Keeping Short SFF Alive
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
For those of you who don't already know, Kindle Newsstand is closing, and magazine editors are freaking out.
If you are like me, and not a heavy Kindle user, you might not even have known what Kindle Newsstand is. (My own reading habits are part "paper books please!" and part surfing the Internet.) It's the part of Kindle where they subscribe users to magazines. They're not only phasing out electronic subscriptions through Kindle, but also any print subscriptions that used to be available through Amazon. (Some magazines will still be available through Kindle Unlimited, but that's a different business model which allows for a lot more obfuscation of crucial data like how payments are calculated and how much each magazine is supposed to actually be getting.)
This is a big deal because quite a lot of the speculative fiction magazines we know and love were getting most of their subscriptions through Kindle Newsstand. (It’s a hazard of having a business landscape where a single company, like Amazon, can gobble up such a large majority of the market share for an industry. When they suddenly decide to stop doing something, everybody who depended on that thing is toast.) Magazine editors are looking at their income and panicking! I am in the SFWA Discord watching some of them panic! It's grim. To be honest, in the short term future, losing KN is a bigger threat to magazines' survival than AI.
Fantasy Magazine, one of my recent favorites, has already announced it's closing its doors. Apparently it wasn't making money even before the loss of KN, let alone after.
I, like many other authors you know and love, got my start through magazines. It's pretty much impossible to make a living with short fiction (orders of magnitude more impossible than with novels, which are already kind of impossible) but short stories helped me hone my craft and connect with huge numbers of other writers whose friendship and collegiality has helped me in so many ways. Plus I happen to find short fiction beautiful and wonderful for its own sake.
So I'm asking myself, what have I done lately to financially support magazines?
This varies! Different magazines organize their incomes in different ways. Some still heavily rely on print subscriptions. Some have a yearly fundraiser or a Patreon. Some have ads, but ads alone aren't generally enough. Some rely on digital subscriptions, or a mix of different methods.
When it's yearly fundraisers, that's easy - I have a portion of my income that I set aside for stuff like that. Plus, I'm at the stage in my career where some of them are asking me for signed books and other rewards to entice more donors! (I offered stuff to both the Uncanny and the Strange Horizons fundraisers this year and then I promptly forgot to signal boost or promote the fact that I was doing this, sorry.)
I also support some individual authors, through Patreon, Substack and other platforms - as do you, by definition, if you are reading this! - but that doesn't solve the problem of ensuring there are magazines for such authors to publish in.
It's when it comes to subscriptions that things get more challenging for me, because my existing way of reading short fiction is not very subscription-friendly. I trawl trusted reviewers to find stories that sound promising, and then I sort these stories into different bookmark folders and read from each folder when the mood strikes me. (This is one of my silly autistic ways of organizing things that most people don't need to organize at all.) Basically, I'm dipping in and out, reading random things, and not subscribing to anything at all.
But... why am I attached to doing it that way? It is mildly more convenient, especially since I find PDF and other e-copies of magazines challenging to read. But most magazines that offer PDF and e-copies also offer links to the stories online. So why not subscribe to a magazine that consistently puts out work I like, look at what all the stories are every month, and then put those stories into the bookmark folders? I wouldn't even have to change much of what I was doing.
My own 1 person's worth of subscription money is a pittance. But that's how subscriptions, and almost all other legitimate forms of commerce, work - take a lot of pittances and add them together. Either way the closing of Kindle Newsstand has shocked me into realizing I actually need to do something about this, even at the pittance level.
If you enjoy short speculative fiction, I would challenge you to think about this too. Are you putting your money where your readerly heart is?
I really do not want any more of these magazines to disappear.