"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 15th Annual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Age all registered the lowest circulation figures in their respective histories. Even the fantasy magazine
Realms of Fantasy, the only magazine to show a gain in circulation in 1996, was down some, although
only by a measly 0.5 percent. Asimov's lost about 3,700 in subscriptions but gained about 360 in
newsstand sales, for a 7.4-percent loss in overall circulation. Analog lost about 6,230 in subscriptions
and another 38 in newsstand sales, for a 10.5-percent loss in overall circulation. The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 6,730 in subscriptions but gained about 800 newsstand sales, for a
13.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Science Fiction Age lost about 4,590 in subscriptions and about
another 2,220 in newsstand sales, for a 14.0-percent loss in overall circulation. Realms of Fantasy lost
about 151 in subscriptions and about another 100 in newsstand sales, for a barely perceptible
0.5-percent loss in overall circulation-basically, they're holding steady.
This is probably not as dire as it looks. For instance, one of the traditional advantages that has always
helped the digest magazines to survive is that they're so cheap to produce in the first place that you don't
have to sell very many of them to make a profit. I'm willing to bet that most of these magazines are still
profitable, in spite of declining circulation.
Still, it's hard to deny that things are dicier these days than they were ten years ago, especially in the
area of newsstand sales. There are so few distributors left now that it's a buyer's market, and the
distributors know that very well. The few surviving distributors often charge much-higher fees for carrying
titles or ask for greatly increased "discounts," both higher than many SF magazines can easily afford to
pay; some distributors also set "subscription caps," refusing to even handle magazines with a circulation
below a certain set figure, usually a higher circulation figure than that of most genre magazines. Many
newsstand managers have also become pickier, sometimes refusing to display magazines that fall below a
certain circulation figure-again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines. The result of all
this is that it's harder to find genre magazines on newsstands, with some carrying a lot fewer copies of
each title than before, and many newsstands not carrying them at all.
This is not as serious as it looks either, in the short-term, anyway. Most SF magazines are
subscription-driven, and always have been, with newsstand sales a considerably lower percentage of
overall sales than subscription sales, so they could get by without newsstand sales if they had to-for a
while. Declining newsstand sales hurt magazines the most by cutting them off from attracting new readers,
casual newsstand browsers who might pick up the magazine and read it on a whim, but who, with luck,
might like what they see enough to eventually become new subscribers; without a constant flow of new
subscribers, a magazine's circulation will continually dwindle as natural attrition eliminates a percentage of
the old subscribers, until eventually the magazine becomes inviable. So one of the biggest problems facing
magazines these days is to find ways to attract new subscribers even without a strong presence on the
newsstand. One way to do this may be with a greatly increased presence on the Internet, which, if things
go well, might enable the magazines to get around the newsstand bottleneck and attract the attention of
potential new subscribers to their product even without much traditional newsstand display. I expect that
this will become an increasingly important outlet in days to come and may be what saves the magazines in
the long term-if anything can.
At the beginning of 1998, Penny Press announced that all of their fiction magazines, Asimov's
Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, will change size, starting with the June 1998 issue. The new format will
add a little over an inch in height and about a quarter inch in width to each issue of Asimov's or Analog;
the page count will drop from 160 pages to 144 pages for regular issues, and from 288 pages to 240 for
double issues, although the larger pages will allow Asimov's and Analog to use about 10 percent more
material per issue. The hope is that the increase in size will increase the visibility of the magazines on the
newsstands (where, at the moment, digest-sized titles tend to get lost because other, larger magazines are
shuffled in front of them), and increase their attractiveness as a product to distributors, who seem to favor
larger-format magazines over digest-sized magazines these days. This marks the end of an era; for almost
fifty years now, there have always been at least three digest-sized SF magazines on the newsstands
(although which three changed as time went by), but now The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction