Apparently I was less than clear in yesterday’s status update post. Stupefying Stories is *not* ceasing publication. Rather, we’re taking a step back and a little time off, to reevaluate our business model and change the way we go to market.
I still love genre fiction. I’m still proud of (most of) what we’ve published. I still like (most of) the people I’ve come to know through my years of running Stupefying Stories, and before that The Friday Challenge, and before that being on the SFWA Board of Directors, and before that et cetera, etc., etc., etc., etc.…
But Stupefying Stories, as a publication that aspires to be a monthly general-interest SF/F magazine, can’t go on. We are just plain losing too much money on it. I didn’t worry about this when I was a project manager pulling down a six-figure salary and could afford to consider it my eccentric and expensive hobby.
[For the record, the real point of origin of Stupefying Stories was when I found a Jaguar E-type with a blown engine in a junk yard in northern Wisconsin, and Karen put her foot down and said I could either start a new science fiction magazine or buy and restore yet another refugee from a vintage British sports car museum, but I couldn’t do both.]
But now that I am retired, living on a fixed income, and watching my investment portfolio sublimate into thin air in the current economy (but that’s a topic for another time), I just plain can’t afford to keep Stupefying Stories going in this form. So now it’s time for us to step back, think, discuss, restructure, and find a new way to bring great short fiction to the market—preferably without shoveling bales of cash into the furnace this time.
Yesterday I fished up a salient quote from that old Strange Horizons interview. After re-reading the entire interview for the first time in years, I have a better quote for today. Geez, that guy Lynne Jamneck interviewed for that piece was clever and observant.
Maybe, with a little time to breathe, I can be that guy again.
LJ: Will electronic publishing have a negative or positive influence on the publishing industry?
BB: This is a case where “positive” and “negative” really are a matter of your point of view. For the delivery truck driver who makes his living hauling magazines around to newsstands, it’s bad. He’s going to have to find something else to do. For the writer who’d be willing to sell his mother for transplant parts in order to get published, it’s good. As I said earlier, there is a lot more material being published now than ever before, and thanks to the Internet, you can reach readers you’ve never reached before, literally all over the world. I mean, consider us; here’s a guy in Minnesota doing an interview with a writer in New Zealand, for publication—where?
As far as professional writers are concerned, the big problem is that the old business model for the publishing industry is dying and electronic publishing won't be “just like it, only electronic.” We’re probably moving to some model where author payments are based on actual unit sales, and the days of publishers giving out big advances based on the hope that the author’s latest book might break out of the midlist are probably over. Positive? Negative? It’s change, is what it is, and the emotional quality of that change depends on how you deal with it. [~brb: emphasis added]
As for what this new business model might look like: kindly remember that the original novel is a fairly recent development and the paperback original even more so. Dickens, for example, sold most of his work as newspaper serials, and people subscribed so that they could read the next chapter. The future of fiction authorship may look very much like the past.
Ad astra per alta cacas,
Bruce Bethke
Editor / Publisher
Stupefying Stories | Rampant Loon Press
1 comments:
Aces. Exactly the message I read.
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