I’m currently collecting data for a prolonged meditation on pulp fiction, pulp writers, and the current resurgence of the pulp mentality in indie publishing circles. The image above appeared on the pulp covers. Among the habits I’ve built up around this: following the Pulp Covers blog, where the image above appeared in my RSS reader.
You’ve got to admire the brutal efficiency of the title development here – 10 Story Mystery Magazine! 10 outstanding fiction aces! It’s a promise so clean and keyword driven you’d be forgiven for thinking it was developed by a 21st century content marketer with one eye on effective search engine optimization.
The more lurid and suggestive titles for individual, which promise much and give away little, support that clean promise and draw strength from it. The Voice in the Mist would be far less effective as a stand-alone title, requiring really careful promotion and packaging to make it clear what genre and style you’re getting. Meanwhile, the main title gains a lot by those little splashes of colour from the story titles, their promise and intrigue reeling in a reader tempted by the big hook.
I suspect this approach would still be hideously effective here in 2022 — the customer is relatively clear about what they’re getting, and who the target audience is. Some research suggests these were 6.75″ x 9.5 periodicals of about 116 pages to 120 pages. At a rough guess, I’d say about 30,000 to 60,000 words of fiction a month, depending on the formatting choices, which isn’t entirely out of the range of a fast writer (or, more sensibly, several writers banding together to produce 1-2 5000 word stories a month).
Add in some recurring characters to create some issue-to-issue continuity and there’s a really interesting publishing model to play with (and I suspect some people are, probably in the horror and western spaces, possibly even in romance).
But — and you probably suspected this was coming — what a lot of folks who follow the quick production pulp path miss is one of the key market considerations of pulp fiction: the authors wrote fast and hard, putting out a prodigious amount of content, because they were writing for a disposable market. Stories were read once and discarded, the focus was on the new and the next issue. Nobody was engaging with backlist other than a few rabid fans.
Sure, there were outliers who broke this paradigm, but writing the same disposable fiction here in 2022 has a very different effect. When your entire backlist is always available for sale, making sure each new story is an invitation to go read more rather than forget and dispose can be a smarter play. Every story written for a magazine like this would go on to be collected, transformed into best-offs and themed collections, and repurposed into other works.
And that’s a very different paradigm than pulp writers wrote within, and I’m curious to see how some of the more prolific examples would have played things if working in a 2022 market.
