Re: Man, did I put the fox in amongst the chickens...

On Mar 30, 11:05 am, David Friedman <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In article <MPG.2076bdf6f281c943989...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jeff Stehman <j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



In article <460c1f36$0$8930$4c368...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, crowell07
@lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com says...

Is the short story market really shrinking that much? On what time
scale?

Here's a quote from an article Amy Axt Hanson wrote in 2001:
(http://www.broaduniverse.org/broad***/archive/0110aah.html)

"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."

On the plus side, F&SF's circulation went up a smidge last year.

On the other hand, my impression is that the sf sections in bookstores
have a lot more books in them than they would have twenty or thirty
years ago. If that's right, why the opposite patterns for magazines and
books?

There are tons of magazines, just not a lot of short fiction magazines
(and I think that goes across genres, just at a guess.) Why?
Because people who like to read like to read long stories? That's a
guess too, but look at the average length of a novel compared to a
while ago. There are still some pretty thin Harlequins but other
than that it seems like it's just the reprints of older books on the
shelves that are thin anymore.

Second guess, or at least something to look into... has the target
market changed? Who bought analog and azimov's all those years ago?
13 year old boys? What are they buying now? Who buys SF magazines
now? How would short game tie-ins sell to a younger market? It's
not that they never buy paper... what are they buying?

Will electronic short SF be a stable market? Why or why not? Do
people read differently on a lap top then with a book? When and where
do people who buy short e-book fiction read it?

I can't believe that people don't *like* SF anymore, that young people
don't like it as much as they used to. And sure, computer games and
television cut into that but at some level they also promote it.

-Julie

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