Fallout from the bankruptcy of distributor American Marketing Services—the largest book distributor in the U.S., which went into Chapter 11 last year, taking Publishers Group West down with it—caused Publishers Group West to be sold to Perseus Book Group, which also acquired the Avalon Publishing Group, publishers of Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press, frequent publishers of SF/fantasy titles, both of which were phased out of existence in 2007. Taken down by the AMS bankruptcy, ibooks has yet to reappear, and many books affected by the bankruptcy of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, following the sudden death of publisher Byron Preiss in 2005, are still in legal limbo. Small-press publisher Meisha Merlin died. Houghton Mifflin was acquired by Education Media Publishing Group, which also picked up Harcourt and Greenwood Press; it’s uncertain as yet what effect this will have on Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin’s trade imprint lines. Canadian publisher Dragon Moon Press merged with Hades Publication’s two imprints, Tesseracts Books and EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publications, with results as yet uncertain, although they could just as well be positive as negative. German media conglomerate Bertelsmann bought BookSpan, publisher of numerous book clubs, including the Science Fiction Book Club, and in the shake-ups that followed, longtime SF Book Club editor Ellen Asher was forced into retirement and Andy Wheeler was fired outright. The newly appointed editor is Rome Quezada. Company spokesmen have stated that there are no immediate plans to do away with the Science Fiction Book Club, but the shake-up delayed the publishing of some scheduled titles, and not all genre insiders are sure that Bertelsmann is to be believed. Let’s hope that the Science Fiction Book Club does continue, since it performs several valuable functions for the field.
On the uphill side, Hachette Book Group USA launched a major new imprint called Orbit USA in 2007, which intends to produce forty titles per year in hardcover and paperback, and BL Publishing’s new line Solaris, which completed its second year, has already established itself as a major presence in the genre market. Other UK lines moving into the U.S. are Titan Books, Abaddon Books, children’s publisher Egmont (which plans to launch a new line in the U.S. in 2008), and fantastic erotica line Black Lace. Wildside Publishing moved away from Print-On-Demand publishing with twelve mass-market titles published under the Dorchester/Cosmos imprint and with their Juno line of paranormal romances. And Paizo Publishing introduced an imprint of classic SF reprints, Planet Stories.
For more than a decade now, cyber-prophets have been predicting that eventually the whole structure of modern publishing will be swept away by the internet revolution, with electronic books in various forms replacing print ones, and either Print-On-Demand systems in the home or online distribution over the internet replacing the current network of brick-and-mortar bookstores and the physical delivery of product by trucks. This particular millennium has not yet come to pass, and as time goes by, many commentators have become almost contemptuously skeptical that it ever will. But although the changes effected by them have not yet become sweeping, new technologies such as Print-On-Demand books, downloadable e-books, and books made available for purchase on websites online have, slowly, incrementally, had an effect on the publishing world. With the advent of even newer technologies such as Amazon’s e-book reader, Kindle—and the future generations of hand-held text-readers that are no doubt marching along behind it—this hopeful cyber-future may have inched a bit closer to existence, especially as there are now whole generations of people who are accustomed to getting media entertainment of various sorts from small hand-held devices. At the beginning of 2008, Amazon bought online audio book seller Audible Inc., in what some people think may be part of a bid to become the iTunes of books.
It’s worth remembering that a decade ago many commentators sneered at the idea of online booksellers like Amazon, saying that they either wouldn’t last for long or that they’d always remain something that appealed to only a small niche audience, and now everyone takes their existence for granted. (I buy most of my books online now, as do most people that I know, and I think that will become true of even larger populations in the future—although I doubt that brick-and-mortar bookstores will ever completely disappear.)
Who knows what the publishing world will look like twenty years from now—or even ten?
The good news about the troubled magazine market this year was that things could have been worse. The precipitous drops in circulation that have plagued most print magazines in the last few years have at least slowed, if not stopped altogether, and there are signs that a moderately stable plateau may have been reached. None of the major magazines died, and all of them brought out their scheduled number of issues. With such crumbs of comfort, we’ll have to content ourselves.
This year’s big postage hike and the Post Office’s revamping of their entire rate scheme, eliminating many of the cheaper shipping options, were bad news for the entire print magazine industry, far beyond genre boundaries. As postal rates and production costs continue to rise (you don’t really think they’ll ever go down, do you?), many of these magazines may be driven out of the print world into online-only distribution—if they can figure out a way to make money that way.
Asimov’s Science Fiction registered a 5.2% loss in overall circulation in 2007, encouraging when compared with the 13.6% loss in 2006 or the 23% loss of 2005, with subscriptions dropping from 15,117 to 14,084, but newsstand sales actually rising slightly from 3,419 to 3,497; sell-through rose from 29% to 30%. Asimov’s published good stories this year by Greg Egan, Tom Purdom, Neal Asher, Ted Kosmatka, Mary Rosenblum, Chris Roberson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Elizabeth Bear, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, and others. Sheila Williams completed her third year as Asimov’s editor. Analog Science Fiction & Fact registered a 3.2% loss in overall circulation, compared to a 7.3% loss in 2006 and an 8.2% loss in 2005, with subscriptions dropping from 23,732 to 22,972, while newsstand sales dropped from 4,587 to 4,427; sell-through, however, rose from 32% to 34%. Analog published good work this year by Michael F. Flynn, C.W. Johnson, Richard A. Lovett, Brian Plante, Robert R. Chase, Sarah K. Castle, Ekaterina Sedia, and others. Stanley Schmidt has been editor there for twenty-eight years. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction registered a 11.2% loss in overall circulation after a couple of years of near stability, with subscriptions dropping from 14,575 to 12,831, and newsstand sales declining slightly from 3,691 to 3,658; sell-through rose from 27% to 33%. F&SF published good work this year by David Moles, Bruce Sterling, Gene Wolfe, Ted Chiang, Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert, Ian R. MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, Alex Irvine, Alexander Jablokov, and others. Gordon Van Gelder is in his eleventh year as editor, and seventh year as owner and publisher. Circulation figures for Realms of Fantasy lag a year behind the other magazines, but their 2006 figures show them registering a 2.5% loss in overall circulation as opposed to 13% in 2005, with subscriptions rising from 16,547 to 17,642 (making them the only magazine whose subscriptions are actually going up), but newsstand sales dropping sharply from 6,584 to 4,902; sell-through also declined, from 29% to 24%. Realms of Fantasy, published good stuff this year by Theodora Goss, Jack Skillingstead, Christopher Barzak, Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold, and others. Shawna McCarthy has been editor of the magazine since its launch in 1994.
Interzone doesn’t really qualify as a “professional magazine” by SFWA’s definition because of its low rates and circulation—in the 2,000 to 3,000 copy range—but it’s thoroughly professional in the caliber of writers that it attracts and in the quality of the fiction it produces, so we’re going to list it with the other professional magazines anyway. On the brink of death only a couple of years back, Interzone has been making a strong recovery under new publisher Andy Cox, who has also transformed it into the handsomest SF magazine in the business, with striking glossy covers. In 2007, Interzone published good stories by Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Chris Roberson, Jamie Lynn Blaschke, Aliette de Boddard, Steven Francis Murphy, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and others. The ever-shifting editorial staff includes Jetse de Vrie
s, Andrew Hedgecock, David Mathew, Liz Williams, and Sandy Auden. Interzone’s publisher also revamped their horror magazine The Third Alternative as Black Static, and, after a gap of a couple of years, relaunched it as Interzone’s sister magazine in 2007—to me, Black Static reads almost exactly the same as The Third Alternative did, so I’m not sure I understand why they bothered, but at least they’ve now got a snappy new title.
If you’d like to see these magazines survive, and continue to contribute to a healthy short-fiction market, subscribe to them! It’s never been easier to subscribe to most of the genre magazines, since you can now do it electronically online with the click of a few buttons, without even a trip to the mailbox. In the internet age, you can also subscribe from overseas just as easily as you can from the United States, something formerly difficult-to-impossible. Furthermore, internet sites such as Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com), magazines.com (www.magazines.com), and even Amazon.com sell subscriptions online, as well as electronic downloadable versions of many of the magazines to be read on your PDA or home computer, something becoming increasingly popular with the computer-savvy set. And, of course, you can still subscribe the old-fashioned way, by mail.
So I’m going to list both the internet sites where you can subscribe online and the street addresses where you can subscribe by mail for each magazine: Asimov’s site is at www.asimovs.com; its subscription address is Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855–$55.90 for annual subscription in U.S. Analog’s site is at www.analogsf.com; its subscription address is Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dell Magazines, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855–$55.90 for annual subscription in U.S. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s site is at www.sfsite.com/fsf; its subscription address is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spilogale, Inc., P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, annual subscription—$50.99 in U.S. Interzone and Black Static can be subscribed to online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestorel.html; the subscription address for both is TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, England, UK, £21 each for a six-issue subscription, or there is a reduced rate dual subscription offer of £40 for both magazines for six-issues; make checks payable to “TTA Press”. Realms of Fantasy’s site is at (www.rofmagazine.com); its subscription address is Realms of Fantasy , Sovereign Media Co. Inc., P.O. Box 1623, Williamsport, PA 17703, $16.95 for an annual subscription in the U.S.
Dealing with the same pressures that the professional magazines do, rising postage rates and production costs, I suspect that most of the semiprozines, especially the fiction semiprozines, are going to eventually be driven either out of business or out of the print world and into online-only production as well. Already, two of the most prominent new fiction semiprozines, Subterranean and Fantasy Magazine, have transitioned from print to electronic formats, each publishing a couple of final print issues (one of Subterranean’s guest-edited by Ellen Datlow) this year before seeking refuge online (I’ll discuss them more in the online section, below). After more than two years of complete silence, I’m going to consider Argosy Magazine to be dead, and will no longer list a subscription address for it unless I hear something to the contrary. Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications empire—consisting of Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Dreams of Decadence, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Weird Tales, Mythic Delirium, and the newszine Chronicle—has completely died, and I won’t be listing subscription addresses for any of them any more, although Weird Tales survives in a new incarnation under a different publisher. In the last couple of years, Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, Century, Orb, Altair, Terra Incognita, Eidolon, Spectrum SF, All Possible Worlds, Farthing, and Yog’s Notebook have also died, and although it’s theoretically still alive, I didn’t see an issue of the long-running Space and Time this year. I also didn’t see an issue of Say … , for the second year in a row, or Full Unit Hookup.
Of the surviving print fiction semiprozines, the most prominent and professional seems to me to be the British magazine Postscripts, edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, which had strong fiction this year by Richard Paul Russo, Paul Di Filippo, Marly Youmans, Stephen King, Lisa Tuttle, and others—although I could wish that they’d use more actual science fiction and less slipstream/fantasy/horror, which seems to be the default setting for most fiction semiprozines and almost all internet electronic magazines. The Canadian On Spec, run by a collective under general editor Diane L. Walton, one of the longest-running of them all, published its four scheduled quarterly issues in 2007, as it has been doing reliably for years; unfortunately, I don’t generally find their fiction to be terribly interesting, something that can also be said for another collective-run magazine, one with a rotating editorial staff, Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (perhaps no one editor stays in the chair long enough to have a chance to establish a distinct editorial personality for the magazine), which published five issues this year. Long-running Australian magazine Aurealis, which was feared to be dead, came back after a two-year hiatus under new editors Stuart Mayne and Stephen Higgins, publishing two issues, one of which arrived here late enough that it’ll have to be considered for next year. Talebones, an SF/horror zine edited by Patrick Swenson, also nearly died last year, but survived due to an impassioned subscription drive to publish two issues this year. Paradox, edited by Christopher M. Cevasco, an “Alternate History” magazine which is one of the few magazines discussed in this section that gets newsstand distribution in chain book-stores such as Borders or Barnes & Noble (where it’s usually displayed with the Civil War buff magazines), only managed one issue this year. Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, in it’s third year, edited by Jason Sizemore, published its four scheduled issues, and is also pretty reliable. Neo-opsis, another Canadian magazine, edited by Karl Johanson, managed three out of four scheduled issues in 2007, as it had in 2006; this little magazine has some really nice covers, and won an Aurora Award. Jupiter, a small British magazine edited by Ian Redman, perhaps the most amateuristic-looking of the fiction semiprozines as far as production values are concerned, had an indeterminate number of issues out (nobody seems quite sure, but I saw at least two). Shimmer did a special all-pirate issue, guest-edited by John Joseph Adams. There were two issues of the Irish fiction semiprozine Albedo One this year, one of Tales of the Unanticipated, one of New Genre, one of Fictitious Force, two issues of Sword&Sorcery magazine Black Gate, and three apiece of glossy fantasy magazines Zahir, Tales of the Talisman, and Aoife’s Kiss.
The venerable Weird Tales, coming up on its 85th anniversary, managed to survive the Great Extinction over at DNA Publications, being bought in 2006 by Wildside Press. This year, the magazine underwent a sweeping reorganization, with Ann VanderMeer coming in as the new fiction editor. The slogan of the new Weird Tales is not “This is not your father’s Weird Tales,” but maybe it should be, as the aim of the magazine seems to become noticeably hipper, cooler, and more au courant than its somewhat stodgy previous incarnation. Whether this will go over with the audience or not remains to be seen, but there was good stuff in the magazine this year by Ian Creasey, Richard Parks, Jay Lake, and others. Wildside also publishes the newish H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, edited by Marvin Kaye—of which there was one issue this year, and which so far doesn’t seem much different in flavor from Weird Tales—and was the publisher of Fantasy Magazine before it transitioned into an electronic online incarnation.
Below this point in the print market, you’ll find little core science fiction, and even little genre fantasy, but lots of slipstream/fabulist/New Weird/postmodern stuff, much of it of high literary quality. The model and still the flagship for this sort of magazine is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, which published two issues this year, plus a “Best of” anthology drawn from past issues, but there’s a number of other ones out there, very small-circulation magazines that Locus editor Charles N. Brown once refer
red to as the “minuscule press,” including Electric Velocipede, edited by John Kilma, which published two issues this year, as did Flytrap, edited by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw.
After a fifty-two-year hiatus, almost certainly the longest one in history, the old pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories came back to life, edited by Winston Engle, reinvented as a “bookzine,” a magazine in book form, like an anthology, with an ISBN number. The one issue they’ve managed so far was mostly filled with reprints from the old Thrilling Wonder Stories, although there were originals by Eric Brown, Michael Kandel, and R. Neube, and a reprint of more recent vintage from Geoffrey A. Landis.
With the disappearance of Chronicle, there’s not much left of the critical magazine market except for a few sturdy, long-running stalwarts. As always, your best bet is Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, a multiple Hugo-winner edited by Charles N. Brown and, an indispensable source of information, news, and reviews that has been perhaps the most valuable critical magazine in the field for over thirty years now. Another interesting and worthwhile magazine, publishing a variety of eclectic and sometimes quirky critical essays on a wide range of topics, is The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and a staff of associate editors. Most other critical magazines in the field are professional journals more aimed at academics than at the average reader, but the most accessible of these is probably the long-running British critical zine Foundation, which recently celebrated it’s hundredth issue with a special fiction issue that functioned as an original anthology.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 108
