Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> >>Walter Bushell <
pr...@panix.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Perhaps the people who like science fiction should buy the mags just to
> >>> keep them in circulation and offering an entry point for new writers.
[snip]
> Well, I wasn't doubting that new writers appear in the magazines. My
> question was more on whether they move up the food chain from there.
> The old career path(*) was to publish short stories, then maybe a
> serial then to graduate out of the magazines into first-publication
> novels. It just seems to me that most novelists now appear full-blown
> with first-novel as first-sale, bypassing the mags entirely.
That's a question I've wondered also as I've seen the above sentiment
over the years. To try and answer it, I downloaded the latest ISFDB
database bump and generated some stats.
The format of the stats is as follows:
DECADE AUTHOR WAS FIRST PUBLISHED:
NOVEL only = # authors with only novels
SHORT only = # authors with only shorts
BOTH with BOTH first = # authors with both & both in first year
BOTH with NOVEL first = # authors with both & novel first
BOTH with SHORT first = # authors with both & short first
The stats include only novels, short fiction, and serials (treated as
SHORT); exclude non-English titles; excludes variants (same work with
title change or pseudonym); and does not differentiate magazines from
anthologies (for where short appeared). It also assumes that while the
ISFDB has errors and omissions, they occur equally in both novels and
shorts at this level of counting.
And the results are:
1930s:
NOVEL only = 191
SHORT only = 1449
BOTH with BOTH first = 29
BOTH with NOVEL first = 71
BOTH with SHORT first = 212
1940s:
NOVEL only = 110
SHORT only = 693
BOTH with BOTH first = 7
BOTH with NOVEL first = 30
BOTH with SHORT first = 118
1950s:
NOVEL only = 330
SHORT only = 1489
BOTH with BOTH first = 26
BOTH with NOVEL first = 67
BOTH with SHORT first = 234
1960s:
NOVEL only = 394
SHORT only = 1301
BOTH with BOTH first = 17
BOTH with NOVEL first = 74
BOTH with SHORT first = 237
1970s:
NOVEL only = 939
SHORT only = 1672
BOTH with BOTH first = 28
BOTH with NOVEL first = 235
BOTH with SHORT first = 396
1980s:
NOVEL only = 1745
SHORT only = 2364
BOTH with BOTH first = 50
BOTH with NOVEL first = 422
BOTH with SHORT first = 498
1990s:
NOVEL only = 2085
SHORT only = 5494
BOTH with BOTH first = 84
BOTH with NOVEL first = 437
BOTH with SHORT first = 725
2000s:
NOVEL only = 5879
SHORT only = 6614
BOTH with BOTH first = 158
BOTH with NOVEL first = 581
BOTH with SHORT first = 625
2010s:
NOVEL only = 3518
SHORT only = 2514
BOTH with BOTH first = 67
BOTH with NOVEL first = 25
BOTH with SHORT first = 24
So, minus bugs, it appears that the magazines, while they may have been
a gateway for new authors, where never a dominant gateway for new novel
authors (for the early decades, novel authors were pretty evenly split
between those who started with novels and with shorts) and starting in
the 1970s, that role has vastly shrunk.
Now, if this could be broken down by sub-genre (the original statement
specified "science fiction") would that change the results any? Not
sure, but that is outside the realm of the scriptable.
- W. Citoan
--
To clip the wings Of their high-flying arbitrary Kings
-- Dryden