April 13th, 2010 / 5:18 pm
Random
Roxane Gay
Random
Two Things
On his blog, Jason Sanford asks if online genre fiction is all powerful.
Here’s a video about online literary journals.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPBp2GGjcyg
Tags: Emerging Writers Network, Fiction Writers Review, storysouth, Waccamaw
I think there is a factor he is missing: the rabidness of genre fans. I don’t mean this dismissively, but genre fans are simply more likely to see it as their duty to bump the ranking of genre work.
Take, for example, IMDB’s top 250 movies list. If you follow it, you will notice that everytime a sci-fi or fantasy movie comes out that has fan buzz, it shoots up the IMDB ranking, often before the film has even been released! Almost every comic book, sci-fi or fantasy film that is decent at all flies into the top of the ranking, often making #1, before the movie has been widely seen. Then as more people see it the films drop down.
My guess is that the readers of online genre magazines are more likely to go and vote in something like the MWA and probably the genre magazines themselves are more likely to promote those awards and urge readers to go vote.
You’ll notice, I think, that the magazines represented in the MWA are not necessarily the most talked about magazines in the lit world (nor likely the most read) and comparing a the MWA to something not voted on online to something like Dzanc’s Best of the Web shows a different picture.
I think there is a factor he is missing: the rabidness of genre fans. I don’t mean this dismissively, but genre fans are simply more likely to see it as their duty to bump the ranking of genre work.
Take, for example, IMDB’s top 250 movies list. If you follow it, you will notice that everytime a sci-fi or fantasy movie comes out that has fan buzz, it shoots up the IMDB ranking, often before the film has even been released! Almost every comic book, sci-fi or fantasy film that is decent at all flies into the top of the ranking, often making #1, before the movie has been widely seen. Then as more people see it the films drop down.
My guess is that the readers of online genre magazines are more likely to go and vote in something like the MWA and probably the genre magazines themselves are more likely to promote those awards and urge readers to go vote.
You’ll notice, I think, that the magazines represented in the MWA are not necessarily the most talked about magazines in the lit world (nor likely the most read) and comparing a the MWA to something not voted on online to something like Dzanc’s Best of the Web shows a different picture.
2 cents
2 cents