Locus, February 2013

by Locus Publications

  We saw one issue of newcomer Pravic’s two issues: 60 pages with three stories. According to editor Nathaniel K. Miller, there were 250 copies printed, with 13 subscribers. Other single-issue showings came in from Granta, Phantom Drift, and Bourbon Penn.

  For poetry, we received two issues of chapbook-style poetry ’zine Mythic Delirium, #26 and #27 priced at $5.00 with 40 poems total; four issues of Star*Line priced at $5.00 with 176 poems total; three issues of Dreams and Nightmares priced at $5.00 with 43 poems; plus one issue each of Dwarf Stars and The Magazine of Speculative Poetry.

  ONLINE MAGAZINES & FICTION WEBSITES

  Online magazines and fiction websites have become a substantial portion of the field, and their ranks increase every year. More and more print magazines are transitioning to digital-only format. We are seeing more quality fiction, high mixed media appeal, and better paying markets online than ever before.

  Website Tor.com published 46 original stories, all with original artwork, and ten short story reprints. From Patrick Nielsen Hayden: ‘‘What I was struck by just now… is that out of 46 original stories, 29 of them were by women. This didn’t happen because of any agenda; we just got a lot of really good stories by women.’’ The site receives well over 700,000 unique viewers a month. According to art director Irene Gallo, ‘‘we’ve doubled our editorial staff, both in terms of our first readers and, with Ellen Datlow and Ann VanderMeer, our acquiring editors.’’ Plans for the future include more extensive publisher and blogger outreach, covering more new titles and short fiction each month, and a concerted effort to explore the science fiction and fantasy genre and publishing outside of the US. Pay rate is the highest of the short fiction venues at 25 cents/word to 4,000 words.

  Clarkesworld, , published 12 issues with 36 stories, as well as a podcast of each story, and non-fiction. The website attracted 30,000 unique visitors per month, up from 23,000 last year, along with 6,000 listeners (same as last year), and 2,450 subscribers via Kindle/Weightless Books epub and mobi subscriptions, up from 900 PDF subscribers last year. Editor Neil Clarke said, 2012 ‘‘was rough for me personally (heart attack and other issues) but our readers and the SF community as a whole were amazingly supportive… Print copies of the 2012 issues of Clarkesworld were unveiled at World Fantasy Convention in Toronto… Production on all back issues is now in-progress. The third and fourth volumes of Clarkesworld’s annual anthology series are due in early 2013.’’ Pay rate is 10 cents/word to 4,000 words, 5 cents thereafter.

  In January 2012, editor and publisher John Joseph Adams merged Fantasy into Lightspeed Magazine, . The 12 scheduled issues were seen with 96 stories (48 originals and 48 reprints), half SF and half fantasy, plus author interviews and spotlights, articles, and artist showcases, and had an average 31,000 visitors per month. Last year’s average for Lightspeed was 22,500 visitors, and for Fantasy was 31,200 visitors. According to Adams, a ‘‘custom-built ebookstore [is] pretty much ready to roll out…. [and] will also offer direct subscriptions. We’ve currently got it running on the Nightmare website, and once we work out all the kinks we’ll roll it out for Lightspeed.’’ Pay rate is 5 cents/word.

  Strange Horizons, , produced 51 issues with 35 stories (32 new and three reprints), as well as poetry, reviews, and articles. The magazine welcomed two new columnists this year: Eleanor Arnason and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. According to editor-in-chief, Niall Harrison, web traffic has held steady compared to 2011, and four stories have been picked up for Year’s Best collections. Harrison is also happy to report a successful fund drive this autumn resulting in increased pay rates for reviews and poems ($30 apiece), an increase in fiction pay (8 cents/word), and plans to launch a weekly fiction podcast in early 2013.

  Apex, , published 27 new stories and 13 reprints, plus poetry, essays, and interviews in twelve monthly issues. The site received an average of 13,000 unique visits a month, up from 10,000 last year, and the magazine has 500 digital subscribers, up from 400 last year, and sells or gives away around 100 single issue copies a month. This was Lynne M. Thomas’s first complete year as editor-in-chief, and Michael Damian Thomas’s first year as managing editor. Lynne M. Thomas said, ‘‘2012 was great for us,’’ noting Apex’s first Hugo nomination and an increased readership. There are plans for a special Shakespearean-themed issue in February, and for an expansion onto the iPhone/iPad app platform. Pay rate is 5 cents/word.

  Subterranean, , put out four issues containing 18 stories. Publisher Bill Schafer mentions that stories by K.J. Parker, Lois Tilton, Maria Dahvana Headley, and Kat Howard received positive attention, and plans to offer free mobi and epub downloads of the magazine starting with the Winter 2013 issue, ‘‘to boost circulation and, we hope, drive even more traffic to our site.’’ Schafer will edit three of the four issues in 2013, with Jonathan Strahan guest editing the fourth. Pay rate is 10 cents/word.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies is a bi-weekly online magazine of ‘‘literary adventure fantasy’’ published and edited by Scott H. Andrews. They published 55 stories and 22 podcasts in 26 issues. Said Andrews, ‘‘We got the best response from character-driven stories set in vivid worlds, in which the characters were struggling with an internal conflict as well as an external one… I personally would love to see more Weird West. We published our 100th issue and our 200th story, our third Best of BCS e-book anthology, and our first e-book theme anthology of stories from the magazine, a steampunk anthology Ceaseless Steam.’’ They averaged about 22,000 unique visitors per month in 2012. Pay rate is 5 cents/word.

  Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, , published 35 stories in six issues, plus four audio stories, as well as interviews and artwork. Edmund R. Schubert is editor. Pay rate is 5-6 cents/word, depending on length.

  Notable new digital quarterly Arc, from the folks at New Scientist, was launched – ‘‘fact, fiction, and opinion about the future’’ – with issues 1.1 through 1.4 appearing. Sumit Paul-Choudbury is editor-in-chief and Simon Ings is managing editor. There were 19 pieces of fiction as well as non-fiction by a notable roster of SF authors. Issues are $6.99 for digital, and $30 and up for POD.

  Daily Science Fiction, , published 261 stories in 2012: 126 flash stories, 78 short shorts, 51 full-length, and one novelette in five parts. They have 5,800 subscribers who get a free story emailed to them every weekday, up from 3,400 last year, and about 25,000 website visits a month, up from 15,000 visits a month last year. Pay rate is 8 cents/word.

  Abyss & Apex Magazine, , published 25 stories in four quarterly issues. There were also reviews of small-press books, editorials, and poetry. Average monthly viewership is 6,500. Editor and publisher Wendy S. Delmater said, ‘‘We will be transitioning to a new managing editor taking the reins. Carmelo Rafala has been an anthologist with Immersion Press… The transition will be gradual, with me taking more of a role at the helm of Abyss & Apex Publishing.’’ Pay rate is 5 cents/word.

  Electric Spec, , published four issues with a total of 17 stories, four author interviews and a few movie columns. The site gets 900 new and repeat visitors a month. Editor Betsy Dornbusch noted that slush submissions are slightly down from previous years and said, ‘‘It’s my thought (anecdotal) that more people are self-publishing their short stories rather than submitting them.’’ Pay rate is $20 per story.

  Fireside, , a new online magazine published and edited by Brian White, put out three issues in 2012, with 12 stories and three comics, primarily speculative fiction. Each issue has been funded by a separate Kickstarter. Most sales were to backers, with 250-280 per Kickstarter, about 50 subscribers through Weightless Books, and a handful of single-copy sales, for a total of 300-350 per issue.

  Electric Velocipede transitioned to digital only in winter of 20
11 and has since only published two of the expected four issues, with 17 pieces of fiction and nine poems. Editor John Klima plans to publish four issues in 2013; ‘‘the issues in 2013 will be a little shorter than what we’ve been publishing for the past few years, but that will help up keep our schedule…’’ Pay rate is ‘‘around 1 cent a word.’’

  Black Gate transitioned to online-only in September 2012, publishing one piece of fiction every week. Publisher and editor John O’Neill said, ‘‘Interestingly, I hoped that [publishing free fiction online] would draw some new readers to the site, but I hadn’t expected it would positively impact our traffic to the extent it has.’’ There were 13 works of fiction published online at between September and December, seven of them original stories, three reprints, and three novel excerpts. Howard Andrew Jones is managing editor. Pay rate is 3-6 cents/word to 5,000 words.

  Escape Pod, , produced 52 episodes, with one story per episode and an average of 30,000 unique downloads per episode. In April 2012, Escape Pod became a SFWA-recognized professional publication, paying 5 cents/word for original fiction and 3 cents/word for reprints. Escape Pod hosted its third annual flash fiction contest with over 300 submissions and a cash prize for finalists. Norm Sherman will take over from previous editor Mur Lafferty in 2013.

  Podcastle, , produced 50 episodes, generally with one story per episode, mostly reprints with three originals, and an average of 12,000-15,000 listeners per episode. Podcastle is edited by Anna Schwind & Dave Thompson, who said, ‘‘Typically our stories feature one reader, but for our 200th episode, we did a full-cast production of Scott Lynch’s ‘In the Stacks’, which was downloaded nearly 18,000 times.’’ There are plans to run another flash fiction contest in 2013. Pay rate is $100 per short story and $20 per flash piece.

  Pseudopod, , produced 52 episodes with generally one story per episode, excepting the quarterly flash showcases, with three stories apiece. Editor Shawn Garrett celebrated the 300th episode with a ‘‘special audio collage of clips from all previous episodes.’’ Pay rate is $100 per short story and $20 per flash piece.

  Drabblecast, , produced 46 episodes in 2012, with 138 total stories (90 reprints, 48 originals), and an average of 20,000 unique downloads per episode. In 2012 Drabblecast raised its rates to 5 cents/word for original fiction and 3 cents/word for reprints. Editor Norm Sherman mentions that Drabblecast won its third Parsec Award for ‘‘Best Speculative Fiction Magazine or Anthology’’ in 2012.

  The Agony Column, , is a weekly podcast hosted by Rick Kleffel and broadcast on local NPR station KUSP 88.9 in California, featuring interviews, reviews, readings, and commentary about science fiction, mystery, and other subjects. According to Kleffel, the site gets around 20,000 unique visitors per month.

  Flurb, , published 13 stories in 2012 in one March issue, which was published in e-book format and online. Rudy Rucker, Flurb editor and publisher, mentioned that ‘‘unlike earlier issues, #13 included primarily new and emerging authors.’’

  Newcomer International Speculative Fiction, , opened publication in April 2012 and has published three issues with 15 stories. According to editor-in-chief Roberto Mendes, ‘‘ISF is a quarterly publication with a mandate to publish science fiction, fantasy, and horror [stories] that were (i) originally written in languages other than English (but always published in ISF in English translation), as well as (ii) fiction that comes from non-traditional sources (geographically speaking) or (iii) that has a particularly internationalist bent.’’ Non-paying market.

  There is not enough space in print to list all of the SFnal sites, but other online magazines and podcasts of note are discussed in Rich Horton’s and Gardner Dozois’s year-end columns, and URLs can be found in the Links section of Locus Online, and include Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe’s weekly conversation about SF: The Coode Street Podcast, Tony Smith’s StarShipSofa: The Audio Science Fiction Magazine, Hub, Ideomancer, Futurismic, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, etc.

  QUALITY

  Our gauge of quality is our short fiction Recommended Reading list; see chart. We recommended 138 pieces of short fiction from 2012, up from 120 in 2011. Recommended stories appeared in 22 magazines or online venues, just up from last year’s 20. Anthologies had 34 recommended stories, well down from last year’s 48, plus an additional seven from collections, up from last year’s four. Major anthologies were Edge of Infinity with six stories, The Future Is Japanese with five, and Rip-Off! and After with four each. Asimov’s led the magazines with 16 recommended titles, followed by F&SF with 12, then Clarkesworld with 10.

  CRITICAL MAGAZINES

  The New York Review of Science Fiction switched to digital-only format following a crisis after the sale of their longtime printer, Odyssey Press. Print issues were published through August 2012, then shifted to PDF, epub, mobi available through Weightless, and POD editions. Managing editor is Kevin J. Maroney. Reviews and features editor David G. Hartwell added, ‘‘It is quite clear that a majority of our readers prefer print. We hope that we can attract many new electronic readers to offset the loss of many of our print-only subscribers.’’

  Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts maintained a print run of 450, with about 420 subscriptions. The second two issues of 2011 shipped in 2012 for a total of four issues received in 2012.

  Science Fiction Studies published three issues in 2012. According to editor Arthur Evans, the subscriber base ‘‘averages between 800 and 900, with about a third of that in the form of ‘electronic-only’ subs.’’ The magazine offered electronic-only and print plus electronic subscriptions for the first time in 2012. Electronic access to the full text archives of Science Fiction Studies from 1973 to the present is now available online through JSTOR, accessible from .

  The Cascadia Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly, launched by Aqueduct Press in January of 2011, produced four issues of 23 pages each, one focused on poetry, and a fifth special issue in remembrance of the life and works of Joanna Russ. Content included essays in social and literary criticism related to speculative fiction, flash fiction, poetry, art, and reviews of new and classic science and specfic titles, with color reproductions of art by the featured artists on the cover and a b&w interior. The magazine is available at .

  There were two issues of academic journal Foundation. According to editor Graham Sleight, subscriptions remain stable.

  Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, produced one issue in 2012, #270. Circulation was approximately 600, with a print run of 650. According to editor Shana Worthen, ‘‘We sent out a book in lieu of Vector for the summer mailing.’’

  Scholarly magazine Extrapolation published three issues in 2012. Extrapolation was published by Liverpool University Press beginning with the Spring 2012 issue, and is now available free online at . Print and online editions are simultaneous.

  Peake Studies published two issues this year. The subscriber base remains constant.

  There were two issues of SF Commentary in 2012, with reviews, reports on fanzines, and interviews. Print run was 120 copies per issue.

  CONCLUSION

  The professional print magazines have seen improvement in their sales and circulation numbers from the addition of digital editions. Online magazines – in their many permutations of free online fiction, free or paid downloads, free or paid subscriptions, and more – continue to grow and new ones appear regularly. Most of the venues seem to be shooting for 5 cents a word to make the threshold for a professional market, per SFWA, and several raised their pay rates just this year. In some cases, the online sites have become the major paying markets for short fiction writers, though some of the best paying online sites (Tor.com, Subterranean, etc.) are subsidiary to companies that finance their bottom line. Indie distributor/pub
lisher Weightless Books provided a successful alternative fulfillment option for many of the electronic magazines. It’s hard to tell if there are any independently able to support themselves and the work that goes into making them yet, but several seem to be getting close. Maybe next year will hold a breakthrough. While others shift to online only, several of the online magazines are working to incorporate print editions into their repertoire, with Clarkesworld reissuing print editions of their whole 2012 run. All said, the prophesized ‘‘death’’ of the magazine may simply have been the ‘‘transformation’’ after all, with room in the margins for all editions: print, online, e-mail, audio, or whatever is the next medium for a still-vibrant short fiction field.

  –Francesca Myman & Liza Groen Trombi

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Eclipse Online 10/12, 11/12, 12/12

  Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear (Prime) October 2012.

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where On Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer) November 2012.

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer) November 2012.

  The Best of Joe Haldeman, Joe Haldeman (Subterranean) March 2013.

  The Collected Kessel, John Kessel (Baen) November 2012.

  Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete ‘‘Near Space’’ Stories: Expanded Edition, Allen Steele (Fantastic) January 2012.

  At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson (Small Beer) September 2012.

  Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse series, which started with Eclipse One in 2007 and ran through Eclipse Four in 2011, was one of the most important annual (more or less) original SF anthology series of our day. Late in the year, in one of the more interesting developments of 2012, Strahan announced that Eclipse was transforming itself from a print anthology into an online magazine, Eclipse Online, accessible at