I heard only last night that Realms of Fantasy will soon be defunct. I’m really bummed by this news. For years Realms has been at the top of my list for places I want to break into. The finished product looked great, and the fiction they published was what I liked to read and write. I’ve had a subscription for some years now, five or six. I did manage to publish a story there last year, and for that I’m glad. There’s an upswelling of support for the magazine, a call to save it from what looks like a sure demise. I’ll probably participate however I can, but I’m skeptical that it will do any good. It’s owned by a relatively large company, and I don’t imagine a promise to subscribe from several hundred writers is going to change their mind. And outside of that, I don’t know what can be done. Outside of some tiny uptick in sales, we can’t make newsstand sales any more profitable for them, especially, I fear, in the long run.

It’s a sad day, not only because I liked the magazine personally, but because it is another part of a trend of declining sales in the short fiction market. Hopefully other promising magazines like Fantasy will move in to take up the slack. And hopefully more magazines will begin to crack the code for publishing success in the 21st century. But I fear many more long-standing markets will die before this happens. And that’s too bad.