She was fired this week from her job at 1-800-Flowers.com, a floral delivery service, after a death threat was sent to popular science blogger PZ Myers from her work email address. The irony stems from the fact that she most likely heard about Myers only because the Catholic League had attempted to get him terminated from his job at the university where he teaches.

Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, had published a controversial blog post on July 8 titled “IT’S A FRACKIN’ CRACKER!” The cracker in this instance was referring to a Eucharist — a small wafer considered by Catholics to be the body of Christ — that had been smuggled uneaten out of a church by a Florida man. The incident caused public outrage from some Catholics and after the Catholic League condemned the action the man received multiple death threats. He finally succumbed to the pressure and returned the wafer to the church.

Myers is a vocal atheist and his blog post expressed incredulity and anger that a person would be harassed in such a way over what Myers considered a…well, cracker. At the end of the post he called his readers to action. “Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” he wrote. “There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare.”

Eventually Myers’s writing reached Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and in his typical fashion he went on the attack. The Catholic organization sent out a press release encouraging Catholics to email the president of the University of Minnesota and demand that action be taken.

But Myers received a large number of emails as well, many of which were vitriolic and hateful. A few of those threatened the blogger with physical violence or even death. Citing a disclaimer on his blog that he has the right to reprint any emails that threatened violence, he posted two such messages on July 13, making sure to include the addresses and other identifying information of those who sent them.

Many of his readers noticed that one of those two emails came from what appeared to be a work address — 1-800 Flowers. The subject of the email read “your short life” and in the body the person wrote, “… You have two choices my fucked up friend, first you can quit your job for the good of the children. Or you can get your brains beat in … I give you till the first of the month, get that resignation in cunt”.

Several people took the post as their cue to fight back. 1-800 Flowers was flooded with emails and phone calls alerting the company that one of its employees was using her work email to send potentially criminal messages. It wasn’t long before the floral company announced that Melanie Kroll — the employee using that address — had been terminated.

But did Kroll actually send the email? Greg Laden wanted to find out.

Laden is a researcher and adviser at the University of Minnesota — though he works at a different campus than Myers — and maintains his own science blog. In a phone interview he told me that he emailed Kroll shortly after Myers posted her message and asked if she had written it.

Laden received several emails from the address and in one of them a man claiming to be Melanie’s husband, Charles Kroll, said that he had been the one who sent the threat.

“It was basically saying ‘I did it, it wasn’t my wife. I was wrong for sending it,’” Laden said. “What I did then was publish a post called ‘PZ Myers Death Threat Confession.’ … I explained what I learned from the letter, that this guy is saying his wife didn’t do it. It’s not that I’m really supporting his position, I just thought it would be reasonable to do that.”

If Charles’s claims are to be believed, then at some point he either purposely or accidentally logged on to his wife’s email account to fire off his angry email. In a comment thread in another blog the husband said he made the threat “in the same way one does when saying ‘I’ll beat your ass’, ‘or kick I’ll kick your butt’ or other such niceties used by members of the unpolished masses, such as myself.”

Regardless of whether he sent it, Melanie was out of a job. When Myers learned that his readers were sending harassing emails to the address he seemingly became apoplectic, writing that he never intended for his readers to contact 1-800 Flowers. After all, he said, there was the very real possibility that someone had hijacked her address to send the threats.

But should he have been surprised? Shouldn’t he have expected his relatively large audience to launch a counter attack when he made it so easy to do so?

This is a question that many bloggers are facing as they consider whether they should reprint controversial and/or hateful email they receive. A few have experienced a fair amount of backlash after they engaged in such activity.

Gossip blogger Perez Hilton, for instance, is currently being sued for $25 million by a woman who claims she received hundreds of angry emails and was fired from her job after the blogger published her hate mail, address, and office phone number on his site. “Indeed, Mrs. Wargo would not have been fired, but for the publication of her email address,” her filing states. Whether her lawsuit holds any water is yet to be determined — $25 million is a ridiculously high number — but the incident highlights the question of who owns the text of an email once it has been sent. Does it automatically become the property of the blogger, or does the sender have any rights — copyright or otherwise — that could prevent the message from being posted?

Luke Jackson has been thinking about this question a lot lately. By day Jackson is a Los Angeles attorney but in his free time he writes and submits short stories to magazines and anthologies. Back in March he submitted a short story to Helix, a speculative fiction online magazine, and received a rejection from the publication’s editor, William Sanders, that same day.

The rejection languished in his inbox for several months until he one day posted it in the comments section of another person’s Livejournal blog. The thousands of people who eventually saw the rejection were shocked by its contents.

Referencing an Islamic extremist character in the story, Sanders wrote that he was “impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people – at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one from the civilized world ever can – and I was pleased to see that you didn’t engage in the typical error of trying to make this evil bastard sympathetic, or give him human qualities.” Later in the email he wrote that “the narrator seems to be saying that it was this incident which caused him to take up the jihad, but he’s being mendacious (like all his kind, he’s incapable of honesty);”

The Livejournal comment was soon linked to by dozens of blogs. Many who read it felt that Sanders had been referring to Muslims with his incendiary comments and quickly labeled him a bigot. It wasn’t long before the editor learned that the rejection had been posted and became angered, banning Jackson from ever submitting to the magazine again. What followed was a lengthy debate across several blogs and message boards over whether it was considered ethical for a writer to post his rejections in a public forum. Several bloggers engaged in a Post A Rejection Day, in which they published story rejections they had received on their own sites.

I contacted Sanders to get his thoughts on the matter, but after several exchanges we were unable to agree on interview conditions — he wanted to place restrictions on what subjects we would discuss and how I could incorporate his quotes into my article. I also emailed Jackson, who later told me in a phone conversation that he felt ambivalent over whether it was professional for him to have posted the rejection.

“If I was working in a professional capacity, like as an attorney, I would never copy something publicly,” he said. “Of course as an attorney I have client privilege and all of our emails have the caveat that it can’t be reposted or relayed whatsoever. In a business capacity, yeah if I worked for a business I don’t think I would post it as well. It’s just that I really didn’t necessarily see this as professional because this is William Sanders’s home front operation and writing is something that I don’t think pays a lot of money. I don’t see myself making a living as a writer, especially now. And I think that this realism kind of colored my actions as well. That’s probably why I didn’t react strongly, I don’t believe that the rejection was business correspondence.”

I asked Jackson whether he thought this had hurt his chances of being published elsewhere and if posting the rejection would have any long term effects. He replied that this remained to be seen, though he noted that a few fiction editors had reacted negatively to what he had done. What perplexed him most, however, was that he had seemingly been the first person who had encountered this problem.

“What’s strange to me is that it seems like this is the first time in history it’s ever come up,” he said. “Some people are saying that posting rejection letters is done all the time and there are people saying that people should be shot for doing it. Some people think it’s a generational thing … the idea is that older editors basically just expect privacy because they’re used to letters. That’s something that I certainly didn’t dwell on. Just as William Sanders didn’t dwell on his rejection letter before he dashed it out, I didn’t dwell on putting it up on Livejournal comments. In hindsight it’s shocking to me that this is an issue that hasn’t been resolved. I guess people have posted their rejections before but it’s never contained such controversial content.”

I asked Laden what his philosophy was on reposting hate mail and whether he believed that Melanie should be fired for sending Myers a death threat. He replied that while he considered it fine for the professor to publish the message he also didn’t think she should have been terminated. Laden argued that if it was true that her husband had sent it from her address without knowing, then the IT department for 1-800 Flowers was as much to blame as anyone else. They should have provided safeguards for this sort of situation, he said, and done more to educate employees on how to avoid it.

But as for his own policy on hate mail, he decided at some point that he would refrain from posting it.

“If you have a disclaimer on your site then you’re free to do whatever you want with an email,” he said. “With my own policy, I decided not to do it. I don’t want to scare people away from sending me email. I have not received any death threats, but in the chance I would, I report them to the IP abuse number or contact the appropriate police authorities. Then it’s up to them to decide whether anything should be done.”

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Well, the other day Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden revealed even more details about the site at his blog.

But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day—and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers also posting to the “front page”; in fact we’ve already recruited several in order to ensure coverage of particular niche areas. (Some of these individuals will be familiar to Making Light readers—wave hello, Bruce Baugh—and we haven’t finished recruiting, either.) We know that the site will also feature new original fiction on a regular basis, illustrated under the supervision of art director Irene Gallo, and that these original stories—free of DRM, offered as part of the blog feed and also Available For Your Convenience in a variety of other formats—will have their own associated open comment threads, just like everything else on the blog. We know that there will be lightweight “social networking” features for registered users, including the ability to form mutual-interest groups through tagging and the ability to create journals and/or discussions of their own. Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn’t to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it’ll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.

And then today, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction launched a new blog for its site.

To be honest, this is something that should have probably happened like two years ago or more — many readers not familiar with the pulps might say “Why is it a big deal that a magazine is launching a blog? Most magazines started doing that years ago.”

Well, so far, F&SF is the first of the three remaining pulps to do so. I think this is a big step forward for them learning how to survive and market themselves to a generation that has so far been moving on without them.

Sorry, not trying to sound condescending here, like I’m patting F&SF on the head. And I’m not even 100% sure that this will have a grand positive effect on the magazine. But since just about every other publication out there has gone this route, I definitely think it’s a step in the right direction.

Tor Books, a major science fiction and fantasy publisher, announced recently that it would offer free weekly ebooks of its print titles if you sign up for its email newsletter. But this is just part of a larger online expansion that will include social networking and the publication of original short fiction and nonfiction, sources familiar with the project told me.

Two sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said that it’s intended to be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and fantasy fans. A few authors have already been approached to submit original short fiction to be published online. Tor is paying upwards of 25 cents per word for these stories and right now is only dealing with solicited authors.

According to one of the sources, this website will act in part as a form of branding and promotion for Tor book titles, “with an eye towards leveraging traffic into advertising revenues, down the road.” The project is being largely organized by Patrick Nielson Hayden, a senior editor at Tor.

So far the details of this site have remained a secret, hence why the sources spoke on condition of anonymity.

In an email on Friday, Nielsen Hayden confirmed many of these facts.

“Yes, it will involve lightweight ‘social networking’ features, although I don’t think those will be the core value proposition of the site,” he said. “We’re not going into competition with Facebook.”

The editor described the site as “a platform for original short SF and fantasy, by both Tor authors and non-Tor authors.”

As for those free ebooks?

“The free digital books are exactly what we say they are: an inducement to get people to pre-register as users and allow us to send them emailed progress reports,” Nielsen Hayden said. “The book-length freebies are a temporary program slated to run from now until when we launch. Although the site will be ‘giving away’ a lot of content–indeed, all of its content, as we don’t anticipate any part of it being DRMed or paywalled–the core of the site will not be built around a program of free novel giveaways. That said, we reserve the right to give away free digital books any time we think it’s a good idea to do so. (With the cooperation and consent of their authors, naturally.)”

He confirmed that the site would be functional in approximately three months, “but any such estimate has a large margin of error.”

Ebooks slated for free publication include Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, and Through Wolf’s Eyes by Jane Lindskold.

In an article published last week titled “The rise of the genre ezine: Will it ever find a profitable model?” I predicted that many companies would launch online publications to act as a form of branding for their products. I think this project with Tor supports my theory.

UPDATE: Irene Gallo, an Art director for Tor, writes:

I will add that the commissioned fiction will be accompanied by commissioned artwork and we are working gallery section that will contain portfolios for 100 artists. This wont be the kind of peer-to-peer workshop site that ConceptArt.org and CgSociety is, but it will be a place for fans and art directors to get a taste of an artist’s work and then link into the artists’ sites.

If there is one major criticism to be made of the now-defunct online magazine Event Horizon, it’s that it was too ahead of its time.

Ellen Datlow, a former fiction editor for OMNI (a science magazine that was published under the same owner as Penthouse) and a veteran within the short fiction scene, collaborated with three former colleagues to launch the magazine in November 1998. It published original and classic genre fiction, held regular online chats with authors, ran interviews with writers, and published nonfiction columns.

It was among the first speculative fiction ezines to rise out of the primordial ooze of the internet — before the word “Google” became ubiquitous, before even the term “blog” was first coined — and make a stab at profitability.

“The idea was to sell advertising on the site plus brand Event Horizon Web Productions—our corporation, which produced several online conventions for EOS books and other online events,” Datlow told me in December. “We each put up a bit of money. I was the publisher and edited all the fiction. Rob Killheffer edited the nonfiction and created the look and feel of the website and worked on the back end of whatever needed to be done. Pamela Weintraub and Kathleen Stein worked at soliciting projects for our web production company and helped out with regular events such as our chat sessions, and sold advertising.”

But the site failed to find much in advertising, and the group didn’t have the time to chase down their few advertisers for payment. In July 1999, a mere eight months later, the magazine folded.

Datlow’s next position at the helm of an online magazine lasted much longer. Shortly after Event Horizon shut down, she was approached by SciFi.com (the online presence for the Sci Fi Channel) and asked to become the fiction editor for a new ezine they were launching. In 2000, SCI FICTION was born.

The ezine had a relatively simple format; every week, like clockwork, it published a piece of original science or fantasy short fiction and one classic reprint. The stories were then stored in online archives.

“This occurred during one of the tech bubbles when websites were paying ridiculous amounts of money for ‘partnerships’ that were in reality worth nothing,” Datlow said. “Despite such missteps, SciFi.com evolved into a wonderful, content-rich site with animation, Seeing Ear Theatre, SCIFICTION, SF Weekly…and other exciting components. There was advertising but there was no dedicated advertising department.”

This was because the website itself was the advertising. SCI FICTION and all its sister publications were a form of branding for the Sci Fi Channel. This meant that the owners could use it to promote its shows and at the same time expand its reach over another form of media.

Over the next few years the online magazine went on to become an award-winning juggernaut within the speculative fiction community. Because it paid per-word rates higher than any other genre magazine (both print and online) and was headed by a well-respected editor, it quickly gained street cred with popular writers. It wasn’t long before stories published in SCI FICTION made it onto the finalist ballots of just about every major SF award. In 2002 and 2005, Datlow received the Hugo Award for Best Editor, perhaps the most prestigious honor for someone within her profession.

But despite these accomplishments, in 2005 SCI FICTION met its end. In 2004, NBC bought the Sci Fi Channel, and Datlow told me that even though the fiction site was pulling in “good numbers,” it wasn’t performing quite as well as other sections of SciFi.com. Soon, she was informed that the ezine would close its doors forever.

Datlow told me about this decision through email — so it was impossible for me to pick up any non-verbal cues — but I couldn’t help but detect a degree of frustration in her writing. “What I think boggles my mind the most about the Sci Fi Channel is the squandered opportunity,” she wrote. “The channel had first look at hundreds of stories I published over six years. Surely, if someone had been on the ball they could have easily picked up some of the fiction for development in one of their anthology shows or have started a new show featuring stories from SCIFICTION.”

Whether this would have worked is unknown. Not only did the site cease from publishing new stories, its online archives were eventually wiped clean. You might still find them in a Google cache, but otherwise you’d hardly be able to tell that SCI FICTION existed at all.

The publication’s demise highlights an interesting question — one that has been asked at numerous science fiction conventions and online discussions: Has short genre fiction lost its ability to be profitable?

The field reached its apogee in the mid-20th century, when stories appeared mainly in pulp magazines. Its name derived from the cheap wood pulp paper on which it was published, it was not uncommon for a pulp magazine to have a readership in the hundreds of thousands. In high school, I read an anthology introduction written by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov (who died in 1992). I found the book in a used book store and it had been published sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, if I remember correctly. Somewhere within this introduction, Asimov touched briefly on the state of genre fiction, saying that a “successful” magazine had a circulation of at least 100,000.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the market today would laugh at such a number. According to Locus Magazine (“The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field”), two of the three remaining speculative fiction pulp magazine have circulations lower than 20,000. Analog, which specializes in “hard science fiction,” isn’t doing much better, with a circulation of just over 23,000.

These three are considered the lucky ones. Most of the others had all died out before the end of the 20th century.

Many have blamed this demise partly on the internet, saying that many of those readers — like the readers of most newspapers– were flocking to the internet. But if this is so, why is there such a noticeable lack of profitability online? Other than SCI FICTION, no publication that has appeared on the web could even be remotely compared to the magnitude of the pulp magazines that were published 50 years ago.

So will the genre ezine ever find a profitable model?

***

To answer this question, we must first consider the growing number of genre ezines spread out across the web. Many of these sites pay writers — some at decent rates — even if they’re not necessarily bringing in significant income. A few of these publications have at least succeeded at breaking even — not an easy feat.

Perhaps the most noticeable example of this is an online magazine called Strange Horizons. According to its editor, the ezine was a collaborative effort between several genre writers who grew dissatisfied with the short fiction that was being published at the time. So they spent a few months creating an organizational infrastructure and lining up funding, and in late 2000 the magazine officially launched.

The fiction published in Strange Horizons tends to be literary in nature, different from the plot-oriented science fiction that often appears in the pulp magazines. I’ve also noticed that the themes in its stories are often politically left-leaning (it’s not uncommon to read a piece about gender roles and the characters in the stories are more diverse).

The ezine certainly found its niche; over the last few years it has developed a large following, and many of the stories published there have been nominated for awards and reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. What’s more, the group behind Strange Horizons has been able to sufficiently monetize the site so that it can pay its content-producers competitive rates.

Susan Marie Groppi is the magazine’s current editor-in-chief. She joined its editorial staff not long after they launched the publication, becoming one of three fiction editors. A few years later the former editor-in-chief, Mary Anne Mohanraj, stepped down and Groppi took her place.

A little over a month ago, I asked the editor to explain the ezine’s funding mechanisms. “We rely almost entirely on donations,” she told me. “About half of our annual operating budget comes from regular reader donations–most of that comes in during the fund drives, but we get a significant amount of money from out-of-season donations as well. We get another couple thousand dollars a year from small organization grants and from things like the Amazon Affiliates program. The rest of our budget is drawn from a few private donors who have asked to remain anonymous.”

These anonymous contributions can sometimes be substantial. A source familiar with the magazine told me that a single anonymous donor gave as much as $5,000 during at least one fund drive. Whoever it is, the person has deep pockets. Either way, Groppi said that the amount given by the smaller donors is significantly increasing, to the point that the magazine relies less and less on its bigger backers.

The result? An ezine that pays its writers competitive rates and is arguably the most widely-read publication of its kind.

But all of its behind-the-scene editors are unpaid. They read through writer and artist submissions as volunteers and any increase in fundraising often goes into upping the rate they pay their writers. Not only is Strange Horizons not profitable, it doesn’t attempt to be.

A website called Futurismic has implemented a surprisingly unique approach by being centered around a blog that is updated daily. I say “surprisingly” because relatively few of the ezines I visited while researching this article use blogging on the sites themselves. Many of the editors and staff of these magazines have blogs, but they’re typically hosted off-site, a decision that I think truncates the effects blogs can have on driving traffic to the sites.

Futurismic has over 1,200 RSS subscribers, and as far as I can tell the fiction and columns are published in the form of blog posts, something I would consider an interesting approach. Paul Raven is the site’s nonfiction editor, and he told me that it’s his job to keep the site flowing with fresh content in between the publication of short stories and articles.

“Futurismic used to have ads to support it – from Pajamas Media, ironically enough” — Pajamas Media is an advertising network that is typically right-of-center, with a few exceptions — “which meant people often found it confusing when our content was leaning to the left. I’m not privy to the figures, but I believe the ads made enough to pay the writers for their fiction, keep the hosting bills paid off, and pay for incidental expenses.”

But because of what he mysteriously labeled “technical problems,” the site went a period of time without being updated, causing the traffic to go under whatever bare minimum was required by Pajamas Media. Though the website is updated daily, it hasn’t published any fiction since 2007. Raven said that once the site is publishing new fiction again that they would likely try to offer advertising, though he wasn’t privy to the exact details. Interview questions sent to the publisher of Futurismic were not answered.

“Futurismic is at least as much a blog as a zine, at the moment even more so, and that’s what’s kept our name on the market for so long,” Raven said. “Without the blog, this long fiction hiatus would have killed us off stone dead. I think bolstering the fiction with other content is a good move, but it has to be the right stuff. Futurismic’s fiction remit is quite precise…and so our blogging fits to the tastes of those who like the same stuff. Our content wouldn’t work at, say, Fantasy Magazine, or even Asimov’s. And vice versa.”

In other words, fresh content is better than no content. Many of the ezines I visited are published on a monthly — or sometimes even quarterly — schedule, meaning that weeks go by without new content. As many mainstream monthly magazines are learning — The Atlantic comes to mind — it’s almost impossible to develop a loyal reader base online when your publishing schedule is so spread out.

For instance, an ezine called Abyss & Apex publishes on a quarterly schedule. Several of its editors have blogs, but they’re hosted on Livejournal and other off-site platforms. Wendy Delmater, one of its editors, is a friend of mine, and I asked her last month how traffic is driven to her site. Like the others I interviewed, she acknowledged that links from blogs and online message boards brought in a substantial percentage of the magazine’s readers. But a brief look at the website shows that there isn’t much new content published in between issues. Many of the readers have to wait up to three months until the next batch of stories are put up. In internet time, that’s an eternity.

When I asked Eric Marin, publisher of a genre ezine called Lone Star Stories, about online publications such as his attracting links, he seemed to recognize this challenge that editors will have to overcome if they want to achieve profitability. “In order to garner serious ad revenue, an ezine has to have a lot of visitors [and] downloaders and high-value linking,” he said. “To gain both, an ezine needs funds to spread the word about itself. If funding does not exist for heavy-duty, long-term marketing, ad revenue will not arrive in sufficient amounts to keep the ezine afloat for any length of time.”

***

It’s worth pausing for a moment to note that most of the ezine editors I interviewed for this article have day jobs, and if I had bothered to ask them to categorize their editorial practices within the larger framework of their lives, the word “hobby” would have surfaced. More than half of them don’t even attempt to bring in revenue; they’ve accepted the fact that any payment given to writers would come directly out of their own pockets.

To date, there have been few serious entrepreneurs who have tackled this profitability question. A cloud of pessimistic realism has overcome many in the genre, and discussions seem to focus more on the decline on the pulp magazines and how to reverse it rather than the rise of the ezines.

When we talk about advertising, the value of a website is often based on its niche. Advertisers, in their eternal quest to get maximum efficiency for their dollars, tend to seek out forms of media that are frequented by the demographic they’re trying to reach. This is why advertisements in Wired Magazine tend to be focused on technology and the ads that appear on a political website like Daily Kos are often sponsored by special interest groups.

Here lies the difficulty for short genre fiction; it fits into such a specialized niche that it can often be difficult to monetize.Add to this the fact that many of the subscription-based ezines that have emerged — where the stories are hidden behind a pay wall — have failed to gain much traction, and you can begin to appreciate the hurdle that these editors must overcome.

In my research for this article, I came across two online magazines that had found a way to confront these problems. Both used a revenue strategy very similar to the one employed with Event Horizon and SCI FICTION, and that is single-sponsor branding.

***

If you’ll remember, the people behind SCI FICTION didn’t make many serious efforts to find advertisers because the site itself was a form of advertising for the Sci Fi Channel. Brett Alexander Savory, editor of a dark fiction publication called Chizine (disclosure: I’ve had a story published there), once tried the traditional routes of finding advertisers for his site.

“From ’99 to ’01, I tried the trolling-for-advertisers schtick, but it wore me the fuck out,” he told me in December. “I don’t envy anyone in that position.”

Savory, who by day works at Scholastic Canada as a Senior Editor, launched Chizine in 1997, and back then it was called The Sick Fuckers Club, a name that he recognizes now “wasn’t exactly the most professional name we could have come up with.”

After trying unsuccessfully to search out advertisers, he eventually reached an agreement in mid-2001 with a book publisher of dark fiction called Leisure Books. The way the deal was set up was that Chizine would advertise for Leisure’s titles almost exclusively, and in return the publisher would cover all the magazine’s costs.

“They’ve been really great,” Savory said. “Basically, I create banners for their horror line and they give me cheques to pay the writers and editors. They have zero hand in the editorial decisions, too, which is wonderful. I couldn’t ask for a better set-up.”

Because of this agreement, not only does Chizine pay its writers above professional rates, starting in 2008 it will begin to pay its behind-the-scenes staff, something almost unheard of with publications of its kind.

The creators of Clarkesworld Magazine tried a similar approach. Neil Clarke, the owner of an online bookseller called Clarkesworld Books, initially launched the magazine as a way to drive readers to purchasing books from the website. “The whole thing spun out of a conversation with [Prime Books founder] Sean Wallace at Readercon,” Clarke said. “The business model was flushed out shortly afterwards. It was decided that each issue would include two stories, paid at a professional rate, and that one of them would be solicited.”

The two brought in author Nick Mamatas to slush through the unsolicited fiction submissions and in October 2006 they published the first issue.

In 2007, Clarkesworld Books mostly closed (it still has some inventory it’s selling off), but the magazine continued to come out, this time promoting a new publishing venture headed by Clarke called Wyrm Publishing. “We receive our funding through sales of signed chapbook editions of each issue, an annual anthology…secondary sales through Clarkesworld Books (when it was still open), donations, and advertising/affiliate programs,” he said. “At present, our advertising space is used to promote Wyrm Publishing projects.”

This trend is beginning to catch on. Prime Books has launched Fantasy Magazine, and though my questions to Wallace were mainly focused on Clarkesworld, it appears that Fantasy implements a similar business model — the theory that readers of free short genre fiction will turn into buyers for genre books. The ezine uses a blogging format, regularly invites readers to “blog for a beer,” and both it and Clarkesworld offer RSS feeds.

So will this business model work? It’s hard to say; with the exception of Chizine, these publications are relatively new, and I wasn’t given access to any actual income figures for what these magazines are pulling in. And when I asked Mamatas, who reads submissions for Clarkesworld, about the probability of ezines becoming profitable, he gave a sobering reply. “I think it’s important to note that most fiction magazines in the print world are either university-backed non-profits, labors of love, or the least successful of a cross-subsidized bundle of properties that are kept around because fiction copy is much cheaper than non-fiction copy,” he said. “In the periodical trade in general, churn is also very high. Magazines come and go all the time, regardless of their subject, market, or demographic. The magazine business is ultimately the business of selling people disposable content. The challenge of the ezine isn’t all that much different than the challenge of any other magazine, except that if anyone knew what the “best bet” was, they likely wouldn’t try it out on SF ezines when they could launch another massive slick with 75% ad pages.”

To underscore this point, let me leave you with a telling figure. Ralan.com is a website that tracks short fiction markets for writers, mainly in the speculative fiction genre. In a section of Ralan called “dead markets,” it lists all the genre magazines that have folded and ceased publication over the last few years. Many, if not most, of those listed are genre ezines.

The number of dead markets listed?

649.

***
CORRECTION: In this article, I state that Event Horizon was published for eight months before it folded. It was published for an entire year. I regret the error.

2. I’ve heard of elaborate Facebook pranks, and I’ve reported on some here, but I think if you manage to trick the entire French media into believing your prank then you get to take home the gold medal.

3. I use Google as much as the next person, but let’s face it, their algorithm has some serious flaws.

4. A former editor for The New Republic has died. Luckily for him, he stopped working there when the magazine still had some credibility.

5. Why you shouldn’t exercise to indie rock

6. When I heard that The Virginia Pilot was for sale (Disclaimer: I work for a competing newspaper), the last thing I was expecting was for Pat “700 club” Robertson to consider buying it.

7. Some interesting Twitter messages that have emerged from the presidential press bus.

8. The blogosphere increases its influence on the 2008 presidential election.