Busting a Myth

“Only writers subscribe to genre magazines.” or “Most subscribers are writers”

I don’t know why this myth keeps surfacing. It could be writers trying to blame non-writers for the woes of magazines. It could be people who don’t like short fiction trying to suggest that real readers don’t bother with it.

With the current nonsense surrounding Amazon and subscriptions (if you are one of our subscribers on Amazon, see this), it’s cropping up again.

I’ve addressed this issue in the past, but can’t remember where. It was a while ago, so let’s re-run the numbers and see if it still holds up.

I have to start by acknowledging some assumptions for the purpose of this exercise:

We’re defining an author as someone who has submitted at least one story to Clarkesworld. At present, that data set includes over 69,000 writers (bans removed) since 2009. I know there are writers that don’t submit work to us, but the underlying current of the argument is that it is really just the people who want to be published at a magazine.Some of our vendors (Amazon, B&N, Weightless) do not supply subscriber data, so we are working with data from other subscriptions (Patreon, Clarkesworld Citizens, PayPal, Ko-Fi, and the small percentage of Amazon subscribers that opted-in to data sharing). This provided us with nearly 5,300 different people who subscribed or supported the magazine sometime in the last decade.

The overlap between the two groups is only 708 or roughly 13% of our known subscribers. That’s only 1% of the authors that have sent us stories. The percentages show very little variation (1-2%) when broken down by subscription source. It even holds for subscriptions from the Amazon readers that have switched over since March (when Amazon announced their plans to end subscriptions).

With the size of the data sets involved, I feel very comfortable stating that this myth is busted.

 

[EDIT: Some people want exact numbers, but the only one I provided above was 708. Everything else was rounded to keep it simple. Moving the rounding out a few decimal places, authors as known subscribers is 13.37% and known subscribers submitting to the magazine is 1.022% percent.]