Thursday, June 8, 2017

Short crime fiction scene

This week the facebooks have been sprinkled with discussions of the publishing scene for short crime fiction.

Brian Lindenmuth linked to this piece he'd written a few years back, a post worth your time.

Collecting the Short Crime Fiction Scene




While I pine away for an annual best of anthology for short stories published online there is a way that future generations of readers will remember the vibrant short crime fiction scene, site specific print anthologies. Right now anyway books last and websites fade and the sites that have anthologies will stand a greater chance of being remembered down the road.

Here’s an interesting thing. Next time you’re at a thrift store or a garage sale or whatever keep an eye out for old genre magazines and anthologies. It can be science fiction or fantasy or whatever. Take a look at the table of contents and read the authors names. It’s almost guaranteed that some of the names you’ll recognize and others you won’t. Some of them made it to greater posterity and some didn’t. But here you are, however many years down the road, holding something that contains a story by this person. Some of the folks published in the online zines will go on to greater fame and some won’t; some will publish novels and some won’t. Regardless of what may or may not happen at a future date the scene deserves to be remembered.

I don’t want the online scene to fold and turn into print. I like the online scene BUT I do want to see some of the fiction from online make the transition to print. Some have. As I mentioned above some of the sites have been publishing anthologies of stories that were originally published online. I just wanted to take a moment to highlight the site anthologies that were out there because THEY are the permanent record.


Buy them now, while they are all still reasonably available, because this is the scene as far as future generations are concerned. The legacy is being defined now and your small part in all of this is to remember.

Back in 2005 Anthony Neil Smith >>>

No comments: