[Results] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hard Sells Survey
100 science fiction and fantasy writers & editors weigh in on the subjects that impact their enthusiasm for a story
Receiving a story rejection sometimes feels like going on a first date that doesn’t lead to a second date. Sometimes they’ll tell you why it didn’t work out, but usually, you have to read between the lines. Was it my dumb mustache? Did they feel judged when they learned I’m vegan?
When a story piles up form rejections, it’s easy to go crazy with this guessing game, especially if it includes a “hard sell,” an element that makes some editors/readers predisposed against the story.
Many magazines include a list of hard sells, but these aren’t universal or uniform. Is it just Clarkesworld that doesn’t want to read a story about children who find a talking foot in a cornfield, or does everyone kind of feel that way, whether or not they say it?
The idea behind this survey is to gauge the attitudes of writers and editors fairly plugged into the current speculative fiction landscape towards some common divisive topics, to discover which subjects are actually hard sells, and which are just a tad tricky.
My intent isn’t to discourage anyone writing about any of these topics — the opposite, actually — but I personally find this kind of information helpful for gauging expectations and understanding how my fellow writers and readers feel about various topics of techniques.
Let’s dig in!
About the Findings:
Survey criteria:
The only hard criteria for the survey was that an element/subject had to be on at least one SFF (science fiction and/or fantasy) magazine’s list of hard sells (and it should be noted that the survey was written with short fiction in mind.). This produced a list of 50 or so subjects that I whittled down to 20, to make the list manageable. This process was inherently arbitrary, but I attempted to include items that “feel” like hard sells, but are still fairly common for writers to employ anyway.
About the audience:
Almost exactly 100 qualifying SFF writers and editors took the survey. The survey was primarily distributed through Codex, a group for working speculative fiction writers. That means these are mostly people very attuned to current fiction trends, but they likely don’t reflect the attitudes of a more general, casual readership.
Some demographic breakdowns:
100% of respondents are active SFF writers
Of these SFF respondents
81% regularly write science fiction; 89% regularly read science fiction
82% regularly write fantasy; 87% regularly read fantasy
40% regularly write horror; 46% regularly read horror
25% of respondents work on a pro or semipro SFF magazine in some capacity (slush reader or editor)
87% are members of Codex — the speculative fiction writer’s group that served as the main distribution base of this survey.
About the survey:
Respondents were given a list of the aforementioned 20 “hard sells” and asked to choose every subject whose inclusion negatively influenced their enthusiasm to read a story they otherwise knew nothing about. They were then asked to choose every option that positively influenced their enthusiasm to read a story. Any items that had no impact on their predisposition towards a story were left blank.
About the analysis:
For my day job, I run the research department for a software company. Surveying people and analyzing their responses is my bread and butter and it also literally and metaphorically puts my bread and butter on the table.
This survey is entirely recreational, so I didn’t subject to it the same rigor or use the same (expensive) tools for analysis, but I still employed best practices wherever applicable to ensure as much integrity as possible. Keep in mind that the sample (both size and selection) heavily impact results.
When I collected all of the data (~ 100 responses), I created two simple formulas to evaluate the performance of each item:
Impact Score: How many people said this element impacted their enthusiasm to read a story — either negatively or positively?
For example, if out of 98 respondents, 23 people said they don’t want to read stories about cats, and 25 said they actively want to read stories about cats, that gives us an impact score of 49% (48/98).
In other words, 49% of readers have an active opinion on stories about cats that influences their feelings about a story before they know anything else about it.
Sentiment Score: Of the people who have an opinion about the “hard sell”, what percent of those opinions are positive?
Back to the cat example, 25 out of 48 respondents who feel some way about cat stories are excited to read them, giving us a 52% sentiment score.
In other words, roughly half of the sentiment towards cat stories is positive and half of the sentiment is negative.
All together now: When we combine the two metrics, we now have some interesting information about how SFF writers and editors feel about cat stories.
Roughly 1 out of 4 are excited to read stories about cats, 1 out of 4 are ready to nope out, and half don’t care one way or another.
Using these metrics, I’ve assembled four categories.
“Legitimate” hard sells: These are stories with a low sentiment score and a high impact score. A lot of people have an opinion about this element, and it’s mostly negative.
Secret selling points: These are stories with a high sentiment score and a high impact score. A lot of people have an opinion about this element, and it’s mostly positive.
Great dividers: These are stories with a middling sentiment score and a high impact score. A lot of people have an opinion about this element, but the nature of their opinion is a coin toss.
Relative non-factors: These are stories with a low impact score, regardless of their sentiment score. These elements are less likely to influence a reader’s predisposition towards a story in either direction.
Almost there! Some caveats and qualifications:
The findings for each hard sell is best understood in context to one another. These elements were specifically chosen for their reputation as hard sells, so even a “good performance” is kind of like being the best-behaved kid in detention.
Impact scores range from 26 percent to 65 percent. This means that roughly two-thirds of respondents had an opinion on the most impactful element (time travel) and one-quarter had an opinion on the least impactful (stories that include sensitive material that may necessitate content warnings).
Sentiment scores range from 7% positive (furry fiction) to 76% positive (robots with emotions). As indicated above, we’d expect these to skew negative based on the survey criteria, so while 76% looks stellar compared to 7%, I’d still be bummed if one out of four people who had formed an opinion on me decided I suck.
Let’s get to the results!'
Results:
Below you can see the breakdown of topics by impact score and sentiment score.
The bubble chart shows where each topic places in terms of impact (the y axis) and sentiment (x axis). Topics higher on the chart have a greater impact on potential reader appetite while topics to the right are more likely to invoke positive associations.
The stacked bar chart below shows how each of the 20 topics fared in sentiment score (the percentage of opinions about a topic that was positive).
Below that, you can find a writeup for each of the twenty topics divided by the general trend group that the topic fell into.
Hard Sells
Furry
Werewolves
Vampires
Body Horror
Prominent Sexual Content
Prominent Violence
lion-people, bat-people, and wolf-people, oh my! These six topics are hard sells in a sea of hard sells. While these subjects were the most likely topics to influence reader sentiment negatively, it should be noted that stories with all of these elements have appeared in top magazines (maybe not all at once).
Furry:
Sentiment: 7% positive —(20th out of 20)
Impact: 61% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (3rd out of 20)
It’s probably not a surprise to see furry at the top of a hard sells list, but the severity of its position surprised me. Three out of five respondents said that furry stories impacted their enthusiasm for a story, and 93 percent of those folks said it was for the worse.
I am by no means an expert in furry fiction, but I suspect negative connotations or perceptions around the term “furry” play a major part, as does the distinction between “furry stories” and “stories that feature animals with human qualities.” While I am not qualified to parse the latter, I used “furry,” as it is the chosen term by advocates, such as the pro-rate, self-identifying SFF furry magazine, Zooscape.
Many stories in Zooscape, such as the charming, The Swift-Footed Darling of the Rocks (Do NOT Actually Call Me That), by Marie Croke, seem like easy sells when described more granularly — a story about a stabby unicorn.
My suspicion is that the label is doing the heavy lifting for this result. You’re probably facing an easier road to sell your story without using the word furry, but I suspect most writers using the term are doing so with the specific goal to remove its stigma.
Werewolves:
Sentiment: 16% positive —(19th out of 20)
Impact: 56% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (7th out of 20)
Vampires:
Sentiment: 19% positive —(17th out of 20)
Impact: 59% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (5th out of 20)
I would guess that the oft-linked trifecta of zombies, vampires, and werewolves are the most frequent staples of the hard-sells page for SFF magazines.
(Note: I cut zombies to keep the list of options manageable, but I highly suspect it would be in this general range.)
Why is this the case for vampires and werewolves? Is it over-saturation? Does it feel like their utility as a metaphor has been squeezed dry? Is it their affiliation with critically out-of-favor/ignored, but wildly popular (and probably not-coincidentally) women-driven genres like romance? Their association with more novice writers? Have they never been able to recover from the dual garlic-infused silver bullets of Twilight and Anne Rice? A combination of all of those things?
Yeah, probably.
Body Horror:
Sentiment: 23% positive —(16th out of 20)
Impact: 54% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (10th out of 20)
This is where I note that the pool of respondents (primarily science fiction and fantasy writers & editors; not horror writers) makes a difference. Still, I’m surprised its sentiment score is this low. My guess is that it’s some combination of sensitive personal history and general squeamishness.
Prominent Sexual Content:
Sentiment: 31% positive —(14th out of 20)
Impact: 55% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (9th out of 20)
Prominent Violence
Sentiment: 18% positive —(18th out of 20)
Impact: 45% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (16th out of 20)
These are tricky to ask about without leading respondents. Unlike most other topics here, these are features of the stories, not (necessarily) subjects, and any word that indicates its presence as a major element —-prominent, explicit, graphic, etc.—feels like a synonym for “excessive,” and thus a judgment.
For those reasons, I find that these two are especially useful to gauge in context of one another. And in that respect, the results are fairly surprising (and to my eyes, positive). For all that has been written about a culture that glamorizes violence but clutches its pearls at sex, sex-forward stories are nearly twice as well-received (in a vacuum) than violence-forward stories.
Obviously, these results leave no room for how the subjects are used —- there’s a big difference between graphic violence as entertainment and graphic violence as social commentary —- and this selective sample size is most likely not reflective of the larger culture, but I’ll take it as a win.
Finally, I should note the fuzzy way many magazines discuss sexual content in their guidelines. Most SFF markets explicitly cite erotica as a hard no, but note that sexual content is permissible with the same degree of vagueness that companies cite “competitive pay.” Some specify that the sexual content should be central to the story’s plot.
In my experience, you’re much more likely to see a harrowing depiction of sex in a story, partly out of writer prerogative but partly because it’s easier to justify as necessary. That sample, taken with fuzzy guidelines about what’s acceptable make it easy to feel like the shorthand for sexual content guidelines is something like, “Depictions of sex are okay as long as they make you feel bad.”
That said, I am consistently surprised and impressed at how many mainstream SFF magazines aren’t afraid to take on strong sexual content. This includes magazines that I don’t necessarily think of as natural fits for such stories, like Clarkesworld, which published Priya Chand’s terrific Social Darwinism.
Secret Selling Points:
Time Travel
Robots with Feelings
Fairytales, Folklore, and Mythology
Prominent Humor
Ghost Stories
These are the five topics most positively associated with readers. They also happened to be among the most impactful, suggesting that readers may be more excited about topics they actively like than they are turned off by topics that don’t appeal to them.
Time Travel:
Sentiment: 72% positive —(2nd out of 20)
Impact: 65% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (1st out of 20)
As a time travel story enthusiast, this comes as a very pleasant surprise, largely because many of the most prominent magazines include time travel in their list of hard sells in some form or another.
If I had to guess, I’d say time travel stories are the miniature golf of science fiction. Most people are excited by the premise but usually disappointed by the experience.
In my humble opinion, time travel stories are among the most dependent on execution and particularly benefit from a well-read writer. Because time travel is such a science fiction staple, there’s a good chance that someone has beat you to the punch with what you thought was a clever idea. For example (spoilers):
By 1953, someone already wrote a meta-story about time travel in an experimental format (Who’s Cribbing)
By 1958, someone already wrote a time travel story in which a person is their own parent, lover, and child (All You Zombies)
By 1973, someone already used time travel as a metaphor to explore a marginalized identity (The Man Who Folded Himself as an exploration of homosexuality)
I still think there is a lot of fertile ground to tell interesting stories with time travel as a device (as I’ve written before), but be warned: even if there’s an audience for time travel stories, writing an excellent original take on it is still no small feat
Robots with Feelings:
Sentiment: 76% positive —(1st out of 20)
Impact: 60% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (4th out of 20)
This also came as a genuine surprise to me, but that may be a result of my personal bias.
It’s mostly a result of personal fatigue and oversaturation, but I could use a break from stories about sentimental AIs. In contrast to time travel, which (to my eyes) feels like a vehicle to discuss any number of subjects or themes, stories about “robots with feelings” tend to be about a narrower range of ideas, and tend to share a similar perspective and a narrative arc.
But it is clear this is just not my bag, as sentimental AI comes out on top in this NIT bracket of story elements.
Even more impressively, it does it with a semi-pejorative moniker. Personal biases aside, I attempted to use neutrally charged terms wherever possible, but to the best of my knowledge there isn’t a standard nomenclature for this subgenre of science fiction stories (and “stories about AI that specifically emphasize their humanity” is too wordy), so I borrowed the phrasing from Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores’ hard sells list for clarity and concision.
Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Mythology:
Sentiment: 67% positive (4th out of 20)
Impact: 62% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (2nd out of 20)
These are extremely prevalent in the market right now, so I suspected there may be some fatigue or oversaturation, but it turns out that a genre that has withstood thousands of years of interest is slightly more sturdy than that.
It must be said that there’s a notable difference between a story that riffs on Goldilocks and a story that riffs on the passage of the Old Testament where God begs people to stop defecating everywhere, but the line between fairytale, folklore, and mythology is blurry enough that these were lumped together all the same in in the interest of space.
Prominent Humor:
Sentiment: 61% positive (5th out of 20)
Impact: 58% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (6th out of 20)
Another genuine surprise for me. This feels like a case where reader appetite may exceed market appetite, as no small number of markets beg you not to send them your hilarious tavern stories or fantastical takes on Alcoholics Anonymous in which alcohol is replaced by something totally zany.
Like time travel, the challenge in publishing humor probably has more to do with execution than it does with a lack of interest. When you account for the vast variety of taste and the subjective, personal nature of humor, it’s not surprising that markets are more likely than the average reader to have been burned by humor stories that don’t hit the mark.
While humor isn’t totally lacking in SFF markets — Alex Shvartsman’s wonderful long-running Unidentified Funny Objects Anthology series is still going strong, and Daily Science Fiction has long published humor pieces — you’re still more likely to see humor as a tertiary feature than you are a comedy-first story. A recent favorite story driven by humor is Aimee Picchi’s For Sale: One Unicorn Saddle, Mostly Disenchanted in Translunar Traveler’s Lounge.
Ghost Stories:
Sentiment: 69% positive (3rd out of 20)
Impact: 55% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (8th out of 20)
Why is it that writers & editors are sick of zombies, werewolves, and vampires, but not the humble ghost? Ghost stories are just as prevalent, if not more so.
If I had to guess, ghost stories benefit from variety, ambiguity, and cultural resonance. Most cultures have a take on ghosts, while werewolves and vampires are slightly more singular. Similarly, because there are so many variants on ghosts, they feel broader and more malleable to tell a wider range of stories.
Anecdotally, while I have seen ghost stories on hard sells lists, I’d suspect it’s among the least cited in this group; its status as an actual “hard sell” is fair to debate.
The Great Dividers:
Cats
Social/Political Commentary
Epistolary
Post-Apocalypse
Sentiment was fairly divided on these four topics. Incidentally, these subjects all ended up in the middle when it comes to impact as well. The topics that were most likely to impact a reader’s attitude toward a story tended to be either very popular or very unpopular, while these four are a mixed bag in every sense of the term.
Stories about Cats:
Sentiment: 52% positive (12th out of 20)
Impact: 49% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (14th out of 20)
This is exactly where I’d suspect cat stories to land. Cat stories, like cats, are divisive. On one hand, there seems to be some unspoken connection between science fiction writers and cats that it’s basically its own genre (they even have a great dedicated market for them in Catscast). While it feels like dog lovers reign supreme in the general culture, it’s not even close when it comes to SFF representation: cats win.
But not everyone is a cat lover, and even those who are fairly neutral towards cats might be fatigued by their omnipresence (the latter is my theory for why cat stories usually end up on the hard sells lists at places like Flash Fiction Online).
Social/Political Commentary:
Sentiment: 59% positive (7th out of 20)
Impact: 52% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (11th out of 20)
Politics — the one thing more divisive than cats. That said, I’d be curious to know how many of those who are turned off by stories with prominent political commentary feel that way because they disagree with the messages of those stories versus those who simply value other qualities of stories, such as escapism.
Finally, I’m sure execution plays a part as well. As someone who firmly believes in the power of science fiction as commentary, stories in this camp are still hit-or-miss for me.
At their best, politically driven stories like the excellent Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills in Uncanny feel urgent, vital, and inventive, borrowing from the language of speculative fiction to find new ways to make powerful statements about society.
At their worst, they can feel pandering, ham-fisted, and self-congratulatory, parroting a safe viewpoint without any point of view. For me personally, a politically-fueled story is like seeing improv comedy; depending on who’s at the helm, it’s either my favorite or least favorite way to spend a Saturday night.
Epistolary:
Sentiment: 59% positive (8th out of 20)
Impact: 50% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (12th out of 20)
If anything, I expected this to be more of a non-factor (and to be clear, this is middle-of-the-pack in both sentiment and impact).
Some smart folks pointed out to me that epistolary — the fancy pants term for stories told through letters — isn’t as universally known as I probably assumed. I didn’t provide definitions (oops), so it’s possible that is actually reflecting conflicted attitudes towards Episcopalians.
Post-Apocalypse:
Sentiment: 49% positive (14th out of 20)
Impact: 50% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (13th out of 20)
I used to play a party game with friends where you have to split the room with an opinion, and it’s always much harder than you think. Most of the topics we think of as divisive will often lean heavily in one direction like-minded companies. It usually takes a less flashy subject to divide opinions in half: e.g., “the thumb is the best finger.”
The seemingly unassuming post-apocalyptic fiction does the trick here: half of writers have any opinion about it, and half of those opinions are positive.
(Relative) Non-Factors:
Second Person
List-Structure
Present Tense
Content Warnings
Twist Endings
The results feel fairly conclusive: subject matter is a far bigger factor in influencing reader appetite towards a story than form or technique. In other words, what you’re talking about matters more than how you’re talking about it.
Second Person:
Sentiment: 52% positive (12th out of 20)
Impact: 45% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (15th out of 20)
List-Structure:
Sentiment: 54% positive (8th out of 20)
Impact: 42% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (17th out of 20)
Present Tense:
Sentiment: 54% positive (10th out of 20)
Impact: 27% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (19th out of 20)
This trio of of “experimental” story staples bring me the most anxiety out of any “hard sell” as a submitting writer because you can never be sure if your story didn’t work or the slush reader just really fucking hates second person on principle.
I’m surprised then, to see how mild and middling the results of the survey turned out to be for them. They were all among the least likely to impact a respondent’s enthusiasm, and when they did have an impact, it was right down the middle.
The numbers are still somewhat discouraging for experimental writers, however. If two out five people say second-person stories impact their enthusiasm for a story, and half of that group say the impact is negative, that still means that one out of five working writers & editors are negatively predisposed to second person. Compared to third-person, which turns off no editors, that’s still a sizable disadvantage.
Twist endings:
Sentiment: 54% positive (9th out of 20)
Impact: 38% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (18th out of 20)
Twist endings have forever felt simultaneously out of fashion and wildly popular. Its low impact score here aligns with the larger trend of subjects outweighing storytelling devices; the fact that twist endings come at the end also likely plays a part — by the time it matters, you've already read the whole story.
Attitudes towards twist endings in prestigious circles have always felt to me like Cinderella's stepmother’s promise that she can go to the ball when she finishes her chores with the knowledge that she’ll never finish them. Detractors will say that twist endings are okay when they are earned, but that assessment is subjective and nebulous enough that anyone could feasibly weigh it against any story with an ending.
Not that this metric is at all unfair or unearned when used in good faith. SFWA has an excellent write-up about Jar of Tang stories — “Surprise! our heroes are microbes in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink” — in their classic primer on missteps to avoid in science fiction.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that novice writers are far more likely to invoke twist endings than their more seasoned peers, and they often stumble into the most derivative options available, so I suspect editors in particular might have a weary attitude toward them from slush pile representation.
Sensitive Subjects that Require Content Warnings:
Sentiment: 28% positive (15th out of 20)
Impact: 26% say it impacts their enthusiasm for a story (20th out of 20)
Sensitive subjects that may merit content warnings were the least likely to impact a reader’s enthusiasm for a story. This is likely in part because this is a huge umbrella category for the many specific, personal topics within it.
In a future survey, be interesting to see if the low sentiment score for those who do have an opinion is reflective of sensitivity towards specific difficult topics or a reflection of a preference for more escapism-tinted fiction.