Does it have anything to do with the stigma SF/fantasy has garnered? There is a sense of pride in paying to go to the opera, but an SF book is more often thought of as a guilty pleasure.
Here's a thought experiment: A super-wealthy individual pledges to underwrite a spec lit magazine, paying $1 a word - prime rate, as good as the New Yorker. Would that magazine then attract writers from "reputable" genres into the SL fold? Would SL start to lose its ghetto stigma and become someone someone would be proud to pay for? -- Jonathan Sherwood Sr. Science & Technology Press Officer University of Rochester 585-273-4726 On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 10:50 AM, cd <[email protected]> wrote: > > I just wish we had numbers. How many subscribers did they have? What > was their overhead? Etc. Same for Strange Horizons, EscapePod, etc. > An estimate of those would really help understand what's possible and > what's not. > > (I confess I was always annoyed by the Baen rejection letter, which > seemed to me to betray a misunderstanding. It says in it that they > are trying to compete with Joe Six Pack's beer money. But that's not > right. Joe Six Pack already bought cable, it's sunk cost, so you're > competing with Joe Six Pack's "free" (no additional cost) Stargate > episode or Mansquito. And that's a very different thing. I'm not > sure short fiction can compete with free Stargate, for someone who > wants to watch Stargate. I mean, let's face it, compared to Mansquito > reading a short story is work. Now, this might have just been a > figure of speech for Baen -- Baen has a solid audience of military sf > fans, and they could, or at least should, have been targeting those if > self-sufficiency was their goal.) > > Also: is there an audience problem here? Do SF audiences not feel > that they should pay for SF? Something like McSweeneys, or any part > of the not-broadway theatre world, or the ballet, or classical music, > or all of poetry, or much of jazz, survive because there are audiences > ("fan bases") that feel they have to invest in these things. I gather > that that feeling is completely absent from almost all SF fans. Maybe > we need to train our audience. > > cd > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
