When the semester wraps up, I always speak to my students about the business side of publishing. Queries, advances, submissions, and all that fun (read: frustrating) stuff that MFA professors often don’t like to talk about. I’m currently teaching “speculative fiction,” which means I’m also talking to them about the differences between the SFF world and “literary fiction” world. So it was timely today to have a discussion of this on Twitter with writers like Usman T. Malik and Nick Mamatas about lit mag sales and payments.
As I say in this newsletter a lot, readers and writers are increasingly happy to cross the supposed barrier between so-called literary fiction and SFF. But at the same time the ecosystems of the worlds remain largely separate. E.g., there are speculative works that compete for the Pulitzer and NBA and there are very literary works that compete for the Hugo and Nebula… yet with only a few exceptions they’re works published o
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