Well, that's a sad thing.

[seawasp]

From wyjoe, we get the news that Jim Baen's Universe is closing up.

It was an ambitious experiment to create another, high-paying venue for short SF/F fiction. They gave it four years.

But it never quite reached the level necessary.

I'm afraid I'm not particularly surprised. It's not a real blow for me -- I don't write short stories, really -- but for those who aren't writing in the novel category this could hurt. There just aren't that many worthwhile venues available, and those that exist are getting more pinched. I wouldn't be surprised if, by the time I'm 60, all of the SF magazines are gone.

Comments

[katestine.livejournal.com]

Not terribly surprising. I should be their target market - disposable income, casual fangirl sci-fi reader - and while I subscribed at the beginning, I let it lapse bc I read maybe two stories in that year that made me glad to have a subscription :( Maybe they'll focus more on the main publishing business and bring me more books I can buy.

[seawasp]

That was always my view of ALL the magazines. One story that I liked per issue, maybe, and maybe not that. This simply wasn't worth it when I could always buy collections of short stories that were MOSTLY good.

Yes, most of those collections were gathered by cherrypicking from the old magazines. I'm afraid there will have to be some other way to manage short stories from now on, but I haven't any good ideas myself.

[meril.livejournal.com]

Same here. I subbed for two years, stopped reading it when my PDA broke, and forgot to check it again to see if there were stories by authors I was interested in.

(And, re the main publishing business--outside of the yearly Weber and Drake release and whatever seawasp comes out with...haven't been buying those either.)