neil clarke best science fiction of the year

(Quick plug: We just published Clarkesworld Year Twelve: Volume One and Volume Two. Subscriptions, however, have long ago replaced them as our primary source of income.

Soon after, the bookstore closed, but those anthologies continue today. The startup money came from my marketing budget for the bookstore and was supplemented by PayPal donations from readers, but the trick that pushed us into the black was the annual anthology ( Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld) published at the end of the year. We paid well-above market rates and the slim contents were to keep our budget in-check. Issue one of Clarkesworld, like all the issues from our first year, contained two stories of less than four thousand words each and a cover. By the end of the weekend, the magazine was fully-staffed and three months later, our first issue dropped. A few hours later and sleep-deprived, we had a business model in mind and we decided to go for it.

In July 2006, I met up with Sean Wallace (then editor of Fantasy Magazine, one of the publications I was working with) at Readercon and we started discussing the impact of that experiment, the recent demise of SciFiction, and a post-mortem on several of the other recent losses in online publishing. Sometime in 2005, I started offering publishers the opportunity to include free sample stories on our website as a means of promoting magazines to our customers. My passion for short fiction manifested itself there as a very large magazine section of over a hundred titles. In fact, if it were not for the collapse of one corporate-funded publication, SciFiction, Clarkesworld may never have existed.Īt the time, I ran Clarkesworld Books, an online bookstore. Corporate funding, wealthy patrons (sometimes the editor/publisher), and other charity models existed, but had problems of their own.

Advertising? You’d be lucky to get pennies. Digital subscriptions, Patreon, Kickstarter, membership software, and most of the mechanisms that fund online fiction today simply didn’t exist and there were far fewer people reading online.

While a lot of that was simply poor planning, a significant part of the problem was the lack of infrastructure to support such activities. To be fair to our early critics, the landscape for online fiction was more like a slaughterhouse back in 2006. We were told we wouldn’t last a year, but here we are at our fifteenth anniversary issue and I have to say that it feels really good.

Neil clarke best science fiction of the year