Save Science Fiction

Want to help save Science Fiction? Read this:

New authors of genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, etc.) need marketplaces to establish themselves as professional writers before submitting to the bigwigs of the publishing business (editors and agents in NYC). Without publishing credits to your name, it's almost impossible to get attention for your novel from the right type of people.

So how do you get those publishing credits? The biggest, easiest way is to submit to genre magazines like Asimov's, Analog, Apex, and Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The problem is these marketplaces are dying off.

Television and the Web have dealt a crippling blow to speculative fiction magazines. Readers that, 20 years ago, would have subscribed to a dozen spec-fic magazines each year are now spending their time mindlessly surfing TV and internet sources. Reading is falling by the wayside.

How can you, as a writer, help?

Check out genre fiction magazines on the web and subscribe. Subscribing does two things for you as a writer. First, it helps keep those genre marketplaces open and active. Every subscriber helps the magazine raise both the quality of its fiction and the amount it can pay per word (the two come hand-in-hand), which is a continuous cycle. Eventually, they might be able to establish themselves as professionally-paying magazines (5 cents a word or more, according to the SF&F Association). Secondly, it allows you the writer to see just what that particular magazine is looking for in its fiction. Each magazine has a niche it likes to fill in the genre marketplace, and if you know what that niche is, your chances of being accepted increase many, many times over blind submission.

And, if you know what the magazine publishes and use that knowledge to get published in it, you've just raised your chances of getting accepted by an editor or agent, since now you've got some credits under your belt.

So, in short, subscribe to speculative fiction magazines. Enjoy them, pass them around, and get your friends to do the same. Maybe together we can turn the cycle around.

Some good places to start:
http://www.ralan.com/ (lists genre writing markets)
http://www.duotrope.com/index.aspx (lists spec-fic magazines)
http://www.locusmag.com/Links/Portal.html (lists a TON of writing links and magazine websites)

Thanks for helping to support genre fiction!

-Sara King
http://www.kingfiction.com