Are the Big Three SF Mags Irrelevant?

This one starts with Warren Ellis, passes through Cory Doctorow, and ends up at John Scalzi before I notice it. Ellis started by running down 2006 circulation numbers for the big three (Asimov's, Analog and F&SF) (figures courtesy Gardner Dozois):

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions 15117
A drop of 13% from 2005. No numbers given for newsstand sales.

ANALOG: subscriptions 23732 newsstand 4587
Newsstand sales are “soft,” returnable — sellthrough is reported at 32%. I’m presuming the above number is the sellthrough number, not the overall circulation before returns. 7.3% loss year-on-year.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions 14575 newsstand 3691
According to Dozois, this constitutes a drop of less than 1% — losing some 600 readers overall year-on-year makes them the only magazine thus far mentioned that has made any progress at all in stemming the bleeding.

INTERZONE: “Circulation is in the 2000-to-3000 range.” Which I find a bit scary.

Someone recently said to me, “Well, what could you do to save them?” And I said, well, no-one’s asking, but there’s probably about twelve things that could be done. And they said, “Well, maybe, but what I really meant was — why try? Why not just bury them and start anew?”

And then someone else asked me why there’s still an sf magazine called “Analog.”

[links added]

The numbers are pretty scary, if you are of the mind that the "big three" are what matters from a career development perspective. Scalzi points out (again) that these digest print magazines may not be so relevant anymore:

.... [A]ll of the Big Three suffered circulation drops from 2005, some double digit percentages, too. What we don’t know from these numbers are the demographics of the readership, but I’m going to make a guess that the average readership age for these magazines is in the older than I am by a more than fair margin (I’m 38). The circulation pool is very likely to be the same circulation pool it has been for the last 30 years; if so, it’s no surprise it’s shrinking, because one end of the pool is drying up when the subscribers die, and what’s coming in on the other end is a trickle. Which is to say, right now, the SF magazine circulation pool is Lake Lanier and the magazines are Atlanta.

Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow is wringing his hands about what needs to be done to save the Big Three, but between you and me and the rest of the whole bloody Internet, I have to wonder, as Ellis apparently does, if it’s worth the time. I seriously question whether the “Big Three” think they need saving, and therefore I question whether they want to save themselves. And if they don’t, I’m not entirely sure why it would be incumbent on anyone else to try to save them.

The big three can still be relevant, mind you; I suspect Asimov’s was essential in bootstrapping Charles Stross into being the decade’s pre-eminent SF writer when it published the short stories that would eventually become the Hugo-nominated novel Accelerando. Likewise, Tim Pratt’s Hugo win this year is going to do great things for him moving forward. That said, I can think of more prominent SF writers published since 2000 who have gotten along without the benefit of exposure in the “Big Three” than who have been helped by them.

For examples of this, one need only look the Campbell Award winners from this century. I did a little research this evening, and unless I’ve flubbed bibliographies greatly, I’ve come up on an interesting tidbit, which is that of the last seven Campbell winners — Naomi Novik, me, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Wen Spencer, Jo Walton and Kristine Smith — precisely one of us was published in the “Big Three” prior to winning our award: Elizabeth Bear, who published a poem in F&SF in ‘03. So, a single appearance from just one of the us.

(Scalzi pointedly eschews submitting to any venue that requires him to actually print a manuscript.) He goes on:

Nice but not relevant is not where the “Big Three” want to be, but this is where they are....Look: yesterday, [John Scalzi's blog] the Whatever got 37,558 unique visitors, which means that I get about the same number of people visiting on a Monday as Asimov’s and F&SF combined roll up in a month. Is it smarter for me to spend time writing fiction for any of these magazines than it is for me to write here?

And if I do write short fiction, does it make sense for me to send it to publications that are hard for my fans to find and buy? Subterranean Online or Strange Horizons or Jim Baen’s Universe will pay me the same or more for a story; in all these cases I can easily link my readers here to the story, and they can either read the entire story or read a substantial portion online before they buy. Yes, I know the “Big Three” have electronic editions for sale via Fictionwise; I prefer something more user-friendly. The “Big Three” are my second-tier markets for short fiction for these reasons, and if it gets to that point, I’m likely just to paste the work up here. It’s worked for me before.

[links added]

Cory has some ideas for how to make the mags more relevant -- from a marketing perspective, they're very sound, really New Media Marketing 120 (basic, but not introductory):

 

If I were running the mags, I'd pick a bunch of sfnal bloggers and offer them advance looks at the mag, get them to vote on a favorite story to blog and put it online the week before the issue hits the stands. I'd podcast a second story, and run excerpts from the remaining stories in podcast. I'd get Evo Terra to interview the author of a third story for The Dragon Page. I'd make every issue of every magazine into an event that thousands of people talked about, sending them to the bookstores to demand copies -- and I'd offer commissions, bonuses, and recognition to bloggers who sold super-cheap-ass subscriptions to the print editions.

Sure it's lot of work, and a huge shift in the way the mags do business. But hell, how many more years' worth of 13 percent declines can the magazines hack?

To Scalzi, focusing on what they could do to fix the problem kind of misses the point: They have to first recognize that there's a problem. And he's apparently at a bit of a loss for why we should be expected to care if they don't:

Now, if I saw concrete ways the “Big Three” were working to rebuild circulation and make their magazines easier to find in my local bookstore, or if they had more intriguing online presences, or I felt they were more engaged in the current generation of writers and interested in cultivating the next, rather than waiting for them to make it on their own, or even if they just took electronic submissions, maybe I would be more enthusiastic about submitting; maybe I’d be more concerned about their slow exsanguination (I am concerned to the extent that I know the people who work there; I am fond of many of them on a personal level. I’d like for them to have jobs going forward). But I’m not going to spend a lot of time agonizing about theses magazines’ extended death scenes when I don’t see them doing these things to help themselves. Maybe they are doing these things and I just don’t know. But to be egotistical about it, if I don’t know, isn’t that kind of a bad thing? I’m not exactly hiding here. I’m generally pretty well-informed.

Let me be clear about this: I think it would be better if the “Big Three” not only survived but thrived; they’re the memory trees of the genre, and they can still bear fruit. I want to feel excited about the idea of being published in their pages, and in a way more than fond affectation. I’d like being published there to mean something. I want it to be nice, but more than that I want it to be relevant. They have a ways to go for that.

So this leaves a bunch of questions: Are the magazines relevant, anymore? Does it go beyond a 'nice to have'? Should we start looking outside the US market?