JeremiahTolbert.com: SF Writer Web Designer Photographer

SF Magazines: Financial Models

Filed Under: SF Business, Speculative Fiction, Top Post

For my own benefit as much as anything else, I’d like to run through the models that I am aware of that can be used to financially support a magazine–whether it is a print or an electronic magazine. Here’s what I got. If I miss any, please let me know and I will continue to update this. These are not mutually exclusive. Many magazines use a combination of these.

Subscription/Pay Model

Giving the content in return for a subscription fee or a cover price. Generally selling a bundle of stories/content. Example: traditional print magazines.

Advertising Model

Selling access to your readers to advertisers, and placing their advertising among your content. Example: most traditional print magazines sell advertising as well.

Patron Model

Supported by a single person or small private group of people from private funds. Example: The Fortean Bureau was primarily our private money. (If you ever donated? You are my hero).

Donation/Fund Drive model

The NPR model, as I’ve heard it referred to. Regular requests for funds from readers, with no set amount. Example: Strange Horizons is the most successful example of this. I believe Escape Pod does this as well, but I haven’t seen any fund drives from them.

Full Site Sponsorship

A single corporate entity, for whatever reason, subsidizes the magazine. Example: SCIFICTION. I seem to think Chizine as well?

Premium Content

Special access to special content. A kind of subscription model. I’m not sure about this one, what do you guys think? Is it different enough? Example: Salon used to do this, but I am not sure if they do anymore.These models are irrelevant as to whether a magazine is nonprofit, hobby, or for-profit. Many of these models are considered failures. Which ones do you think work or don’t? Perhaps the best solution for a sustainable magazine (online or off) would be a combination of 3 or more?

I am not sure that the subscription model is working very well anymore. As Chance pointed out in the comments of the Triad post yesterday, comparing Escape Pod to the Triad isn’t a good comparison because Escape Pod doesn’t have a cost to subscribe. I argued that just because the one has a different model for support than the other doesn’t mean that they can’t be compared as “magazines” with readerships.

Steve, I know you sometimes read this– could you tell me or provide me a link to where you might talk more about the funding model behind Escape Pod? Chance argues that Escape Pod is your hobby, as another reason that the subscriber numbers can’t be compared. I’d like to know more about how Escape Pod affords to function, if you’re comfortable talking about it.

TAGS: financial models, markets, My Writing, SF

POSTED: 9:46 am Thu May 03 2007 |

Art Is About the Lonliness of Sentience, Especially SF

Filed Under: Recommended Media, Short Story

f you haven’t read it already, I recommend you go check out Jetse de Vries’ story in Clarkeworld today, “Qubit Conflicts.” I am kind of spoiling part of it here in this post, so if you are against that kind of thing, go read the story and then come back here.Interesting, wasn’t it? I like the unconventional stories, that take risks with not having conventional characters and storylines. I can’t write them, but I love reading them. Anyway, the ending of this story, I think, could be read as an interesting response to some of the ideas of Mundane SF. And it gets to something that I am only just now picking up on, which is maybe what purpose art serves and why we create art at all.

The end of the story has this super intelligent singularity AI remarking on how maybe it was a mistake to set a thinking pace so fast (Planck speed), and ultimately how lonely it is, waiting for aliens to contact it. And it got me thinking about something I read recently, a quote of the late great Kurt Vonnegut, about how every being needs to be reminded that they are not alone, that there are others like them out there.

I think there’s something inherent about the nature of our sentience that brings along a certain loneliness. I can’t quite put my finger on why being able to think and being self-aware means that we pine for the minds of others, to know them, but we do. Maybe it’s a side effect of being the evolutionary end product of a social species. Maybe a sentient solitary predator wouldn’t have this problem, and it’s only a peculiar side effect of our own sentience. But any sentient creations of ours will have this problem, as Jetse seems to convey. I think I agree with that. Their intelligence, while artificial, will be modeled after ours. And we definitely seem to be lonely, every one of us, and I think we create and consume art because it soothes that fear that we’re alone. We get to, through a complex invented system thousands of years in the making, enter the mind of another being. No matter what the narrative is, there is that, in the background, that comfort.

And SF takes that them and makes it explicit in tales of the extraterrestrial. Fantasy does the same thing. Honestly, I don’t find SF/F that completely rules out the idea of the Other Mind very satisfying. It can be compelling and entertaining, but aliens and elves and all of it, they are a salve that we have invented to soothe a pain of which we’re barely aware.

Oh no. What if our species is the Emo Kid of the Galactic Lunchroom?

TAGS: art, jetse, sentience, SF, Short Story

POSTED: 10:47 pm Tue May 01 2007 |