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Neil Clarke – Award-Winning Editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and MoreNeil Clarke – Award-Winning Editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and More Skip to the content Neil Clarke Award-Winning Editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and More Toggle the mobile menu Toggle the search field About Works Edited Clarkesworld Anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Three Clarkesworld: Year Four Clarkesworld: Year Five Clarkesworld: Year Six Clarkesworld: Year Seven Clarkesworld: Year Eight Clarkesworld: Year Nine, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Nine, Volume Two Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume Two Clarkesworld: Year Eleven, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Eleven, Volume Two Clarkesworld: Year Twelve, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Twelve, Volume Two The Best Science Fiction of the Year Series The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 1 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 2 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 3 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 4 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 5 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 6 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 7 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 8 Upgraded Galactic Empires The Final Frontier Touchable Unreality New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction More Human Than Human Not One of Us The Eagle has Landed Submission Guidelines Events Contact Neil Mailing List Search About Works Edited Clarkesworld Anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Three Clarkesworld: Year Four Clarkesworld: Year Five Clarkesworld: Year Six Clarkesworld: Year Seven Clarkesworld: Year Eight Clarkesworld: Year Nine, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Nine, Volume Two Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Ten, Volume Two Clarkesworld: Year Eleven, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Eleven, Volume Two Clarkesworld: Year Twelve, Volume One Clarkesworld: Year Twelve, Volume Two The Best Science Fiction of the Year Series The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 1 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 2 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 3 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 4 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 5 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 6 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 7 The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 8 Upgraded Galactic Empires The Final Frontier Touchable Unreality New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction More Human Than Human Not One of Us The Eagle has Landed Submission Guidelines Events Contact Neil Mailing List Why Clarkesworld isn’t in bookstore newsstands By Neil Clarke On 04/02/2025 In clarkesworld magazine When I started Clarkesworld in 2006, it was already pretty well established that the shortest path to bankruptcy for a magazine was newsstand distribution. Since that time, it’s only become worse as the number of distributors has decreased and the costs have skyrocketed. Print magazine distribution is even more broken than bookstore distribution. When a bookstore returns a book, the publisher gets charged a restocking fee, but the book is back in inventory and can be sent out to another bookstore that wants it. When a magazine is returned, it is destroyed and neither the bookseller nor distributor are penalized. Losses are entirely in the hands of the publisher. When you hear a magazine talking about “sell through” they are talking about the percentage of copies that are actually sold. Of the genre print magazines I’ve been tracking, sell through has ranged between 25 and 50%, meaning more than half of the copies printed and shipped to the distributor end up destroyed. Attempts to better optimize sell through by printing fewer copies don’t necessarily result in better sell through. Complicating matters further, smaller print runs often lead to higher per-unit costs. (The inverse is true as well. Bigger print runs tend to result in cheaper prices. There is an economy of scale that favors larger print runs and publishers with multiple titles.) There’s also the expectation from booksellers that a new magazine will engage in promotional efforts, not just on the national stage, but in their stores as well. This, combined with the necessary sample copies to market to bookstores, can require a more significant financial investment to establish a viable footprint. Now let’s talk about bookstore magazine displays. Have you ever looked for one of the three SFF digests in a bookstore? You have to know what you are looking for because more often than not, you can only see the top inch or two of the cover. This renders cover art, one of the most effective in-person marketing tools, reasonably ineffective. Casual discovery is far less likely than it is with books. Interestingly, this problem could be addressed by shelving the magazines with the genre books, but that is against the standard behavior of nearly every bookstore on the planet. Magazines go here. Books go there. Visibility is extremely limited. The existing genre magazines in that ecosystem established their presence there before these limitations became as big as they are today. Now, supposing you’ve bitten the bullet and decided to invest in a print run large enough for national distribution, you have one more problem: how long it takes to get paid. Most printers expect to be paid within 30 days of your invoice, assuming you’ve convinced them to allow that. (If you don’t have sufficient credit, you may have to pay some or all of it up-front.) It may be months before you are paid, so you will be in the hole for one or more issues before you receive payment or know how you should be scaling your print runs. It can take months to establish a viable newsstand presence and months represent significant numbers of dollars small publishers don’t normally have. It’s a huge gamble and frequently one that fails to pay off. So why establish a newsstand presence at all? Let’s hop back to books for a moment. When the print edition of a book is in stores, it is seen. This often leads to a bump in the sales of ebooks. You could almost considering a market expense, one that could possibly pay for itself. Being on a newsstand is a kind of marketing. It’s being seen and regularly reminding readers you exist. If someone picks up a few issues at the newsstand, they are more likely to become a subscriber, which is where the real money in genre magazines exists. Thing is, before the Amazon fiasco, the leading genre print magazines were selling more digital than print subscriptions. The previously mentioned limited visibility has made it less effective than it once was. In fact, print subscriptions and newsstand sales have been declining in volume for well over a decade. Not only that, print subscriptions have higher overhead than digital subscriptions. It’s entirely possible to earn more from a digital subscription than a print one, even when the print subscription is significantly more expensive. (Thank printing and shipping costs for much of that.) To take things very close to today, there has been a lot of talk about tariffs on Canadian goods. Guess where printers get most of the paper they use for books and magazines? You guessed it, Canada. Even if they don’t happen, paper costs will continue to rise, just not as sharply. We’re a small publisher. Gambling on print distribution was always risky. Today, it would be a deathwish. We’ve had a print edition for many years now and while it can be a headache sometimes, it’s not an anchor that will drag us down. People who really want it that way can get it. We could probably sell a lot more of them, but newsstand distribution would be a substantial drain on revenue, time, and other resources. The same effort put into expanding our digital distribution and subscriptions would likely yield far greater results for our bottom line without having to risk the entire operation. With limited time and resources, I don’t see any path to print newsstand distribution in our future. Simply put, the idea of having Clarkesworld on a newsstand is more nostalgic than practical. 2024 Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll Final Voting By Neil Clarke On 02/11/2025 In clarkesworld magazine Please check out the February Clarkesworld editorial for a list of this year’s Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll finalists in Short Story, Novelettes/Novellas, and Cover art. Voting on the winners in each category will close on February 15th at 11PM EST and this year’s winners will be announced in my March editorial. Clarkesworld’s 2024 Fiction By Neil Clarke On 12/17/2024 In clarkesworld magazine Here are the stories and cover art published in Clarkesworld Magazine’s 2024 issues (in order of appearance and classified by word count):   Short Stories “Nothing of Value” by Aimee Ogden “Down the Waterfall” by Cécile Cristofari “Just Another Cat in a Box” by E.N. Auslender “Rail Meat” by Marie Vibbert “You Dream of the Hive” by C. M. Fields “You Cannot Grow in Salted Earth” by Priya Chand “Scalp” by H.H. Pak “The Flowers That We Intend To Share” by Rajeev Prasad “The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin” by Zohar Jacobs “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim “The Beam Eidolon” by Ryan Marie Ketterer “Lonely Ghosts” by Meghan Feldman “Hello! Hello! Hello!” by Fiona Jones “Phosphorescence” by Ben Berman Ghan “Nine Beauties and the Entangled Threads” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires “One Flew Over the Songhua River” by Qi Ran, translated by Andy Dudak “Her Body, The Ship” by Z. K. Abraham “Geminoid” by Malena Salazar Maciá “Swarm X1048 – Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris, “6”” by F.E. Choe “The Lark Ascending” by Eleanna Castroianni “An Intergalactic Smugglers Guide to Homecoming” by Tia Tashiro “The Rambler” by Shen Dacheng, translated by Cara Healey “Occurrence at O1339” by Kelly Jennings “The Oldest Fun” by Natalia Theodoridou “Fishy” by Alice Towey “The Portmeirion Road” by Fiona Moore “In Which Caruth is Correct” by Carolyn Zhao “The Weight of Your Own Ashes” by Carlie St. George “Our Father” by K. J. Khan “Twenty-Four Hours” by H.H. Pak “Our Chatbots Said “I Love You,” Shall We Meet?” by Caroline M. Yoachim “Artistic Encounters of a Monumental Nature” by S.B. Divya “Bodies” by Cat McMahan “Off Track” by Luc Diamant “Every Hopeless Thing” by Tia Tashiro “I Will Meet You When the Artifacts End” by Amal Singh “Stellar Evolutions in Pop Idol Artistry” by Em X. Liu “Aktis Aeliou, or The Machine of Margots Destruction” by Natalia Theodoridou “The Happiness Institute” by AnaMaria Curtis “Born Outside” by Polenth Blake “The Time Capsule” by Alice Towey “The Sort” by Thomas Ha “Molum, Molum, Molum the Scourge” by Rich Larson “The Deformed Saint and the Poison Wind” by David McGillveray “Where My Love Still Lives” by Emily Taylor “Three Circuits of the Monoceros Ring” by Marisca Pichette “The Music Must Always Play” by Marissa Lingen “Fish Fear Me, You Need Me” by Tiffany Xue “Broken” by Laura Williams McCaffrey “How to Remember Perfectly” by Eric Schwitzgebel “A Theory of Missing Affections” by Renan Bernardo “A World of Milk and Promises” by R H Wesley “A Space O/pera” by Abby Nicole Yee “The Buried People” by Nigel Brown “The Children of Flame” by Fiona Moore “Fishing the Intergalactic Stream” by Louis Inglis Hall “Midnight Patron” by Mike Robinson “The Face of God: A Documentary” by Damián Neri “LuvHome™” by Resa Nelson “Mirror Stages” by Claire Jia-Wen “Luminous Glass, Vibrant Seeds” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires “Technicolor Bath” by Raahem Alvi “Unquiet Graves” by Michael Swanwick “Stranger Seas Than These” by L Chan “From Across Time” by Chisom Umeh “The Painted Skin and the Final Stroke” by Zhu Yixuan “Souljacker” by Shari Paul “Driver” by Sameem Siddiqui “The Coffee Machine” by Celia Corral-Vázquez, translated by Sue Burke “Life Sentence” by Gelian, translated by Blake Stone-Banks “Retirement Plan” by Paul Starkey   Novelettes “Binomial Nomenclature and the Mother of Happiness” by Alexandra Munck “Stars Don’t Dream” by Chi Hui, translated by John Chu “Kardashev’s Palimpsest” by David Goodman “The Peregrine Falcon Flies West” by Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang “A Brief Oral History of the El Zopilote Dock” by Alaya Dawn Johnson “The Arborist” by Derrick Boden “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha “The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman “The Blinding Light of Resurrection” by Rajeev Prasad “The Reflection of Sand” by Tan Gang, translated by Emily Jin “Himalia” by Carrie Vaughn “The Best Version of Yourself” by Grant Collier “Something Crossing Over, Something Coming Back” by Timothy Mudie “Canyon Dance” by Rajeev Prasad “The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia” by Cirilo Lemos, translated by Thamirys Gênova “Those Who Remember the World” by Ben Berman Ghan “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being” by A. W. Prihandita “Duty of Care” by E.N. Auslender “The Slide” by Oliver Stifel “Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium” by Thoraiya Dyer   Novellas “The Indomitable Captain Holli” by Rich Larson “Fractal Karma” by Arula Ratnakar Rebuilding Clarkesworld Subscriptions By Neil Clarke On 08/03/2024 In clarkesworld magazine I’ve been posting most of these updates in recent Clarkesworld editorials, but it’s only the 3rd and that’s a long time to wait for the next one. Here’s a recap: Last year, we were informed by Amazon that they were ending their magazine subscription program. We had been in the program for well over a decade and it had been where the majority of our subscribers received their ebook editions. If you had a Kindle (which is the most popular ebook device), it was extremely convenient and easy-to-use. The ecosystem was designed so anyone could figure it out. As a result, it was quite popular. There were some downsides for publishers, the biggest being that Amazon treated subscribers as their customers. That was great for things like customer support, but when it came time to help those people move their subscriptions to other services, it became a nightmare. Amazon would not share their contact information with us. We did what we could, but when the program ended, so did thousands of our subscriptions. At the same time, Amazon opted to launch a Kindle Unlimited program for magazines. (Different terms than the book program.) We were among those invited and the non-negotiable terms included paying us less than half of what we once earned from them. I’ve described this previously as a hostage situation and what I meant by that is we were left with a choice, take the deal or close. Even taking the deal, we weren’t sure we’d make it, but the odds were better, so we held our nose and took it. Now that enough time has passed, I can say that taking the bad deal is the reason we survived that year. It gave us the time we needed to make a dent in rebuilding our subscriptions elsewhere. A few months ago, they invited us to renew our existing contract for three months, but with an additional 50% cut in revenue. The idea was to move to new terms in July which, when we did the math, included another steep cut. Thanks to combined cuts, the anticipated revenue was not only insulting, but potentially harmful to our ability to sell subscriptions elsewhere. This time, however, they were open to negotiating, but that didn’t work out. As of July 1st, we’re no longer in the program. We won’t rule out returning, but I’d rate the chances as slim. We were able to walk away from the table for a few reasons. there was overlap between the old and new program, so we socked away that revenue for such an emergency our subscription rebuilding efforts were more successful than anticipated the amount offered wouldn’t have closed the gap anyway a sliver of hope that the time allowed by #1 would be enough to close the subscription gap In my July editorial, I laid it all out on the table and explained that we still had some time to recover the remaining 347 subscriptions needed to continue. The response was wonderful. Throughout the month, the number creeped downwards. It was in the 130s by the time I wrote our August editorial. That swift response extended the amount of time our reserves would last and, for the first time in a year, I felt confident that we could pull this off. Early on August 1st, BaltSHOWPLACE shared my July editorial on Reddit (specifically the printSF reddit, but it would later spread to others) and we experienced a surge in new subscriptions.  The first few days of the month are usually a bit chaotic. It’s when a bunch of subscriptions come up for renewals, so there’s loss to churn (people not renewing) and a fresh batch of credit card processing errors. It can take a few days to figure out just where the numbers will settle, but it’s easy to work out the best and worst case scenarios. The surge left us sitting somewhere between the two. More of the data resolved overnight and now I can confidently declare: We did it! We are now back to the number of subscribers we had before Amazon pulled the plug! What we did not include in our goal was making up for the lost time (recovering the anticipated growth we would have experienced had the program not ended) and I can happily say that the surge has bitten into some of that as well, giving it a great start. What we have now will allow the lights to stay on. Our bare minimum line in the sand. Everything that builds on that from here forward will be put towards our continued efforts to pay our staff a living wage. That has been and will continue to be a priority for us. Only a few genre publications have professionally-paid staff and none of those publications were born of the digital age like us. We aim to be the first and believe that it’s not only attainable, but a goal worth prioritizing. We hope you agree and that the ball can keep rolling towards that. Thank you to everyone that has subscribed and boosted and cheered us on. You have no idea how much this means to all of us here. Thank you. On fast rejections By Neil Clarke On 02/11/2024 In clarkesworld magazine, writing At Clarkesworld, we try to respond to submissions in under 48 hours. Sometimes life gets in the way and that can slide to a week, but we always make an effort to catch up and return to normal. We’ve made this response time a goal and have been committed to it for a very long time. Every now and then, an author decides to misunderstand or be upset by a quick response. It happens often enough, that I’ve sometimes sat on stories just to get them over the 24 hour mark, which seems to decrease, but not eliminate, the outrage factor. Rather than repeat myself with those authors, I’m just going to start pointing people to this post. Things you need to know We actually read every submission. Seriously, why would we waste our time handling this many submissions if we had no intention of reading them? Suggesting otherwise is insulting. A good or great story can still be rejected. Most well-known editors have rejected at least one story that has gone on to win awards and usually, they have no regrets about that. The story simply wasn’t right for their project or they weren’t the right editor for that story. It eventually landed in the right market with the right editor, found its audience, and was celebrated for it. We like to see that. Don’t be misled. Magazines that have slower response times don’t necessarily spend more time reading your story than we did. The difference in response times is almost entirely related to the amount of time your story sits in a pile, unread. If a publication averages 30 days, it means they can keep up with the daily volume and could have a 48-hour response time, if it was one of their priorities. To us, getting back to you quickly is a sign of respect. The sooner we reject this one, the sooner you can send it to the next market. It also resets the clock on when you can send us your next one. Every story is a clean-slate, so rejecting one or ten or hundred doesn’t mean we’ve given up on you. While a few authors sell quickly, others have submitted over fifty before landing an acceptance here. Everyone’s journey is different. We did warn you. Our average response time is listed in our guidelines and on the submission confirmation screen. 2023 Clarkesworld Submissions Snapshot By Neil Clarke On 02/02/2024 In clarkesworld magazine, slush, stats Now that the year is over and I’ve had some time to sit with the data, I can share a snapshot of the 2023 submissions data and a few observations. For the sake of clarity, the data here represents stories that were submitted from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2023. It does not include the submissions that we identified as plagiarism or generated by LLMs (also loosely called “AI” submissions). We received a total of 13,207 submissions in 2023. This includes the 1,124 Spanish language submissions that were part of a one-month Spanish Language Project (SLP). We were closed to submissions from February 20, 2023 through March 12, 2023 due to a surge (hundreds in a month) of “AI”-generated submissions. During that period, we made updates to our software in an attempt to better manage this new form of unwanted works. The changes made helped us avoid the need to close submissions again, despite continued surges. (This is a band aid, not a cure. Higher volumes could necessitate future closures.) Combined, the number of submissions received was our second-highest year ever. (2020 and its wild pandemic submission patterns holds the record by just a few dozen.) If we consider just the English language submissions, it was down, but only because we were closed for a few weeks. Assuming the weekly submissions volume would have held during that time, we would have had roughly the same volume as we did in 2022 and, with SLP submissions, our best overall year ever. 7,898 (59.8%) of the submissions were from authors that had never submitted to Clarkesworld before. Courtesy of the SLP, that percentage is considerably higher than normal. In case it isn’t clear, I consider this to be a good thing. Opening the door for authors that had been unable to submit in the past was a major point of that project. We received submissions from 154 different countries, smashing our previous record by 12. US-based authors accounted for 7780 (58.9%) of all works, a new record for lowest levels from there. However, if we remove the SLP, it increases to 64.1%, which is the highest percentage we’ve seen in several years. I’ve tried to dig into the reasons for this change have have identified two likely causes, both of which are tied to the generated submissions crisis: The press coverage concerning our situation with “AI” submissions was global and effectively spread the word that we had closed submissions, but the news of our reopening did not receive similar attention. American authors were far more likely to hear that we were once again accepting submissions. With the amount of time we had to spend on the “AI” and Amazon subscription problems, we did not put as much effort into promoting our openness to international submissions. As I’ve noted in past years, many foreign authors have difficulty believing that US-based publications are open to submissions from them. (History certainly makes it look that way.) Making public statements about your willingness to do so is an important part of undoing the damage and it must be maintained. The decrease in the time we spent doing that in 2023 almost certainly had an impact. While the percentage is disappointing (please don’t take this as not wanting more US-based authors, we want everyone, but one group needs more encouragement than the other), it is recoverable and was offset by the SLP. If anything, that’s a reason for doing more language-based projects in the future. It was clearly more effective than anything we’ve done in the past. Short stories (works under 7,500 words) represented 85.9% of all submissions, followed by novelettes (works between 7,500 and 17,500 words) at 12.7% and novellas (17,500+, our cap is 22,000) at 1.4%. Acceptances followed a similar trend with 82.9%, 14.8%, and 2.3% respectively. Science fiction took the lead across all categories. The following is our submission funnel (by genre) for 2023. The outer ring is all submissions. The middle ring includes stories that were passed onto the second round of evaluation. The inner ring is acceptances. I discourage people from using this data to determine what they should and should not send to us. The data reflects our opinions on the individual works submitted to us at that specific time, and does not represent a general opinion on the length or genre of works submitted to us. If we were no longer interested in considering a specific type of work, it would either be present in our hard-sell list or missing from our list of accepted genres. (This already happened with horror.) We will not waste your (or our) time by leaving a category open if we have no intention of considering it for publication. Genres have trends and right now, some of those trends are working for or against stories in our submissions review process. Works across all categories are still reaching the second round, indicating (to me) that it is still important that we continue to encourage and consider works in those genres. 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