             |
Subscribe to Short Fiction Magazines
Science Fiction and Fantasy are suffering devastating losses at the newsstands. Intelligent, potential readers who would have gotten their daily dose of entertainment from short story magazines 20 years ago are now watching mindless brain-rot and surfing the web instead. Whole generations have fallen prey to the seductive, yet shallow influence of present-day technology. Good, old-fashioned reading material is going out of style. Why does this matter? With fewer subscribers, short fiction magazines are being forced to shut down or sell out to massive corporations that care more for dollars than quality entertainment. The variety of reading material is being whittled away every year, leaving fewer and fewer places to find good fiction. And to sell it. New authors (like me) are getting more rejection letters in the mail, with the note, "It was good, but we just didn't have the space..." It has become almost impossible to live off of short-story writing. The few fiction magazines that remain can only accept one or two non-solicited works each month, leaving competition for publication incredibly tough. Compounding this problem is the fact that a lot of editors and agents judge a querying author by the number of publishing credits he or she has under his or her belt. Similarly, an author is always taken more seriously if they've had previous magazine sales before submitting a short story. Without publishing credits, it's harder to be published. It's a vicious cycle. How you can help: Subscribe to short fiction venues. Each sale will give short fiction magazines more freedom, loosening the noose that technology and current TV-culture has been tightening around the speculative fiction market. Wider readership will allow short fiction magazines to pay their authors more per submission (currently, even some of the most popular magazines can only pay $10 a submission to their contributors.) More interest in short fiction magazines will also allow new Science Fiction authors to do something they haven't been able to do in a long time: Make a living off their work. Just a few bucks a year can make a big difference in an aspiring writer's life. And, if you're one of those people glued to the couch every night, it gives your brain something interesting to do. Tell some friends, especially if you're a writer yourself. Help us save Science Fiction. Speculative Fiction Magazines: Below is a list of links to Speculative Fiction Magazine subsciptions. Please check them out! Analog: Science Fiction and Fact Asimov's Science Fiction Dark Tales Realms of Fantasy Interzone Fantasy & Science Fiction Weird Tales Recommended! Fantasy Magazine H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror Black Gate Book of Dark Wisdom Amazing Journeys Cemetary Dance Dark Realms The Edge Apex Digest Recommended! Neo-Opsis Paradox Andromeda Spaceways Subterranean Postscripts Aberrant Dreams Shimmer STAR*LINE Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet Amazon.com is also a good place to look for speculative fiction magazines. Just search Magazines for the names above. A website I found to have the cheapest magazines for some of the titles above is: www.mags4cheap.com You won't find all of them, but you'll get some pretty good prices on the ones they do have. A few other places you might want to check: Shocklines Clarkesworld Duotrope Wildside Press Ralan's Webstravaganza (Shows market listings of most genre magazines) SpecFicWorld Another Idea: How Writers Can Help Good luck, and thanks for supporting Speculative Fiction! |