Busting a myth: “only writers subscribe to genre magazines” | Hacker News Reader

Busting a myth: “only writers subscribe to genre magazines”

neil-clarke.com

37 pointsilamont26 comments

I subscribe to Clarkesworld because I love a good short story and I want my house to be filled with boxes of books that my son can discover when he’s old enough and if he’s inclined the same way I was as a kid reading what my parents did.

This is interestingly close to the off-repeated line that on a forum 10% of users comment and 1% create content.

Here is a great treatment with sources, musing on the real meaning of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

https://web.archive.org/web/http://neil-clarke.com/busting-a...

I'm not disagreeing with the author, but how many of the 5300 subscribers are libraries or similar institutions? That seems like it could be a significant portion of the non corporate subscriber base.

What is a genre magazine? I googled it and got a list of magazine genres, which I think is not the same thing

A literary magazine that focuses on a particular genre of fiction. These typically publish short stories and novellas, but sometimes serialize longer works. (e.g., Dune was serialized in Analog magazine.)

The blogger, Neil Clarke, runs a science fiction genre magazine called Clarkesworld. Other science fiction genre magazines include Asimov's, Analog, and F&SF.

Other genres, including so-called "literary fiction," all have their own magazines. Apparently none of them are doing particularly well, because short stories are now out of fashion. The trend right now is to make everything as long as possible: Don't write a novella if you can write a novel, and don't write a novel if you can write a three-part (or seven-part!) series.

It's a shame literary gigantism has become fashionable or at least marketable.

Novels are ok, but I've come to despise "book series". It seems everything wants to grow and, if possible, become a Netflix show.

Short fiction is a marvelous art form, which requires a precision with plot and/or words that is hard to match. Novels have room to breathe and grow, but there's no such luxury with a short story: every word matters.

Few things are as enjoyable as a well-crafted short story.

"Genre" here means genre fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_fiction, the sort of mass-market books like romance, fantasy, science fiction and horror. Compare with literary fiction like classics and poetry. It can be used derogatorily to separate commercial literature from "real" literature since genre fiction were usually printed on cheap trade paperbacks, sold in volume and read for entertainment compared to more serious literary and artistic fiction, but I don't think many people today would make that distinction.

I think they mean something like say, Lightspeed Magazine is a genre magazine, and the genre is scifi.

However, we seem to have saturated their database connections (friends don't let friends have connection pools without bounds/with the wrong bounds, especially not to serve static content), so I haven't read the article. [ETA: Did read it, am now positive.]

Friends don't let friends serve static content in a way that involves a database!

It's not static, it's Wordpress, and that's something we can complain about once there's an actual alternative in the niches WP fills.

I was more replying to:

> friends don't let friends have connection pools without bounds/with the wrong bounds, especially not to serve static content

No, friends just throw a static cache in front of their friend's static content.

In the same way that friends throw a rug over their friend's dirty floor? Caches are at best a stopgap, and usually cause more problems than they solve.

I’m an author and I never hear this, what I hear is “only writers subscribe to lit fic magazines.”

Only rich people subscribe to genre magazines. Like, I really like Clarkesworld, but between it, Analog, Asimov's, and a few others... I just can't.

And last I checked, libgen hasn't had any Clarkesworld since about 2019.

For the record, at time of writing, an electronic Clarkesworld subscription appears to be $2.99/month, increasing to $3.99/month in September.

It's not my first choice of science magazine subscription. So at $50/year, how much am I spending on subscriptions?

Is their digital-only subscription any cheaper? Don't need the paper one. If I do have to pay $50/year for their digital only subscription, do I get access to their back catalog for that, or only the new ones going forward?

I'm not just picking on Clarkesworld. For the longest time now, Analog has been under the impression that it's ok to half-ass it and have their digital edition not match up with the paper edition, not to mention refusing to release it in standard formats. Quite frankly, in a world where even National Geographic can't make it, what hope is there for these pulps? In an earlier time you might liken them to the farm leagues for genre novel publishing, but that's dying too.

Out of curiosity, must you subscribe to all magazines within your favorite genre(s), or is just one or two acceptable? If the latter, then I don't think you have to be rich.

I think there's an analogy with the maddening offer of streaming services, but in that case there's the FOMO effect and you "need" to be watching the same shows as your coworkers and friends in order to be able to discuss them... a more devious trap.

That was sort of my point. If only one or two are acceptable, Clarkesworld's never going to make the cut.

I'm wondering for whom it is their first or second choice.

Fifty bucks isn't even two hardcover books these days.

That's a lot of reading, if you're reading them from cover-to-cover.

Analog and Asimov's were bimonthly last I had subscribed, just 7 or 8 per year. They're not even novel-sized. When I had more time to read, I could keep up with those and still read 5 or 6 novels per month.

Dunno what I would have done if I'd been alive when there were more titles in publication. I think of the old stuff, I like Worlds of If, archive.org has most of those. The new stuff's a little too pandering anyway.

> The new stuff's a little too pandering anyway.

What do you mean by this? I think I've noticed the same thing, and it troubles me -- because I'm not sure who exactly they're pandering to (the set of non-readers who are uninterested in the genre?) or to what purpose. It could be, however, that we're not talking about the same thing...

It's true. There were a lot more in the past. It was impossible to keep up. So much greatness to be found in these magazines though, I would hate not to read them cover-to-cover because when I've tried to skip around I invariably end up missing some story that turns out to blow my mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com