Pro

A pro is someone who has professionally published sf. Typically, fans use the term to refer to authors, although book and prozine editors, literary agents and professional artists are lumped in with the general crowd of "pros."

Few authors earn a full-time living as pros, and they need not earn a significant amount of income from published sf to get the label. However, a writer who has made only a few sales is termed a neopro, regardless of how long ago those sales were.

Professional Artist

A pro artist is a visual artist who draws, paints or sculpts for money (i.e., where the money earned from selling the art is a significant motivation for creating the art).

The division between a fanartist and a professional artist is based on whether or not the artist was paid more than a nominal amount for the work. Minor sales at convention art shows don’t kick an artist out of the fanartist category, but exhibitions in commercial galleries or, especially, being paid for publication does.

However, fan art can be done by a pro artist if it is done for love and not money. Pros who contribute to fanzines are eligible for Best Fan Artist Hugos.

See "fan artist" for more details.

Pros vs. Fans

Pro is not the opposite of fan. Pros may be fans. Historically, most pros came out of fandom, many remaining active in fanzines, clubs and concoms while their professional sales grew. Increasingly, however, today’s pros have had little or no contact with fandom until after selling their first works and, for most, attendance at conventions and other involvement in fan doings tends to be self-promotional, something they view as “work.” (Even Laura Resnick, whose parents were actifans well before her father, Mike Resnick, became a quintessentially fannish pro,

The relationship between pros and fans, always uneasy, as the Fancyclopedia 2 passage below indicates, becomes ever more contentious. Although prosuckers are worshipful, many concom members and other actifans chafe at some pros' demands regarding convention policies and programming, and resent their commercialism and tendency to disappear after panels rather than to socialize with fans. These differences are exacerbated by perks given pros at ticket/gate shows that are not usual at traditional fan-run cons.

What counts?

In fandom the word pro or professional is used in multiple ways, but the basic distinction is receipt of more than de minimus payment for work. A specific piece of work is pro if the person who produced it was paid more than a token amount for it. So the common fannish payment for a contribution to a fanzine of a bheer or a copy of the zine is token and does not make the work pro.

Payment in money is usually non-token. Cash prizes in a contest where only a small fraction of the entrants can expect to win a prize is not normally considered to make the contest entrant professional.

Token payment, even in cash, does not make something professional. A work is professional when the payment involved creates a non-trivial economic justification for doing the work. (Note that we're talking motivation here, so that what is a good salary for a job for J. Random Poorfan, is an entirely token payment for Bill Gates.)

The semiprozines are a particularly complex case because they normally do pay cash, but the amount is often very small. As of 2012, when the professional magazines are paying 3-5 cents/word for fiction, payments of around 1 cent/word or higher are generally considered to be professional. (Lower rates may also be, but it's not as cut-and-dried.) There is a continuum between semiprozines and fanzines which publish fiction.

From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959

Professional. Commercially published fantasy magazines and the people who write or draw for them. Art Rapp wants to eliminate confusion by the practice, which we follow in this volume, of using "pros" for people and "proz" for publications. Whether specialist booksellers should be included or not is disputed; "No," says Bob Bloch, "they are filthy hucksters", but "Yes," says Big Hearted Howard DeVore, "and be sure you spell my name right". Joy Clarke informs that Anglofans include booksellers with other pros. Behold the Pro in all his glory! He's dreaming up a new stf story Which writ, he'll send off to NY For some rich publisher to buy. After the sale, I rather fear, He'll turn his profits into bheer, Proving his appetites the same As theirs from whom the money came. Bob Tucker observes sourly: "These people are often called 'filthy pros' and 'dirty old pros' [or 'vile pros -- because that's what they write'] because they are supposedly rich, and because it is whispered that they will stoop to any trick to do wrong to the innocent fan. The majority of them are as much fans as anyone; many are older fen who turned to writing for fun and profit [including Bob himself]. They are both despised as parasites and fawned on as minor tin ghods. And those fans who are loudest in censure are often just those who try hardest to sell fiction and thus become pros." Joy Clarke explains that the dividing line in Anglofandom is not marked because many British pro-authors have emerged from the fan groups, British fandom is sufficiently close-knit for everybody to know the pros and pro-fans before they turned pro, and it's therefore hard to consider Ted Tubb, Ken Bulmer, Arthur Clarke, Sam Youd and the like as anything but fans selling to the prozines. In practice most of the fan-pro prejudice Tucker remarks is turned against those their own sections of stfdom admit to be obnoxious -- 7th Fandom and the other Beanie Brigadiers and the less scrupulous or more conceited professionals. Sometimes seen is "prodom" for the field of professional scientifictionists; the word is a mere analogy with "fandom", since the pros are not so selfconscious, vocal, or organized. Prozines for pros to appear in have multiplied from the old days of the Big Three to peaks in 1940, 1951-2, and [1956-8. In an IPO Poll taken near its inception, the flood of new proz was disapproved 18:5, so there mustn't have been much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth when the growth-curve turned downwards. (Reasons for such ups & downs much debated.) The 1951-2 peak, and following slump, were also regarded with a good deal of equanimity, but the depression of 1958-9 was intense enough to create audible alarm and despondency over the future of the field and, therewith, fandom's prospects for recruiting. Disapproval of new proz is mainly because, with some exceptions, they print even trashier material than the older ones, and fans aren't interested in reading it themselves and certainly don't want other people to read it and sneer at stf. Quite a few long-time fans have at times completely given up reading the proz thru disgust, or preoccupation with fan and other activities. The course of fan history has varied from close to slight connection with the proz, and the wish has often been expressed that we could get along without using them as a recruiting medium. This is principally a fanationalistic manifestation, however; the average stfnist eats up good stfantasy, has an exaggerated idea of its literary merit, and will leap to defend it against detractors.

List of pros.

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Fanspeak

This is a fanspeak page. Please extend it by adding information about when and by whom it was coined, whether it’s still in use, etc.