Jeremiah Tolbert

The Dream Zine?

I hear what you’re think­ing, “You mean your dream mag­a­zine wasn’t the Fortean Bureau?” At the time, it was every­thing I could make it be with the con­straints (finan­cial, con­tent, for­mat) I worked under. And even though the mag­a­zine is on semi-​​permanent hia­tus, I still fol­low the pub­lish­ing side of ‘zines, and I’m still com­ing up with ideas for what I would do dif­fer­ently the next time. Here are a few of the ideas that I can’t stop think­ing about and wanted to share with you and see what you think. Many of them shake up the way things work now in a fun­da­men­tal way. Don’t take these ideas as to be an assault on the old ways, your favorite mag­a­zines, or your favorite writ­ers. These are thought exper­i­ments and can’t do you any harm.

Play With the Creative Commons: The Story Factory

Many writ­ers have released con­tent under the Creative Commons license, giv­ing explicit per­mis­sion for the kind of shar­ing that can­not be stopped thanks to the real­i­ties of the web. I think we’ve gen­er­ally reached a point where most non-​​Luddites accept the web for what it is. Many of us are hop­ing there will still yet be a way to give away con­tent online and still make some money with­out being famous in the first place. But that’s another topic for another time. I want to talk about the other types of Creative Commons licenses as a foun­da­tion for a dif­fer­ent kind of magazine.

The idea here is to pub­lish work, and pay very well for it, under the stip­u­la­tion that it must be released under a cre­ative com­mons license that allows for com­mer­cial deriv­a­tives. Essentially– pay authors to open source a story entirely. That’s step one.

And in an acknowl­edg­ment that the line between writ­ers and fans has blurred, in step two, you solicit sub­mis­sions that are built with the open source tools pro­vided by your core writer. Each pub­lish­ing cycle, you have one new open-​​source piece, and the pre­vi­ous month’s deriv­a­tive works. If you want, use the orig­i­nal author to help select the issue’s sec­ondary wave content.

Step three, once a year, you accept sub­mis­sions that are deriv­a­tive from every­thing from the pre­vi­ous year, which includes all second-​​wave works too (which were required to be released under share-​​a-​​like licenses as well). So, you end up with the orig­i­nal, the first wave of deriv­a­tive works, and then a third wave of deriv­a­tive works that can draw from all of the above. Essentially, a CC-​​licensed enforced shared world process, paid for by the mag­a­zine. Creating a form of legal fan fic­tion, but with the gate­way of an edi­tor to ensure qual­ity. Authors can always play in the worlds they cre­ated, but they open those worlds up from the start for oth­ers too.

Underlying all of this is link­ing tech­nol­ogy that threads the sto­ries together on the site, mak­ing it easy to find related con­tent. Wind this sucker up, and watch it go. Sell adver­tis­ing as your rev­enue model, maybe. Or pos­si­bly use the fund drive model.

User-​​Selected Content: The Mob

Digg is a social web­site that selects its con­tent by user con­sen­sus. Each mem­ber of the site can dig or bury a story, and these cause con­tent to rise to the front page, where it is seen by hun­dreds of thou­sands of read­ers. Take this model and apply it to the pub­lish­ing of a zine, with some modifications.

First of all, you have an edi­to­r­ial board that applies loose stan­dards, weed­ing out the truly awful stuff. The work above a very basic level of com­pe­tency is paid a small fee, say $10, and held for fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, with a max­i­mum limit set.

Create a mem­bers only, password-​​protected area for your core fan­dom. They pay a small yearly fee to have priv­i­leged access to con­tent. Then you dump the incom­ing slush pile into the hop­per and your core fans go to town, rank­ing and rat­ing the sto­ries, ulti­mately, giv­ing it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. At the end of a pub­lish­ing cycle, you take the best-​​rated sto­ries, and you pay them a larger fee, and then you reject the rest.

Some pub­lish­ers will argue that being taken to the sec­ond level of con­sid­er­a­tion will con­sti­tute being pub­lished. An adopter of this model should remain neu­tral on the issue, say­ing that this assess­ment is up to the indi­vid­ual mag­a­zines. Your rec­om­men­da­tion would be–send your work as a last resort, if this is a con­cern you have. The details will fall out over time, and other edi­tors will decide how they feel about work that’s been through your system.

Go Really Multimedia: The Soup

Let’s face it. You auto­mat­i­cally limit your audi­ence by focus­ing on genre lit­er­a­ture. The web allows you to pub­lish any infor­ma­tion at all. Take advan­tage of that. Publish comics, videos, ani­ma­tions, Flash games, illus­tra­tions, audio plays. Publish all of it, and most impor­tantly, don’t sec­tion every­thing off into lit­tle ghet­tos. The illus­tra­tions are not sec­ondary to the sto­ries. Everything is pre­sented on an equal foot­ing. It’s all spec­u­la­tive art.

Accept reprints here. You prob­a­bly can’t afford to demand exclu­sive rights in per­pe­tu­ity from the video mak­ers or illus­tra­tors, and your best work is going to be stuff that’s been out on the web already. The value of your zine is not its exclu­siv­ity but in the way it aggre­gates the best con­tent together. A one-​​stop shop for all the SF things you like. There’s a wealth of artists work­ing in a vari­ety of medi­ums, and the peo­ple that are fans of each one of these medi­ums could poten­tially be brought together under one roof, and then you could see more cross-​​pollination. Video watch­ers occa­sion­ally read­ing a story, maybe? A lot of genre fans don’t even know genre mag­a­zines exist. Bring those peo­ple in with the other con­tent and expose them to great con­tent. It’s a win for everybody.

Publish and Fund Alternate Reality Games: The Metaverse

I’ve nat­tered on about ARGs in the past. Some of the genre’s best writ­ers are mak­ing a par­tial liv­ing writ­ing for really big bud­get ARG games for com­pa­nies like Microsoft or the Beijing Olympics. There’s no rea­son we can’t take the gen­eral model here and build a mag­a­zine around it, except that they are gen­er­ally mas­sive undertakings.

So limit their scope. Think of the pre-​​existing ARGs as nov­els in scope. Take the con­cept and bring the expe­ri­ence down to one that can be played out in a few hours, or a month, here and there. As a pub­lisher, you would pro­vide tools to facil­i­tate the cre­ation, as well as edi­to­r­ial guid­ance. Perhaps a social net­work­ing tool to encour­age ARG mak­ers with dif­fer­ent skillsets to col­lab­o­rate and cre­ate the projects. Once projects are com­pleted, they are then sub­mit­ted for review. You can choose to pay for the project and run it as your con­tent, or not. If not, the team can take their game and pub­li­cize it themselves.

I leave the fund­ing model as an exer­cise for the reader, because I don’t have a clue.

Help the Fans Put their Money Where their Mouth is: The Rocket-​​shaped Piggy Bank

A com­mon com­plaint among fans is that they can’t find the work that they want to read. So build a mag­a­zine that uses basic eco­nom­ics to deter­mine which authors you pub­lish. Underlying it is a social net­work­ing tool that allows fans to find other fans with com­mon autho­r­ial inter­ests. Coalitions can be formed, and a data­base of work­ing SF authors is pro­vided. Authors can take con­trol of their pro­files and pro­vide infor­ma­tion to the fans–but the main idea here is to say “here’s what I need to do what you want.”

Inspired by the site Fundable, you take the basic idea of group fundrais­ing that doesn’t take any money until the goal is met, and you make it pos­si­ble for fans to pool resources and directly con­tract with authors to write sto­ries. At least at first, the fundrais­ers prob­a­bly shouldn’t be able to require any­thing spe­cific about the work other than its author, but it’s pos­si­ble that you could open up the model so that a group could offer boun­ties on sto­ries with ele­ments they like. For instance, The Coalition For More Robots raises $500 in pledged dona­tions for a story fea­tur­ing the kind of robots Asimov used to write about. The Coalition must elect edi­to­r­ial lead­ers. These lead­ers then receive offers from authors and choose whether or not to accept them as meet­ing their fund require­ments. The sys­tem would han­dle all the money side of things in addi­ton to the social net­work­ing aspects.

Part of your job as an edi­tor would partly be con­tact­ing the authors who have funds raised request­ing work from them and let­ting them know your site exists. Most SF writ­ers have some access to the web, so this would be easy with at least a cer­tain tier of writer. I have a feel­ing that the kinds of funds we would see would be directed at much big­ger name authors, like Martin, King, etc. Those may present dif­fi­cul­ties. You would have to develop a black­list of authors who would not take com­mis­sion work from the site for any amount of money, maybe, but even with­out it, nobody is under any oblig­a­tion to accept the com­mis­sions that the site helps organize.

In Conclusion

Some of the above, per­haps all of them, would fail. There are cer­tainly prob­lems with each one that I haven’t gone into here. I may pos­si­bly expand on each of these ideas in future posts, exam­in­ing how they might suc­ceed, or not, and pay­ing atten­tion to what kinds of fund­ing mod­els could keep them run­ning. And hey, if you want to launch a busi­ness based on any of these, just give me an oppor­tu­nity to invest early on, that’s all I ask.

What do you think? Do any of them spark your imag­i­na­tion? What is your dream zine?