The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Last year I went into great detail explaining the publishing factors that were battering the whole magazine industry, regardless of genre, far beyond the boundaries of the science fiction field, including former mega-sellers such as Playboy and TV Guide, and some of the technical reasons why things might not be quite as bad in the SF magazine world as they appeared to be-and, as I’d feared going in, it was largely a waste of time, as I still spent the rest of the year fielding questions in interviews and convention panels about the “Death of Science Fiction” as indicated by declining magazine circulation and listening to remarks about how the editors must be buying the wrong kinds of stories or the circulations wouldn’t be going down. I can’t summon the strength to go through all that again (read the Summation for The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Nineteenth Annual Collection, if you’d like to see the arguments). So I’ll settle for mentioning that while it’s tough to put too positive a spin on the situation in the current SF magazine market, and, of course, no magazine editor is happy to see his overall circulation decline, one factor that is often overlooked is that while circulation decreased by small amounts at most magazines this year, sell-through, the number of magazines that must be put out in the marketplace to sell one, has increased, increased dramatically in some cases-at Asimov’s, sell-through was up to a record 56% last year; at Analog, sell-through was up to a record 55%; and at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, sell-through was up to 37%. This is a factor that goes straight to the profitability of a magazine. To achieve a 35% sell-through, for instance, means that three times as many magazines are printed and put on the newsstands as actually sell: if you can cut-back on the number of unsold copies you have to put out there in order to actually sell one, your sell-through increases, and you save a lot of money in production costs by not having to print and distribute as many “extra” copies that no one is going to buy. This is one of the hidden factors, along with how cheap digest-sized magazines are to produce in the first place, that is, so far anyway, helping to keep the SF magazine market afloat.

If you had a 100% sell-through, you wouldn’t print any more copies of an issue than you were actually going to sell-and you’d probably be a subscription-only magazine, where they know in advance exactly how many copies of an issue they need to print. It may well be that the SF magazines, the digest magazines in particular, are eventually going to go this route, as newsstands themselves dwindle in numbers, and the ones that are still around become ever more reluctant to display fiction magazines-especially digest-sized magazines that don’t really fit into the physical format of most newsstands very well. And most of the digests could probably survive as subscription-only magazines, considering how much newsstand sales have fallen off over the last ten years anyway (the same problem being faced by many other magazines, not just genre magazines). The problem is that the purpose of putting more copies out on the newsstand than you expect to sell in the first place is that the extra copies act as advertising, tempting potential new subscribers into picking them up. If you only print as many copies as your existent subscriber-base, nobody ever chances across a copy somewhere of a magazine they might not even have known existed until that moment, and that makes it hard to gain new subscribers-and eventually your subscription-base is eroded away, as old subscribers die or fall away and are not replaced by new ones.

Can use of the Internet, supplemented by distribution to bookstores rather than to newsstands, solve the advertising/promotional problem of attracting new subscribers that used to be solved by putting extra copies out on the newsstand? No one yet knows-but most of the magazine editors I know are giving it their best shot.