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posted 22 October 2001
Building A Career on Short Stories or Slow Death By Frustration
Amy Axt Hanson started graduate school in microbiology when things were "better than ever." Her department has since been disbanded. She was a newspaper science writer when things were "better than ever" until a paper crunch forced editors to downsize their science writing staff. She started writing short stories when things were "better than ever" and when the market was at an all-time high, she started buying stocks. * * * For as long as I've been writing fiction, I've been hearing the same advice on how to establish a career. Make a name for yourself by writing short stories. Market your stories top-down. Once you have enough pro sales, a book editor will want your first novel. It worked for the big names on the panels and it worked for the big names before them. But is it still true today? I don't think so. I think times have changed and to survive in this business, you need a different approach. It's a conclusion I've come to by looking at numbers, starting with Locus, February 2001 page 52, "2000 Magazine Summary." It doesn't list circulation figures for every magazine, but does have historicals for the top markets: Asimov's, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. Take a good look at the graphs on page 53. The ones that look like Niagara Falls. Asimov's last year had a circulation of 31,000. It's currently selling 30 percent of the issues it sold at its most recent high (105,000) 17 years ago. Analog is selling 48 percent of the issues it sold at its most recent high 12 years ago. F&SF is selling 50 percent of the issues it did 19 years ago. And Realms of Fantasy is selling 66 percent of its debut six years ago. All four professional fiction magazines have lost subscribers every year for more than a decade. The only consolation is that they're still in business, which you can't say about nine other pro magazines that have folded in the past three years. More searching elsewhere finds that Asimov's and Analog now publish two fewer issues each year since their high points, and F&SF publishes one less issue. (Realms is unchanged.) Each remaining issue of Analog now has 50 fewer pages than it used to, and Asimov's has 30 fewer pages. (F&SF and Realms are unchanged.) Fewer issues, fewer pages — who are they going to cut? Josephine Noname or Big Name Author? Now more than ever, editors need those big-name authors on the cover to lure in readers oozing past the magazine racks. They need those big names on the cover to keep subscribers writing those checks, those big names with glitter and flash and silvery assurance ("Fabulous new story by the Hugo-winning author of...") that the magazine will be worth the price of a paperback. Whatever slots the editors used to have for newer writers are now few and far between. Pro magazines are a closed ecosystem now: you have to already be a name to get there. It also hooks their authors into an ascending spiral of usefulness, as stories in the highest-circulation magazines are more likely to be nominated for major awards, which makes those authors' future stories more prized by those very same magazines that give them an edge in award nominations. Semi-Pros and Ezines Admittedly, pro mags are the top carnivores, and new writers should focus farther down the food chain, on the semi-pros. The good news is that semi-pros do publish newer writers. The not-so-great news is that they only have circulations of a couple hundred to a couple thousand as opposed to tens of thousands. The bad news is they have a much higher mortality rate. Three years ago, Speculations listed 25 magazines as semi-pros. In the last three years, 15 have gone belly up. Sixty percent of the semi-pros died in the last three years, roughly double the death rate (38 percent) of pro magazines in the same period. Sixty percent in three years means that 20 percent will likely die in any given year, raising the question: which 20 percent? Is it a random picking-off or is there some way to figure out which are fatter and stronger and more likely to survive until your story sees print? I don't have any data on this, but I wonder if they're like investment clubs, which often fold within the first three years. Three years is long enough for the initial excitement to wear off, the workload to stay crushing, and for publishers to realize that it's not going to break even anytime soon. Not to mention day job change, marriage, divorce, new baby — all of which are more pressing concerns than publishing a semi-pro. The same bad news is true for ezines, only more so. Three years ago, Speculations listed six electronic magazines. Now they're all gone, a stunning 100 percent death rate. Anthologies and Collections If it's any consolation to those of us left high and dry, pro stories aren't much of a career builder these days anyway, because once they hit the magazine racks, they've got the lifespan of a mayfly. A story's only hope for longevity is to be pressed into an anthology, and anthologies sell so poorly these days that they're only 7 percent of the genre's new offerings. As for short story collections (8 percent), oh those lucky authors who get a publisher to bite. That's the real fun because now they've tanked all their other work. Say an author's last novel sold 25 copies at the local bookstore, then a short story collection comes out and sells seven copies. When the new novel comes out, will the bookstore owner want 25 like the last novel? No, he'll look at the last thing (the collection), and order seven copies of the new thing (the novel). Unless the publisher's sales reps remind him to order 25 novels like the last novel, but hey, who has the time? Meaning . . . Conventional wisdom has been and gone and top-down marketing doesn't work. If pro editors haven't asked to see your work, it's not worth sending it to them. As for semi-pros and ezines, it's worth looking at longevity as well as payment and circulation, to maximize stability. And forget about collections. Oh sure, conventional wisdom worked great 15 or 20 years ago. Fifteen or 20 years ago, fiction magazines sold at an all-time high. Fifteen or 20 years ago, anthologies sold better than novels. Fifteen or 20 years ago, you could break in by writing short stories. The pros sitting on convention panels probably haven't noticed this change because magazine editors haven't stopped clamoring for their work. They don't take it seriously because it's just grousing by unpublished writers, who have no credentials. They smile, remembering their own days on the free flowing river, and radiate condescension as they advise the audience to keep on writing short stories. Because that's what worked for them. Well, it doesn't work anymore, they're living in a doomed ecosystem and they don't even know it. When they stop writing, there won't be many behind them to take their place, no medium-sized pool of getting-better semi-knowns who've made it inside the pro magazine, but are not yet on the cover. No group of writers with a dozen pro stories who are starting their first novel. They're not there because the magazines don't put them there, and they're not there because you can only take so much abuse. The smart ones are moving on, they're finding some other way to pound the keyboard for money. If there's any hope for the genre at all, it will be that a few will try one last stab at writing a novel — because these days, when you hear useful talk about short stories, it's within book editors' anecdotes telling their authors to learn to write short stories as a way to advertise their novels. Novels, it seems, are the way to establish a career these days. And you know, if short stories really were the one true path, then why do most of my first-time novelist friends have no published short stories at all? Which brings us back to Locus, February 2001, page 48, "2000 Book Summary." The graphs on page 49 are a lot more heartening than magazines, showing a historical trend upward in the '80s leading to a jiggly plateau in the '90s. My investment club wouldn't buy that stock, as we'd want constant growth all the way through. But hey, compared to magazines, a plateau looks pretty darn good. Locus has more figures for the genre than a salmon has roe. Some look good (the number of original novels have been holding steady the past decade), other numbers look not so good (overall numbers have dipped the past year). It's no easy glide there, either — I've heard the stories — but I'm willing to give it a try. Because at least with novels, you have the alternative of ebooks and print on demand. So my advice is this: if you're a bone-deep short story writer and no other form rings true, then by all means stay with it and find a way to make a go of it no matter what. But if you don't care either way, then write short stories to get up to speed and cut to the chase and start your first novel. It might lessen your frustration. Or maybe not. At the very least, you'll just bang your head against a different kind of rock. |
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