Making Assumptions

Posted by Colin Harvey Sep 11, 2009

Jed Hartman, the fiction editor at Strange Horizons once told me that the writers who editors prize most are the reliable ones. The young Robert Silverberg built an entire career for almost a decade on being a writer who could dig editors out of a hole by filling an unexpected gap in a contents page.

I've never edited a magazine so I have no idea of the tedium that must be involved in wading through four hundred, five hundred, a thousand submissions a month. God knows I wouldn't want to do it, and have enormous admiration for editors like van Gelder and Sheila Williams, who month in month out, year in year out produce fine issues time after time. So a writer who can deliver on a regular basis must be a jewel among authors for an editor. The temptation to take a story from them and delegate slushpile-reading to an intern must be unbelievably intense.

But as a reader, I'm not hugely happy at seeing the same names on the contents list every issue. If I don't rate a writer and they are one of six names every month, I'm far more likely to give up on a magazine than if they are only an occasional visitor to the contents list.

I've been repeatedly critical .of Gordon van Gelder, both in the reviews and in discussions with other fans. Last year Robert Reed appeared in six consecutive issues, and while Reed generates ideas and writes sound stories, I often find his prose cold.

But on a whim, I went through this year's contents lists of both Asimovs and F&SF, and tallied up how many serial contributors they carried, and what I found was an object lesson in how inaccurate assumptions can prove to be.

I ignored reprints, and looked at percentages, rather than absolute numbers, since screening out the reprints lowers the number of original stories F&SF can carry.

Asimovs has carried 66 stories so far this year (I don't have the Decmber issue) compared to 64 in F&SF. The latter carried more novelets than short stories, but Asimov's has a novella almost every issue. Of Asimov's 66 stories, 48 --73%-- are by 'one-shot' authors, who may return in January 2010, may even become next year's serial contributors; or who may never appear again. Only 27% are by serial contributors.

What of F&SF?

Their stats are astonishingly, almost identical. They have a fractionally lower number of one-shot contributors with 45 (70%), but that doesn't tell the whole story.

Asimov's 18 'repeat' contributions come from 6 authors; so Nancy Kress, Damien Broderick and 4 other authors are averaging 3 stories a year. F&SF's 19 'repeat' contributions come from 8 different authors. Only Albert E. Cowdrey and Robert Reed have appeared more than twice, with 4 and 3 appearances each.

If anything more 'out-of-field' contributions appear in van Gelder's pages; Sheila Williams preferring to take stories from up-and-coming authors. Both strategies work for their various editors.

These remarkable similarities don't mean an awful lot, except that it's dangerous to make assumptions without checking one's facts first.

I'll be more careful next time.