I’ve been planning a post on pulp fiction magazines for quite some time, I won’t count the years. It was going to be a retrospective or a series of retrospectives as I thought the golden age of pulp fiction magazines was in the 1920s to 1950s but I found this list today on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database which really made me stop and think.

There were many magazines started and then stopped in the early days, some of them had a short run of less than a year such as Ace Mystery which only lasted for three issues while others are still going such as Weird Tales which is still going after it’s debut in 1923. The magazines have fed a need in readers, firing their imaginations and keeping their souls fed, while simultaneously starting writers in their career and in others keeping them going after a hiatus. Many authors got their start in pulp fiction magazines and some managed to write for pulp magazines as a full time job. The rate of pay wasn’t terribly high at 5c or 2c per word but it added up and if you could write multiple stories per month it was a nice addition to your normal job.

We’re still blessed by many publications starting then stopping but there are a tremendous number of magazines still publishing to the present day. I thought there might only be half a dozen but was astounded to see the word ‘present’ on 78 occasions throughout the listing. It gives me heart.

Some of them have only been going a couple of years and time will tell whether they have a sound business model or someone behind them with pots of money, some of them have been going for many, many years. If you’re wanting to write with the view to being published in one of these magazines then feel free to take a wander through the list and see if and when they’re accepting submissions. I will be considering compiling a list and publishing it here but that will take more time than I currently have.

The photos I’ve included here are not the actual magazines but compilations of selections of their best stories, not sure how they choose as there are generally so many really good ones.