Editing Pulp magazine (section)

===World War II and market decline===
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| footer            = <small>Pulp magazines began to decline during the 1940s, giving way to paperbacks, comics and digest-sized novels</small>
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During the [[Second World War]], paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Following the model of ''[[Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine]]'' in 1941, some magazines began to switch to [[digest size]]: smaller, sometimes thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce [[Slick (magazine format)|slicks]].<ref>Ashley, Michael. ''Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970'', Volume 2 (2005), pg. 3 {{ISBN|978-0-85323-779-2}}</ref>

Competition from [[Comic book|comic-books]] and [[Paperback|paperback novels]] further eroded the pulps' market share, but it has been suggested the widespread expansion of [[television]] also drew away the readership of the pulps.<ref name="illustrationhistory.org"/> In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, [[men's adventure]] magazines also began to draw some former pulp readers.

The 1957 liquidation of the [[American News Company]], then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the "pulp era"; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including ''Black Mask,'' ''[[The Shadow (magazine)|The Shadow]],'' ''[[Doc Savage (magazine)|Doc Savage]],'' and ''[[Weird Tales]],'' were defunct (though some of those titles have been revived in various formats in the decades since).<ref name="ahgttp" /> Almost all of the few remaining former pulp magazines are science fiction or [[mystery fiction|mystery]] magazines, now in formats similar to "[[digest size]]", such as ''[[Analog Science Fiction and Fact]]'', though the most durable revival of ''Weird Tales'' began in pulp format, though published on good-quality paper. The old format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly ''[[Perry Rhodan]]'' (over 3,000 issues as of 2019).

Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; [[Harry Steeger]] of [[Popular Publications]] claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month.<ref name = "Haining02">{{cite book | last=Haining |first=Peter |title=The Fantastic Pulps | year=1975 |publisher=Vintage Books, a division of Random House |isbn=0-394-72109-8}}</ref> Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly.

The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers trying to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces. Some ex-pulp writers like [[Hugh B. Cave]] and [[Robert Leslie Bellem]] had moved on to writing for television by the 1950s.

The last pulp to cease publication was ''[[Ranch Romances]]'' in 1971.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Nevins |first=Jess |author-link=Jess Nevins |url= |title=The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction |date=2014 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-983884-4 |editor-last=Latham |editor-first=Rob |editor-link=Rob Latham |pages=93 |language=en |chapter=Pulp Science Fiction |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=D44dBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA93}}</ref>