Strange Horizons: Summary (5 of 5)

Summary

As a non-profit magazine, Strange Horizons is guided by its mission rather than profit. It is achieving its goal of expanding professional status and literary appreciation for speculative fiction, judging by its ability to attract well-known and high-quality content providers and its content being nominated for awards and picked up for reprint by other venues.  However, whether it is expanding readership is questionable. Its outreach efforts through its forum and social media sites are perfunctory and there is room for a great deal of improvement in increasing its visibility and making the website more accessible.

Strange Horizons: Social Media (4 of 5)

Social Media

Strange Horizons has a blog, which is incorporated on its website; a Twitter account; and a Facebook page. The blog mentions various magazine-related events such as readings and the fund drive. The Twitter account primarily links to new content as it goes up; and the Facebook page, a basic organization page, seems to have become primarily an outlet for blog postings of someone who has nothing to do with the magazine but has a blog with the same title.

Although the magazine has accounts on what is currently considered the "required" social media sites, it does not appear to be doing anything innovative or particularly appealing to reach new readers.

Strange Horizons: Website Design and Search Engine Optimization (3 of 5)

Website Design

The design of the magazine website is basic, but well organized and clean. Departments are located in a frame along the left side and department contents are legibly arranged within the main frame using basic typographic design elements of bold type, white space, and an appropriate visual on occasion. In addition to links to the departments, links to the submission guidelines, how to donate, the blog, and the community forum are available in the left-hand frame.

The website is not optimized for viewing on smartphones nor is it available for the Kindle or iBooks. There is not an RSS feed for the entire site; however, the Reviews department and blog are available by feed.

Given that many readers prefer not to read for pleasure on computers, the magazine may want to look into providing ePUB or PDF formats of its content.

Search Engine Optimization

According to www.siteguruji.com, the magazine does not have a sitemap, which would help search engines find and index the site’s pages. This lack may explain the uneven search results. Strange Horizons does not show up on the first page of Bing or Google when using the search terms “online science fiction stories”; however, it does appear on the first page for the search terms “online science fiction magazine” and “online fantasy magazine.” The magazine does not appear on any of the first five pages when using a contributor’s name + “short story” in Google, although a link to a discussion forum thread comes up using that search in Bing.

It would appear that the magazine could stand to up its visibility in search engines.

Strange Horizons: Funding and Content (2 of 5)

Funding

Strange Horizons is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit business. The magazine neither carries advertising nor lists sponsors on its website. It has an annual operating budget of approximately $20,000. About one-third of the annual budget is funded through donations, primarily during a yearly fund drive. Some years the goal is met (2009 was over); some years (2010) it is not.

The magazine also generates revenue by being an Amazon.com affiliate. Its bookstore, reachable through a link on the magazine’s home page, lists publications of its contributors by month and is updated weekly.

The staff is composed entirely of volunteers. Staff members reside in at least eight states and two foreign countries.

All contributors of featured content (not posts in the user forum) are paid professional rates.

The all-volunteer staff and its decentralization allows the magazine to keep down costs and put what funding it does have toward paying the professional rates that attracts quality authors and artists.

Content, Copyright, and Permissions

Content is obtained through author/artist submission. For text content, the magazine obtains exclusive electronic rights for two months and, for art, ongoing non-exclusive electronic rights for the current issue. The original authors retain copyrights.

The limited exclusivity of the magazines rights and the authors’ retention of copyright also helps to attract professional authors and quality work.

User-Generated Content

The magazine attempts to build community through its discussion forum. Each article and short story is given a thread and there are threads for general discussion of books, magazines, visual media, and random chit chat. These threads are not very active, although a particular article or story will occasionally generate several posts of actual discussion.

Strange Horizons: Introduction and Mission (1 of 5)

Strange Horizons is a free weekly, non-profit, web-based magazine that publishes short fiction, poetry, art, reviews, and articles of interest to the speculative fiction community each week. The editors use the phrase "speculative fiction" as an umbrella term embracing science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, slipstream, and a host of sub-genres. The magazine has run weekly since its founding in September 2000.

Mission

Strange Horizons is committed “to expanding readership, professional status and literary appreciation of speculative fiction in all media, for all people.”

The magazine has been in operation successfully for 10 years. Each year of Strange Horizons’ existence, multiple short stories, interviews, etc. have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies and nominated and won various genre awards. Susan Marie Groppi won the 2010 World Fantasy Award in the special award—nonprofessional category for editing Strange Horizons. (Although Strange Horizons is considered a professional magazine because it pays its contributors, the editor is not considered professional because, as a volunteer, she is not paid.)

Judging by its continued existence and recognition as a publisher of quality work, Strange Horizons is achieving most of its mission.

In Digital reading spaces: How expert readers handle books, the Web and electronic paper, Terje Hillesund reports

Sometimes, ["Carl"] said, when working away from printers at his cottage, he urgently needs to read an article kept on his laptop. At one level on–screen reading is unproblematic; he can read through the text, understanding every sentence and paragraph. At the same time, he often gets a feeling of failing to get fully to grips with the text, that he somehow loses oversight and is unable to fence the article in, which is frustrating. When asked to expand on these utterances, he says that in order to see connections and make inferences when reading, he often needs to have several text passages or ideas present simultaneously. In printed versions, the passages are physically there on the sheets of paper, and he can flick back and forth, stick his finger in between sheets and keep several ideas in his memory at the same time; comparing, relating and thinking. He is unable to do this on the laptop; here, the text and the author’s intention somehow slip through his fingers. [emphasis mine]

This, to me, is the main problem with online/ereader reading and editing. I have been told, first when starting to edit electronically and later when reading on a Kindle, that I would develop the ability to remember where I saw something in an electronic document the way I currently remember placement of text in paper documents. To a certain extent I have developed this ability, at least for editing. I can remember some of the surrounding text, perhaps whether it was near a section head or graphic. If memory fails and I remember the phrasing, I can electronically search for what I'm looking for. Perhaps as I become better acquainted with the Kindle, I will likewise develop the ability to find a specific previously read passage, perhaps by using the bar at the bottom or the percentage-read indicator.

However, an electronic document is still not conducive to the type of comparative reading that "Carl" mentions in the above passage. One workaround when reading on a computer, whether on- or offline, is to use multiple windows or tabs to open many documents at once. This method can also be used to access different locations within the same document when reading online; however, it does not work when using various offline devices such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Kindle for Mac.

But ereaders don't have a workaround. While I see various improvements--contrast, refresh speed, annotation capabilities--being developed for current ereaders, none of them appear to be working on the capability to allow quick flipping back and forth between passages within a book or between passages in different books. In fact, I have seen no mention of the capability being developed to allow more than one book to be open simultaneously.

Currently reading on electronic devices recreates the pre-codex days of reading from scrolls where comparative and reflective reading is impaired and comprehension less. Without some workaround or technological solution, I don't think ereaders will take over completely or even in the classroom the way many publishers and ereader sellers expect.