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arachnejericho's blog there are 240,000 sold. The article she cites goes further to mention an expectation that there could be between another 500,000 and 750,000 units sold in the next four quarters. So let's look at the numbers? Somewhere between 3/4 and a million users. People wonder why I keep saying: get your SF & F magazines out there for the unit? There's currently (Well, as of two days ago when I last checked) only 16 magazines available. At all. The only two SF&F magazines available are Asimov's and Analog. But think about this: right now they make up one eighth of the options for customers under the heading Magazines. (If you throw in Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's you find that genre magazines make up 1/4 of the currently available options!)
Look, maybe not everyone is going to want to subscribe to magazines on their Kindle. And you can make things available other ways, such as F&SF has as noted here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/2008/07/29/fsf-and-kindle/ by Gordon Van Gelder. Now, I'm hardly privy to the details that Amazon is willing to negotiate with publishers. People who want to go out of their way to obtain something for their Kindle will. So, dedicated fans of F&SF won't likely have a problem grabbing their copies off Fictionwise, and loading them up to their devices. Still, I can't help but think that right now, is an opportune moment for the SF & F markets to get in on the ground floor of something. Being one of the few choices available for new users of the device has got to make your odds of picking up random subscriptions better. I mean, imagine being one of only 16 magazines on a newstand. Don't you think that Asimov's is seeing some kind of uptick in sales being there? (Yeah, that's idle speculation.) When a friend of mine used to work for Ebsco subscription services, he told me that their whole concept, sales-pitch, etc, was based on the idea that somewhere around 4% of everyone who sees an add for something, will buy it. The more people you get your item in front of, the more people you'll get to buy. I have no clue how accurate that is. I'm about as far from a sales type person you'll find. I prefer my life in the caves of the datacenter supporting the salesforce through keeping things running. But it makes sense to me, that if its easier for me to find something, that's the item I'm more likely to buy. And people who own Kindles will be on the Amazon site. A lot.
Look, if you're something like a Clarksworld, or a Strange Horizons, or Fantasy Magazine, you might want to think about how you could make a go of it. Heck, if you're an online zine, consider doing it as a Blog subscription. Especially if you are currently giving away the fiction for free now. I mean, why not? Blogs run at $1-2 a month. Okay, so as a blog, maybe you don't stand out to the same degree that you do as a "magazine". There's 374 blogs available, so you might not get as much coverage there. And I don't know what the revenue split is. (I'm sure heavily in their favor.) But odds are good there'll be a half a million of these things out there by year's end. That's a darn large user base to tap into. Get 1/100th of those, 5,000 subscribers to your magazine or blog? Let's see: that's anywhere from $5,000-$15,000 a month in raw sales. Even if you only get, say a 0 take: $18,000-$54,000 a year? I think that'd help pay those authors. And the internet bills. Maybe even a little for the staff too? Yeah, I think that's at least worth looking into. (Now, to play my own devil's advocate: If you all ready get people to donate....perhaps you lose out. Especially if people start to figure that since the cost of the magazine is X, but previously had donated X Y yearly....they might start to just donate X, since they figure that's the cost. Or, they may just switch from their normal donation to the subscription method, and then you'd lose out. See, this is why I stay in the caves, and fix servers. Business models and ideas make my head hurt. A lot.)
arachnejericho's blog there are 240,000 sold. The article she cites goes further to mention an expectation that there could be between another 500,000 and 750,000 units sold in the next four quarters. So let's look at the numbers? Somewhere between 3/4 and a million users. People wonder why I keep saying: get your SF & F magazines out there for the unit? There's currently (Well, as of two days ago when I last checked) only 16 magazines available. At all. The only two SF&F magazines available are Asimov's and Analog. But think about this: right now they make up one eighth of the options for customers under the heading Magazines. (If you throw in Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's you find that genre magazines make up 1/4 of the currently available options!) Look, maybe not everyone is going to want to subscribe to magazines on their Kindle. And you can make things available other ways, such as F&SF has as noted here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/2008/07/29/fsf-and-kindle/ by Gordon Van Gelder. Now, I'm hardly privy to the details that Amazon is willing to negotiate with publishers. People who want to go out of their way to obtain something for their Kindle will. So, dedicated fans of F&SF won't likely have a problem grabbing their copies off Fictionwise, and loading them up to their devices. Still, I can't help but think that right now, is an opportune moment for the SF & F markets to get in on the ground floor of something. Being one of the few choices available for new users of the device has got to make your odds of picking up random subscriptions better. I mean, imagine being one of only 16 magazines on a newstand. Don't you think that Asimov's is seeing some kind of uptick in sales being there? (Yeah, that's idle speculation.) When a friend of mine used to work for Ebsco subscription services, he told me that their whole concept, sales-pitch, etc, was based on the idea that somewhere around 4% of everyone who sees an add for something, will buy it. The more people you get your item in front of, the more people you'll get to buy. I have no clue how accurate that is. I'm about as far from a sales type person you'll find. I prefer my life in the caves of the datacenter supporting the salesforce through keeping things running. But it makes sense to me, that if its easier for me to find something, that's the item I'm more likely to buy. And people who own Kindles will be on the Amazon site. A lot.
Look, if you're something like a Clarksworld, or a Strange Horizons, or Fantasy Magazine, you might want to think about how you could make a go of it. Heck, if you're an online zine, consider doing it as a Blog subscription. Especially if you are currently giving away the fiction for free now. I mean, why not? Blogs run at $1-2 a month. Okay, so as a blog, maybe you don't stand out to the same degree that you do as a "magazine". There's 374 blogs available, so you might not get as much coverage there. And I don't know what the revenue split is. (I'm sure heavily in their favor.) But odds are good there'll be a half a million of these things out there by year's end. That's a darn large user base to tap into. Get 1/100th of those, 5,000 subscribers to your magazine or blog? Let's see: that's anywhere from $5,000-$15,000 a month in raw sales. Even if you only get, say a 0 take: $18,000-$54,000 a year? I think that'd help pay those authors. And the internet bills. Maybe even a little for the staff too? Yeah, I think that's at least worth looking into. (Now, to play my own devil's advocate: If you all ready get people to donate....perhaps you lose out. Especially if people start to figure that since the cost of the magazine is X, but previously had donated X Y yearly....they might start to just donate X, since they figure that's the cost. Or, they may just switch from their normal donation to the subscription method, and then you'd lose out. See, this is why I stay in the caves, and fix servers. Business models and ideas make my head hurt. A lot.)