The future of science fiction magazines
Yesterday news broke that the three big science fiction and fantasy magazines, Analog, Asimov's and Fantasy & Science Fiction, have all been brought by Assemble Media. Analog and Asimov's have previously been under Dell Magazines and F&SF have been struggling as an independent magazine.
It is always disconcerting when stuff like this happens to a publication, or anything really, you care about, because it naturally creates a ton of uncertainty. Will the magazines be changed for the worse, will the new owners try to extract as much monetary value out of it or who knows.
The short fiction print magazines have been really struggling for many years. Decades ago the number of subscribers could reach more than a 100,000, now it is barely a fraction of that. Digital magazines are not doing much better. They may have more readers as many of them have their stories for free online, whereas the three traditional print magazines have kept things behind a price tag, which have given them better financial ballast. However, the subscribers of the print magazines have also gradually shifted towards digital subscriptions. So when Amazon recently killed its subscriptions feature it was a huge blow to many of these genre magazines, severely cutting whatever small revenue they had.
Going back to the recent purchase of the three magazines, it does seem like nothing radical will happen soon at least. The new owner is described as a wealthy fan and reader of the genre, so hopefully it is more of a passion project than a profit seeking endeavour.
I am a strong advocate for genre short fiction and I think it is worth paying for. It is a literary art form that has value in itself, and it is far from just a “small sample” to get you to buy the authors novel. While novels are where most authors make their living, short fiction still deserves decent payment and equal amount of respect for the craft of writing a good short story.
These magazines have a small but loyal base of readers, and they will likely still be around for the foreseeable future, though I would suspect than in the coming years, the print versions will become too expensive to keep distributing. I am a digital subscriber myself. The important thing for me is still that it continues to get published in a magazine format, where the stories are chosen, edited and curated by a professional editor and it deserves to come with a fair price tag attached.