It says something about the state of the written sf market when we sf writers have a hard time connecting with the users of something as wildly popular as Halo.

I’m not so sure. It’s risky to generalize about a group as large as Halo players, but I suspect that a lot of Halo players also enjoy games like Grand Theft Auto. It doesn’t follow that a similar percentage of SF readers would also enjoy crime fiction. What is most salient about Halo and GTA is that they’re games featuring a lot of shooting; the worlds in which they’re set contribute to the players’ enjoyment, but if the gameplay were unsatisfying, the settings wouldn’t be enough to attract a lot of people no matter how well realized they were. Given that written SF doesn’t provide any gameplay at all, I don’t know if Halo players are the natural audience for written SF.

I’m not saying that there’s no market for fiction that targets gamers; I think the Halo tie-in novels have been quite successful, and a magazine that tried to emulate them might do well. But I don’t know that it necessarily reflects poorly on the state of written SF that Halo players aren’t automatically drawn to it.

I’m really enjoying these posts on the whole Big 3 issue. And it’s nice to see various heavies – oh, wait. it’s just GvG – from them chime in.

If I ever win the lottery, I am coming to your house n my blimp to pick you up so we can discuss your being the editor of Armored Magazine.

http://homelessmoon.com/wordpress/?p=112

I think the biggest challenge for the big three is that they are not intensely defined. Because of their interest in a broad mix of stories, it’s much harder to define your niche and audience – High Country News had this problem as well, because we weren’t an entirely environmental newspaper, and also weren’t national, we were only focused on the western states, so we had to go hunting for other ways to find our readers.

This difficulty in defining a definite direct mail audience is also why I think online marketing has a lot of potential, because it allows readers to prequalify themselves by arriving at your website, these are readers who are already interested generally in your content and so its worthwhile to try to bring them in and convert them. And these same readers are often people who you can’t really profile easily through direct mail.

>However, whenever I’ve tried marketing to the computer game world, the effort has flopped.

Perhaps GvG needs to get into bed with a games company to bring in some investment, like has happened with 2000AD and The Judge Dredd Megazine. For a few years, they were run by successive publishing companies who had no idea what an SF magazine was useful for, then they were bought by Rebellion, presumably to help spin off games.

The difference is that Rebellion owns the rights to all material in the magazine whereas the SF magazine publishers don’t. I can imagine that there might be room for partnerships somewhere, though.