Online Magazines

[ratsy]

I am just curious what the general thought is with Online Magazines around here. Do you guys read them? Do you subscribe to any magazines?

I've had two stories in Kraxon and three with Saturday Night Reader, and the sites look great and I've been very proud of the end result. With SNR, they do a print version every quarter and it can be found across Canada at many retailers.

I guess my question is: How do Online Magazines make money? The pay scale ranges from nothing (exposure) to a lot with the big SF guys to the authors. A lot of them are $5 - $10 per story. Are most of them digital subscriptions that you get for the kindle? Logistically, shipping a $5.00 magazine around the country sounds like a nightmare if you were to do a printed version.

The idea of doing an online magazine style thing in the far future intrigues me, but I am just wondering how big the audience is.

 

[Overread]

I get the Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine through Amazon on Kindle and that's really the only one I get.

I think the issues for online magazines are:

1) Exposure - biggest thing is getting your name out there. Networking with other publications or key websites is very important and you've got to keep at it. Lots of magazines sink because they just don't know how or have the resources to market. And if you don't market then how you earn won't matter because you've not got the popularity for it to work

2) Quality - another big thing; you've got to make a name for yourself as having good quality. That means well presented, spell checked, easy to navigate but also good quality on the writing itself. Doesn't really matter if you fill a niche or are generalist but what you publish must be high grade; that's what gets your name known and keeps people coming back.

3) Big names - like it or not if your magazine is full of small names chances are you won't get the exposure easy. Having a few published authors (esp in the early days) really helps; if you can secure a really top selling author willing to put their work into your magazine then its a huge boost for marketing (so long as you can gain some kind of exclusivity - even if in the short term - if its a short story they've stuck into every magazine and the back of their book then it will still have some weight, still have some influence but not as powerful).

For making money it depends on the model the magazine goes for:
1) Advertising - many use ads either in the magazine itself or on the web-page. How much your running costs and profit margin are depends how extensive this is. Note I've seen a fair few web-comics have now started using subscription systems because of a significant fall off in the profit from online ads (I assume all those adblockers are working well). It works by donation with rewards at specific value amounts. They work for well established comics with a strong readership base.
I would say that like real magazines the advertising is where the biggest profit margins are - certainly it seems to run most things.

2) Direct sales - requires a good price, but also a large user base. You also have to compete with a generation who have grown up with "free internet" and who will raze the roof if anyone wants to charge for something. That said if you can produce a very solid product and charge a fair price then the price complainers shouldn't be a huge problem - yes they are there, but they will be a minority (you can also appease them by giving discounts on old back-copies).


Content wise a thing to consider:
IF you go for ebook on, say, kindle you've got a big problem. It's writing only. Whilst the USA has some different models, the vast market of Kindle is on black and white, small units which do not show images all that well (the reading software even gets confused somewhat with them at times with regard to page turning). This can be a problem; it means you can't get flashy showy ads in; it means you can't diversify to getting fantasy/sci-fi artists to submit work to your publication - it means a good few things.
A print version can overcome this and there are some ways to do magazines fully online or you could do part and part (A kindle version with the stories that comes with an online counterpart).




In the end I've seen a fair few of these start up, but what keeps me away is that its always got that feeling of "no name" authors which makes one question if its worth the investment. Sure the cost might be tiny (a few pounds a month) but the tme investment is something else.
Marketing is also key - I stumbled into the magazines mostly because there were only a handful on Kindle at the time so it was easy to spot. But that was totally by accident - even on sites like Chrons people don't talk a huge amount about the magazines and honestly Chrons is the most active place for them - most other sites (even geeky ones) really don't mention them - magazines seem to be the domain of the serious enthusiast not the casual .

 

[C.E. Gee]

I am just curious what the general thought is with Online Magazines around here. Do you guys read them? Do you subscribe to any magazines?

I guess my question is: How do Online Magazines make money? The pay scale ranges from nothing (exposure) to a lot with the big SF guys to the authors. A lot of them are $5 - $10 per story. Are most of them digital subscriptions that you get for the kindle? Logistically, shipping a $5.00 magazine around the country sounds like a nightmare if you were to do a printed version.

I read BEWILDERING STORIES, APHELION, PERIHELION ONLINE SCIENCE FICTION.

I'm curious as to why you make the assumption that they make any money?

If a person gets into the Science Fiction field thinking they're going to make money, they should not be doing it.

NAMASTE

C.E. Gee

 

[J-Sun]

I am just curious what the general thought is with Online Magazines around here. Do you guys read them?

Until recently, no. But now I've read all the ones on this list and, while some that I'm not listing may stick after all and some that I am may not, I've so far read at least three issues of, and particularly enjoyed,

Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Clarkesworld Magazine (actually, I hate a lot of this and love a lot of it)
Cosmos (if this is still alive)
Crossed Genres
Flash Fiction Online
Nature
Perihelion
Strange Horizons
Terraform

I've read an issue or two of

Galaxy's Edge
Shimmer
Uncanny
Unlikely Story

which also have had good stuff.

How do Online Magazines make money?

No clue, really. Some must take in quite a bit of advertisement, some do successful kickstarter campaigns, some have corporate sugar daddies where they're basically a PR element of the corporation.

The idea of doing an online magazine style thing in the far future intrigues me, but I am just wondering how big the audience is.

Me, too. One (and not the biggest) claimed something like 20K unique visitors a month and is one of about two dozen pro (or pro-level) magazines, not to mention dozens more a step or two down.

In the end I've seen a fair few of these start up, but what keeps me away is that its always got that feeling of "no name" authors which makes one question if its worth the investment. Sure the cost might be tiny (a few pounds a month) but the tme investment is something else.

That's part of the fun! I've discovered Alix E. Harrow and L.S. Johnson and rediscovered Bruce McAllister and have hopes for George S. Walker. I've only read one story - but was pretty well blown away - by folks like by Alexander Danner and, especially, Becky Ferreira. There are some people who I've heard about in passing in the internet echo chamber but the only general names with noteworthy stories that I've recognized other than McAllister are Levine, Liu, Nagata, Vinge, and Zinos-Amaro. (In fact, I was finally moved to buy a Nagata book, after thinking about it for years, because I read and liked a story of hers from a webzine that appeared in an anthology. Also bought the anthology, itself.) But there are a lot of interesting less well-known authors out there.

But, yeah, it's a time sink not everyone wants to get into. That's part of why I started keeping a list of recommended stories and a list of honorable mentions. If you read a few of those stories and like a decent percentage of them, you can read the rest with more confidence and that will cut down on a lot of your time investment (I seem to be recommending an average of a couple stories a week) and, if you don't like what I was impressed by, there are many others who do the same or something similar with a variety of "web roundups". I hope to add a list of them once I get to checking them out but you can search for them any time. Eventually some of these "no-names" (not-yet names) will start being names to you and the contents of the zines will register more clearly. (At least, I'm starting to have that, "Oh, there's that author!" reaction occasionally when I look at a new issue of something.)

 

[B. Morris Allen]

Last year, I read a number of the top online magazines steadily, and posted my findings. (I can't post a link, unfortunately, too new to this site). In brief: "The magazines with the highest proportion of good stories (relative to their published volume) were Tor.com, Abyss & Apex, and Clarkesworld. ... If you feel you only have time for one magazine a month, read Tor."