Fiction magazines come in print and online formats and can be categorized by genre, location, audience, or featured writers. Some pay writers while others offer copies or exposure. The internet has changed the industry, making digital content more popular. Magazines often focus on specific genres or themes and used to include fiction as a section of the overall magazine.
The two most common variants of fiction magazines are print magazines and online magazines. Within these two categories, fiction magazines can be divided by genre, location, audience, or even the writers featured in the magazine. The stories can be thematically similar or they can be a collection of stories about a particular region of the world. Magazines seem to exist for almost any genre or subject, and a writer looking to locate his work can do so by determining what his story is primarily about and finding a magazine that focuses on that genre or theme.
Some fiction magazines will pay writers for their work, while others may only pay in copies of the magazine itself. Others may simply allow a sub and consider it sufficient. In the past, a writer could make a living by publishing stories in fiction magazines, which deal exclusively with made-up stories rather than true stories. Most magazines prefer writers to keep their stories under 8,000 words, which would allow the magazine to run more stories in a single issue.
The advent of the internet has changed the publishing world and many fiction magazines are only available online. Some still produce print magazines as well, although producing digital content is cheaper for the publisher and easier to access for consumers. Pay for writers has generally declined, in many cases quite dramatically, to the point that making a living publishing in fiction magazines is extremely difficult for writers, and in many cases impossible.
Some fiction magazines focus exclusively on a particular genre. Horror magazines have been exceptionally popular throughout the 20th century, as have science fiction magazines. Magazines featuring literary fiction were often read by more academic readers, which doesn’t mean that genre writing was less adept. However, audiences tended to differ by genre or theme, and many magazines produced issues devoted entirely to one theme. An issue might, for example, focus entirely on family fiction, vampire stories, or food.
In the past, it was not uncommon to find magazines that printed fiction only as part of the overall magazine. A specific section of the magazine would be devoted to fictional stories, and writers often coveted these spaces because the writer was given more of a distinct spotlight for his writing.
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