The Philippine Online Chronicles

This is more evident now than it ever has been before. Online speculative fiction publications easily number in the hundreds, including many new publications looking for worthy submissions and just itching to get up and running (e.g. GigaNotoSaurus and Smash Cake Magazine). Just to illustrate: to date, Duotrope lists166 fledgling markets, or those markets with a publication history of less than six months.

Even the Philippines, horribly late in the technological race, generally speaking, has two active online publishing entities: Rocket Kapre, which has published Usok 1 and the charity anthology Ruin and Resolve; and Estranghero Press, which has published the anthologies The Farthest Shore (secondary worlds) and Demons of the New Year (horror). As in the rest of the world, online publications appear to be a growth industry, as evidenced by the upcoming launch of the POC Review (which is not genre-bound) and ( a bit farther into the future) the online version of the Philippine Genre Stories.

So: why an online publication? From the viewpoint of a publisher, one factor to consider is that online publishing is cheap. Compared to a print publication, an online publication is easy to set up that it can actually begin – and even remain – a one-man endeavor. For example, the now defunct (and quite brilliant) Lone Star Stories listed only one person under “Staff” – publisher and editor Eric Marin.

To start an online publication, all you need is a web-publishing platform (Expanded Horizons, for example, publishes using Wordpress), good internet connection, submission guidelines, and time that can be devoted to going through the pile of submissions. Compare this with the money you’ll have to shell out in order to produce your first print issue, factoring in the cost of printing, distribution, and the like.

The fact that an online publication can make the leap from concept to finished product in such a short amount of time, and with relatively little capital, means that we are seeing it see commone useage as a fund-raising platform, either for the author himself/herself or for a third-party cause. For example, Rocket Kapre’s Ruin and Resolve was envisioned and published to raise funds for the victims of Ondoy and Pepeng, with proceeds going to the Philippine National Red Cross. Last year, Catherynne Valente began publishing her novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, in weekly installments in order to help make ends meet during the recession. The novel was available for free, a gift for anyone kind enough to help a writer in need. In her own words: “I didn’t want charity, or something for nothing. I wanted to work, and support my family. I decided that in the world of new media and online literature, I could try to do what I do best: write a novel. I could offer up a book to the world, and try to feed us with it. I wanted it to be free, so that everyone could read it, not locked behind a password. But we needed money—so I posted to my blog and asked my readers to pay whatever they thought it was worth.”

More recently, author Lavie Tidhar began publishing a serial novella called “Jesus and the Eightfold Path” to help support family stranded in Israel because of the eruption of the Icelandic volcano. Chapters are uploaded daily. Tidhar says: “If the old story tellers passed the hat around at the end of a tale, I am happy to do the same. The story is here, and a new chapter is going to be published once a day for the next two weeks. If you like it, please consider donating – as little and as much as you want – through the Paypal button.”

Come to think of it, most online publications can be considered charitable foundations, run by volunteers, earning little to no profit, with a budget often limited to private funds, academic grants, and donations. A hard existence, often hand-to-mouth, but all for the love of the story, yes? And online publications allows publishers to spread this love and their stories in an efficient way, reaching more readers, and reaching them faster.

From the viewpoint of a reader, the online set-up is excellent. Online publications are very accessible--as long as you have access to a computer and an internet connection of course--and some even offer their issues for free. Ease of access goes beyond the current issue: while physical magazines are ephemeral commodities, making it hard to track down back issues, an online publication such as Bewildering Stories often keeps all of its issues available online. An avid reader can browse through issue after issue, or save a copy locally to read later while offline, all without leaving the local computer shop, or from the comfort of his/her own home. (One early argument against online publications is that you can’t read them away from your desktop. That changed, of course, with the advent of convenient e-book reading gadgets such as the Kindle and the iPad.)

For a writer, online publications also have their appeal. The online space is a site for experimentation, as shown by Adam David’s use of hypertext in his short story *snip*. On a more practical level, submissions to online publications are also cheaper to transmit, as a writer only has to e-mail a story, or submit via an online submission system. This beats the traditional method--printing out a manuscript, buying stamps, enclosing a SASE and lining up in a post office--by a mile. In fact, this aspect of online publications has proven so effective that even venerable print publications have begun to accept submissions via the Internet: the Philippines Free Press receives submissions via e-mail, and The New Yorker receives submissions via its online submissions manager (subs have to be in PDF form, though). Asimov’s has also just recently opened its doors to online submissions.

Of course, print publications and their digital brethren still differ in other aspects. For one thing, most online publications reply quicker than their print counterparts. Clarkesworld Magazine , for example, responds in less than a week, with an average response time of 48 hours. Most print publications take at least two months to respond. True, a writer is a patient creature – it is a necessary trait in order to survive – but like a melancholy lover, a writer would rather receive a fast rejection so he or she can (and here my simile breaks down) revise and move on to the next publisher, rather than wait for months for an answer. (Needless to say, a fast acceptance is even more welcome.)

Online magazines can pay as much as the print publications. Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine, for example, pay the professional rate of 5 US cents per word--but of course, the majority of online publications make little money, and so can only pay token amounts to their contributors, or cannot pay them at all.

Of course, writers don’t always send in a story for the money. Is the medium the message? Does the place where a work appears matter at all? At this level enters controversy regarding reputation, respectability, legitimacy, superiority. Are print publications superior to online publications? In the realm at least of speculative fiction, the answer is no.

Jason Sanford in this 2010 blog entry says: “[W]hen you look at this year's list of genre magazines with the most notable story selections [in the Million Writers Award] – Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Thuglit, and Apex Magazine – it is interesting to note that almost all of these are professional-level speculative fiction magazines (with Thuglit instead being a crime magazine). Why so many spec fic magazines on this list? I believe it is because this genre has, to a large degree, accepted online magazines as a legitimate place to publish and read short fiction.”

Online publications get a bad rap because, like blogs, anyone can set them up. Though it is true that there are a number of online publications that do not look at all professional, and publish pieces that are not challenging or engaging or even (gasp) well written, there exist online publications, to quote Sanford, that “publish works by top writers, pay professional rates, have top editorial standards, and have large readerships.”

In terms of story quality, the medium, more often than not, becomes irrelevant.

For a list of online speculative fiction publications, visit Duotrope’s Digest, Ralan’s Webstravaganza and Asia Writes.

[Image source: Screencapture of http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ visited on 11 May 2010]

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