In the introduction to Everything’s Eventual, King wrote the short story genre was on the precipice of “extinction’s pit,” as of 2001, the time of writing. He remarked that as long ago as the late 60s the markets were drying up, and in the years since, he had seen them “continue to shrink,” while remaining thankful for the “little magazines, where young writers can still publish their stories for contributor’s copies.” But, he noted, “God won’t have to spend His whole day—or even His coffee break—blessing those people. [ . . .] Their number is small, and every year there are one or two fewer.”
My impression is God has stopped blessing the markets that King praised in 2001—stopped definitely now in the 19 years since King wrote those words—as I cannot think of a single market that offers an opening to non-famous writers, but also with some kind of community reach, notoriety, quality-control and most notably a physical, hard-copy presence. What publication venues that do exist exist as polar opposites: on the one hand, websites that are obscure and virtually unknown outside of their own web domains and which lead to no tangible place and fail to offer even a tangible “contributor” copy—and on the other, “prestige” publications (national glossy magazines and “literary” journals), which tout how select they are and which were never very amenable to King’s style of work to begin with. To look where King published his stories for The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, you’ll see exclusively prestige venues—New Yorker, Atlantic, Tin House—which attempt to be literary and publish very few (if any) other works similar to King’s. (I have read two issues of Tin House, and I thought the stories were invariably awful, and King, in Different Seasons, commented that the New Yorker never much cared for his stuff.)
Periodicals that do still manage to print good stories, and which do have a reach, and which can be found in a newsstand— AHMM, Asimov's Science Fiction, Playboy—can be counted on one hand and generally ill-suited to new writers.
My question to fellow readers: Is my assessment about the absence of markets correct (as King puts it: “What’s lost has a way of staying lost”)? Or is there some vibrant alternative—analogous to the Weird Tales, Stories, Amazing Stories, Black Cat of yore—in existence, but unknown to me? Can anyone surmise as to what King would say himself?
Thanks!
rey
My impression is God has stopped blessing the markets that King praised in 2001—stopped definitely now in the 19 years since King wrote those words—as I cannot think of a single market that offers an opening to non-famous writers, but also with some kind of community reach, notoriety, quality-control and most notably a physical, hard-copy presence. What publication venues that do exist exist as polar opposites: on the one hand, websites that are obscure and virtually unknown outside of their own web domains and which lead to no tangible place and fail to offer even a tangible “contributor” copy—and on the other, “prestige” publications (national glossy magazines and “literary” journals), which tout how select they are and which were never very amenable to King’s style of work to begin with. To look where King published his stories for The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, you’ll see exclusively prestige venues—New Yorker, Atlantic, Tin House—which attempt to be literary and publish very few (if any) other works similar to King’s. (I have read two issues of Tin House, and I thought the stories were invariably awful, and King, in Different Seasons, commented that the New Yorker never much cared for his stuff.)
Periodicals that do still manage to print good stories, and which do have a reach, and which can be found in a newsstand— AHMM, Asimov's Science Fiction, Playboy—can be counted on one hand and generally ill-suited to new writers.
My question to fellow readers: Is my assessment about the absence of markets correct (as King puts it: “What’s lost has a way of staying lost”)? Or is there some vibrant alternative—analogous to the Weird Tales, Stories, Amazing Stories, Black Cat of yore—in existence, but unknown to me? Can anyone surmise as to what King would say himself?
Thanks!
rey