then returns to ask the very basic questions that web publishers have been chewing on since the experiment began — distribution of ads, premium pricing, perception of readers, etc. It all comes back to the big question on everybody’s mind : just how the hell do we get people to spend money on online fiction?

Jay Garmon responds with a modification of his web 2.0 magazine idea — and, perhaps, with the only real practical answer in a sea of questions, questions, questions — something he’s calling distributed patronage. In Distributed Patronage: How to Save Sci-Fi Short Fiction, Garmon sees his ideal model as “fifty or a hundred John Scalzis bolstering a couple dozen magazines every month.” It’s an interesting idea, one that proposes an almost viral ‘reprinting’ option that would have a big-name author’s story appearing on multiple sites with links and donation buttons all leading back to the central magazine. It’s a mix of publicity and fund raising that would allow a patron-level writer to promote the magazine simply by being famous enough for the rest of the web to want to link to the non-exclusive content originally published by the web 2.o magazine. It’s an amalgam of Doctorow’s distribution, Scalzi’s energized fanbase, and Garmon’s original ‘ransom’ idea of getting the audience to bid on the stories they wanted. This ‘crowdsourced marketplace’ would, in fact, be a ‘meta-magazine’:

. . . one that houses all the stories it has unlocked for perpetual online consumption and reprint. It is also a platform for enabling other online venues to acquire short fiction (or, conceivably, any) content, and one that co-opts the audience of each venue and contributor as an ever-shifting, distributed donor base.

Another little essay of mine on flash fiction was just posted over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today, ‘Frame Your Flash, Don’t Fence It In.’ It’s about the world outside the story, the world beyond the ‘frame’ of the piece — and in the case of flash fiction that is a very small frame indeed, under 1,000 words. This world outside — sometimes existing in a writer’s notes, sometimes the object of pure, spontaneous bluffing on the part of the writer, is one of the things that gives fiction a sense of believability and verisimilitude:

But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.

This is even more important for speculative fiction — since the worlds of spec fic are not the world that readers themselves live in and, by extension, believe in. I go on to talk about the various tricks one uses to achieve this, not the least of which is getting yourself into a mindset where you, the author, believe the truth of what you are writing. When you believe in the world outside of the frame, it’s much easier to hint at, and much easier to get your audience to harness their own imaginations in service of your story. For, when the audience starts conjuring their own conception of the world beyond the frame — perhaps even betraying some disappointment that more of this world was not given to them! — then the writer knows they have achieved the great feat of illusion that is central to storytelling.

Over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today I have a post that recalls my misspent youth with some fondness. You see, it turns out all that time I spent reading Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and Warhammer’s White Dwarf Magazine, I was actually learning how to write flash fiction. Yup, it’s true, all those little snipets of flavor text and one-page stories were way ahead of their time and many were perfect examples of what would come to be known as flash fiction. Not only that but some of that ‘fluff,’ as it’s called, went beyond mere vignette status to give us characterization, setting, and a beginning, middle, and end — all in a handful of paragraphs. This was a style of fiction I never saw anywhere else until the advent of the internet.

Turns out, when it came time to write the stuff myself, both the ‘fluff’ of the RPG and wargames world and spec fic of my own devising, I was ready (which is probably another reason to be saying Thank You, D&D).

Click here to read ‘How I Learned to Write Flash Without Even Knowing It’ at FFC.

A couple of online magazines have recently posted calls for slush readers, Every Day Fiction and Fantasy, to be exact. A while back I wrote a three-piece article all about the benefits of taking a stint as a slush reader called Get Thee to a Slush Pile, and in it I share my personal experiences as slush reader, and go over what a good learning experience it is for a beginning writer.

Reading slush doesn’t just teach you about writing saleable stories, but it immerses you in the world on the other side of the writer-publisher equation. If you want to know everything I have to say about that go read my article, but in summary I’ll just admit that my experiences with slushing and editing were probably the best apprenticeship I could have hoped for when I was just starting out trying to sell short fiction.

The links above will take you to the particulars of applying — though the obvious first consideration on your part should be familiarity with the nature of the magazines you’d be working for. EDF has wisely conceived of their slush reading position as a three-month term, so if you only wanted a taste without being stuck in an open-ended commitment that looks like a great place to try on the slush reader hat.

So, if you are interested in writing or editing — or just think it would be fun to be involved in a magazine — here are two great opportunities that won’t be around forever.

For my 200th post (huzzah!) I’d like to direct your attention to a web resource for writers of incredible usefulness. Ralan’s Spec Fic & Humor Webstravaganza which is, if you don’t know, a free listing of magazines, anthologies, book publishers, freezines, websites, and any and every conceivable other venue for the publishing of fiction. Until I found Ralan’s I was in the dark as to where to send my own short fiction, and providing such an indispensable resource for free means that every starting writer out there has the same chances I did in finding a home for his work.

So, September is fundraising month at Ralan’s, and he isn’t asking for a lot. Surely anyone who has sold fiction to markets they have found via the site owes a little something to the guy that pointed the way? For all the work and cost that goes into Ralan’s, ten or twenty bucks from those of us that use the resource to promote our fiction isn’t too much to ask.

I’ve blogged about this at Black Gate this week as many writers read that site, and I’d hope those of you that have met with some success in the short fiction game will pony up this month and help Ralan out, and at the same time send him a clear message of appreciation for everything he does for the spec fic writing community.

For your delectation this Friday I have prepared two bloggish morsels on subjects various and writerly. First, over at Black Gate, I’ve posted a notice about a new award for adventure fantasy short fiction called . . . wait for it . . . The Ham-Sized Fist Award. Appetite whetted? For a bigger bite head on over to BG and see how you can nominate a story.

Through the miracle of modern technology I also appear with startling simultaneity at Flash Fiction Chronicles on this most fortunate of all Fridays, with an article entitled ‘The Limitations of Flash Are Its Strengths.’ It’s about how the rules of flash fiction help focus a writer’s energies rather than limit his ability:

In imposing sharp limits on a story’s size, flash fiction liberates the writer by forcing certain kinds of behaviors. You cannot write an effective piece of flash that is bloated or rambling — though I believe a good writer could suggest those very things with clever prose. You cannot have sprawling plots, or a large cast of characters, or multiple points of climax. You cannot spend words to no effect.

Naturally, the article then veers madly into talk of bringing a gun to a sword fight and finishes with an extended gardening metaphor — pretty much typical of the writing advice you’re likely to get out of me. You have been warned.

Bon appetit!

A while ago I mentioned some distraction-free, full-screen word processors, namely Write-Or-Die and Darkroom. Well, though both applications had elements I liked (and Write-Or-Die was downright amusing with its incorporation of ‘punishment’), neither really did the trick. Well, I may have found something that does.

FocusWriter, available free from Gott Code, may just be the first draft writing software I’ve been looking for. It’s small, simple, and doesn’t burden the user with a lot of extraneous options and menus. It’s full screen when you want it to be, and by simply moving your cursor to the top or bottom you can summon the tucked away menus. And the display options for text color and two levels of background are completely customizable — you can stick with bog-standard black on white, or do light text on a dark background, even put an image or photograph in as your background. As a fan of white text on blue I was really pissed-off to see the latest MS word no longer offered the option — unless you wanted to screw with display options that had to be tweaked back to standard before ever sending your file out.

FocusWriter also keeps a running tally of your word count and time spent writing. What’s more, you can set either of these things as your daily writing goal, which FocusWriter displays as a percentage. It’s a pretty nice feeling to be typing away and see that you’ve achieved ‘128%’ of your goal for the day.

So, full-screen, great customization, simple functionality — even has a good running spell-checker. FocusWriter does however save its files as text documents, so I find it necessary to paste a rough draft into another program to format the line-spacing and headers before saving again as an .rtf. But, that minor piece of busy work aside, I have to say I’m loving the process of writing in FocusWriter more than any other software I’ve used, and I’m even contemplating creating different theme backgrounds to compliment what I’m working on.

Especially when compared to the clueless behemoth that is the latest incarnation of MS Word with its acres of esoteric menu functions, FocusWriter is the lean, mean writing software that you’ve always wanted. And it’s available for Mac users, as well as PC.

With today’s news that Talebones is ceasing operations as a magazine, I figured I’d better publish this post — which I’d written a few days ago and in which Talebones was still listed as a survivor — before I have to make any more changes to it.

I was recently going through some notes — a big notebook full of semi-legible 2 AM scrawl containing the little rude germs of story ideas, character sketches, and gibberish in the form of made-up words — and I happened upon a list of target markets from around two years ago. These are (or were, I’ll get to that) places I wanted to send fiction to, and roughly correspond to the most attractive semi-pro and smaller SF magazines that I found appealing. In other words, the big three (or four) aren’t on this list, nor are the UK’s handful of pro mags, as these are all markets that mostly pay less than pro rates. Why these fourteen markets were all listed together in the last page of my battered notebook, why I was particularly interested in them, is because they are print markets.

Of these fourteen markets, nine are now gone.

That’s a pretty appalling casualty rate and, while I won’t pretend my list was somehow exhaustive, it was based on a lot of time trawling market listings and reading magazines. In fact, of these fourteen magazines, I’ve read copies of all but one of them and had or have subscriptions to close to half — so it wasn’t just an idle listing of markets for me to pester, it was a list of places that were publishing the fiction I enjoyed, as well.

First, the good news. Black Gate, number one on the list, is still going strong on a semi-annual basis. Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, GUD, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine round out the honor roll of survivors. All of these magazines except for GUD have a fairly established history as print magazines, which no doubt helps. Special congratulations to GUD for being a relative newcomer with some stamina — as  the rest of this list shows, newcomers haven’t fared well.

A look at a couple of these dead markets shows magazines that only lasted for a bare handful of issues: Grendelsong, All Possible Worlds, Fictitious Force, and Blood, Blade, and Thruster. I own and have read copies of all of these magazines expect All Possible Worlds, which came and went so fast I never really had a chance. They all had potential — BBT had real eye-candy appeal with its gorgeous covers, Fictitious Force had stories accompanied by author essays and a quirky ‘tall’ format that was actually easier to read than the full-sized floppy magazine equivalent, and Grendelsong published an appealing mix of myth-inspired, fantastic contemporary, and secondary world fantasy stories.

Then there were the magazines that seemed to have more than potential, they actually seemed to have a fighting chance. City Slab was the most long-running of those, an urban horror zine with a fetish-wear aesthetic that gave it some indie shelf-appeal. Dark Wisdom (formerly the Book of Dark Wisdom) had a strong Cthulhu mythos theme and slick presentation but seemed to run into trouble after about a half-dozen issues. Apex Digest, a science fiction horror magazine, would have fooled any betting man with its strong twelve issue run but, alas, it was not to be. Surviving in an online form (which, increasingly in the case of magazines, is looking more like a sign of a pre-terminal condition than real survival, though there are always exceptions such as Fantasy Magazine) for another year or so, it just recently went on ‘indefinite hiatus.’ At least the folks at Apex still retain their book publishing arm, as a lot of good stuff comes out of there.

Talebones, the demise of which I’ve just heard about today, has been around for years and managed to produce thirty seven issues. Trade-sized, bi-annual (though not initially), Talebones published speculative fiction with a dark edge to it. Containing great interior artwork and fantastic covers, as well as consistently strong and interesting stories, this little semi-pro looked and read better than the dowdy old big three digest magazines and seemed more receptive to new voices as well.

And then there is Paradox. Number one on my list of markets where I would have liked to see my work was Black Gate, but Paradox was number two, so seeing it go is a real loss for me — especially as I never managed to sell any stories to them. It was a magazine specializing in fiction with a historical bent but open to speculative elements — so you might have a straight history, an alternate future, and a historical fantasy all in the same issue. No other magazine really had this, and from its theme, design, and selection Paradox really distinguished itself as something special. Though we should be seeing some anthologies from Paradox in the future, the magazine will be missed.

Many of these magazines intend to reboot as anthology series, which I think is great news and probably a more viable model with the rise of POD. But I really would hate to see semipro print magazines disappear completely and be replaced with semipro anthologies — while short fiction may be served either way, I still feel diving into the latest issue of a magazine is an aesthetically different experience from reading short stories in book form. It’s an experience I’d like to see preserved.

We could talk about the reasons for all these market closings — which I’m sure vary on a case-by-case basis but all boil down ultimately to time and money — but I don’t see the point. I could say something like all you wannabe writers out there (myself included) need to subscribe to these magazines to keep them alive, but even that doesn’t work. Magazines need more than just writers in their audience to stay viable but, on the other hand, they need more than just an enthusiastic amateur who thinks they’ll make their investment back after one issue at the helm, too. Some new markets will always die because of lack of planning, the real tragedy is seeing the death of one of those zines that got past the initial hurdles long enough to gain reader confidence — when one of those goes, we’re all poorer for it.

But there is some good news on the print magazine front. Murky Depths, which I don’t think was around when I made my list or was at least off my radar, is a slick print magazine out of the UK with great shelf-appeal and design. Shroud and Doorways are new dark fiction magazines with a great look, both of which seem to have taken off with a strong start.

And there are print zines that I either left off my list of years ago that are still around, or else have cropped up in the meantime: Albedo One, On Spec, Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, Tales of the Talisman, and Neo-Opsis. I just received the first issue of a brand new zine, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, in the mail, and it looks good, and I’m also continually impressed with the little horror quarterly Morpheus Tales, which has put out five issues so far. And two quirky ‘paperzines’ that have real indie appeal are Kaleidotrope and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

So, things aren’t all bleak, but they certainly don’t justify any boundless optimism, either. While I’m sure I missed some markets here and there (especially in the case of POD or Lulu-based mags), and haven’t even mentioned the prozines that are still limping along with fewer subscribers every year, I think the collapse of some of the biggest of the little magazines in the last few years may be a sign of things to come. Let’s hope I’m wrong about that.

For more about the world of semiprozines check out the wonderful site Save the Semiprozine Hugo.