In the US, for scifi, the SFWA requires a market to offer 8 cents a word or more, I believe, to be considered a "professional market" for the sake of counting towards membership criteria. That means most of the bigger scifi magazines are exactly at 8c (a very few above)
Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld for example, last I checked). Many will prefer much shorter works.
And of course that is before taking into account the competition - the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.
I've submitted a couple of stories, but decided that effort vs. relatively low potential payoff was so low that since I wouldn't really be profitable when factoring in time spent anyway it was better to just put my stories on my website and pay to promote them to relevant twitter followers to pull in readers for my novel and increase my following at the same time.
The few short stories I've published so far has as a result reached a much wider audience than most of the main scifi magazines reach. E.g. even Analog was reportedly down to 27k readers by 2011.
But of course being able to afford to do that is a pretty privileged position to be in.
> the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.
That's surprising; I subscribed to Asimov's for about 6 months back in 2015 and based on what I was reading, I assumed they must be publishing everything that comes in the door.
I can imagine they get a lot of submissions that are just absolutely wrong for their editorial purpose. There's a lot of hobbyist authors online who would love to get paid, and I bet a lot of them are submitting their fanfiction (or narrowly reworked fanfiction) to a magazine with no interest in it.
Also probably many people probably submit the same pieces over and over.
Btw if you find an outlet that seems to have no standards but also pays, the right thing to do is to stop being a subscriber and start being an author.
That makes sense... I suppose if I was trying to pick a dozen stories out of 1500, I'd start by looking for people I've published before, and even if their current submission isn't very good it beats wading through the dross. After that it's probably a matter of rolling up your sleeves, throwing out everything that's obviously unhinged or unusable, and slogging through the rest.
For sure. My guess is that the slush pile count is exclusively of unsolicited, unfamiliar authors. Someone they've published before probably skips the pile.
I think they might be publishing stuff their core audience really likes, btw. It's just that audience is probably a niche.
I think this is an ongoing challenge. You see it with comics as well, where Marvel and DC have gotten really good at knowing what sells to their niche audience. But their audience has been in lengthy decline, in part because they've focused on selling to their niche audience rather than figuring out how to broaden their base.
lol no, I wish. Good luck getting into any of the magazines mentioned in the grandparent post. The relative quality is debatable, but what you see is genuinely the best of thousands of submissions
Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld for example, last I checked). Many will prefer much shorter works.
And of course that is before taking into account the competition - the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.
I've submitted a couple of stories, but decided that effort vs. relatively low potential payoff was so low that since I wouldn't really be profitable when factoring in time spent anyway it was better to just put my stories on my website and pay to promote them to relevant twitter followers to pull in readers for my novel and increase my following at the same time.
The few short stories I've published so far has as a result reached a much wider audience than most of the main scifi magazines reach. E.g. even Analog was reportedly down to 27k readers by 2011.
But of course being able to afford to do that is a pretty privileged position to be in.