I had a 7:30 a.m. breakfast with Bob Silverberg at the Hyatt Friday, which turned out to be the second of three breakfasts he was to eat that morning. How he keeps his boyish figure I have no idea, considering that at our breakfast alone he gobbled a huge open-faced bagel with a great schmears of cream cheese and mounds of smoked salmon. (Well, actually, Bob never gobbles, as he’s far too dignified for that … but you get the idea.)

As we were finishing up our meal, Gardner Dozois passed by to tell us that he saw Fred Pohl having breakfast alone (not many of us were up that early after Thursday night’s partying), and so we joined him, along with Susan Casper, and we all kibitzed for another hour. Who needs a convention when you can sit at a table like that?

I could have spent the day there having a ball chatting and doing my best to absorb the assembled wisdom of the ages, but I had to leave for my 10:00 panel, “SF Magazine Publication and Market Share.” Bradford Lyau moderated me, Sheila Williams and Stanley Schmidt on the proposed mandate of “How many people are still reading short fiction in monthly magazines? Is the market growing or contracting? What influence do anthologies and web-publications have on market share?” I’m not sure whether we fully addressed the topic—I know that we were all trying to remain as upbeat as possible—but the following issues came up.

Sheila reminded us that it’s possible for a magazine with a smaller circulation to be more profitable than one with a higher circulation, if the additional subscriptions came about through a venue such as Publishers Clearing House, in which a magazine might make little or no money on the subs in hopes of making a later profit on renewals.

Stan told us how a book publisher once complimented him on a positive quality magazines have over books, in that magazines have the same customers coming back again and again, whereas book publishers have to invent the wheel with each new author. As I added to that, in book publishing, the author is the brand, not the publisher, but in magazine publishing, it’s the other way around—the magazine is the brand, not the author. People may look forward to the next issue of Asimov’s, but they never say, “Oh, boy, I can’t wait to get my hands on that next book from Bantam.” Particular publishers may guarantee quality, but I don’t feel they garner loyalty in readers in the same way. Book publishers may try, such as when they put out lines such as the old Ace Specials that brought us Stan Robinson, William Gibson, and Lucius Shepard, but they can’t really replicate that aspect of magazine publishing.

I pointed out that for all the doom and gloom people have over the future of magazine publishing, science-fiction magazines are the survivors of the fiction publishing world. You don’t see panels at Western conventions on which editors are asked to speak about the shrinking magazine market, because there aren’t any Western fiction mags out there. And just try to find a spicy zeppelin or South Sea island fiction magazine these days! Once, there were hundreds of mass-market fiction magazines published every month, and now science fiction and mysteries are all that’s left. So we should allow ourselves a moment of pride over that before we declare that the SF magazine dead.

The last comment I made was in response to a question about what we all thought the potential circulation for the SF magazines could be if everything was done right. I pointed out that the falling circulation was not entirely to be blamed on the magazines themselves. SF magazines are currently positioned in the worst possible space on magazine racks and shelves, and require potential customers to crawl on their bellies like snakes to find copies on the bottom shelves. I know from experience that when Science Fiction Age was placed near the cash register, not requiring shoppers to show off the abilities of Sherlock Holmes to track it down, and allowing for impulse purchases, we sold amazingly well. But the months we did not pay bribes (I mean, placement fees) for that, the sales fell off. Which tells me that people will buy the magazines if they can find them. It’s not that there isn’t a market out there, it’s that the system is rigged against them. The public will clearly buy SF magazines. They just won’t get on their knees to find them.

After the panel, I went to John Kessel’s 11:30 a.m. reading, and heard him perform his recently published F&SF story, “Pride and Prometheus,” which is also in his new collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories. The tale melds the worlds of Jame Austen and Victor Frankenstein. After the reading, we headed to the lobby of the Hyatt to meet Sheila Williams for lunch. We found her at the bar with David Ira Cleary and his wife Cheryl.

I was happy to see David, since I hadn’t spoken to him in years. I’d published several short stories of his back when I edited Science Fiction Age, and I was glad to have a chance to catch up on what he’s been up to lately. (There we are above.)

Then it was off for lunch with John and Sheila, a story which will be continued on the next rock.