Posts Tagged ‘business’

Writing Is Made of Failure (And That’s Okay)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You can fail on a sen­tence, para­graph, page, scene, and story level.  You can fail a mil­lion ways in writ­ing, and most likely, you’ll fail in 999,999 of them of the course of your attempts.   So it is with many things in which we seek improve­ment.  We fail, fail, fail, and get incre­men­tally bet­ter with time and effort.

I strug­gle with accept­ing the fail­ure.  I have worked in cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments where fail­ure was not an option.  You could eas­ily be fired for  fail­ure.  Once, I was threat­ened with imme­di­ate fir­ing for allow­ing a typo to appear on a web page. (Later I was laid off).   

In my small busi­ness, I can­not afford to fail right now, and nor can my clients afford to have me fail.   I was just lis­ten­ing to the radio about how a major soft­ware upgrade for the state went mil­lions over bud­get and was delayed an entire year.   I might never work again if that hap­pened on one of my projects.  No room for that.  One bad project, and I’m des­ti­tute.  This year more than last, I’m in a tight spot.  This means I tend to turn down projects that I am not 100% cer­tain about (not sure about tech­ni­cal require­ments, the bud­get, etc). Sometimes, this means turn­ing down thou­sands of dol­lars.  But what’s worse, to turn down the money and tighten belts, or to take the money and utterly fail the client by miss­ing dead­lines, or deliv­er­ing com­pletely buggy soft­ware?  I’d rather keep the pain of that lim­ited to myself, and not ruin some­one else’s dream in the process.

It’s this issue of fail­ure in my jobs that pay and have paid that bills that makes me so hard on myself when I fail at writ­ing.  Because I sac­ri­fice busi­ness time to do the writ­ing, and the fact that I can­not pro­duce pro­fes­sional, sal­able mate­r­ial with any­thing resem­bling con­sis­tency or reg­u­lar­ity makes that time essen­tially a waste from an income stand­point.  I love doing it, but writ­ing is very costly to me.  It costs time and lost income.   So it’s dou­bly hard to real­ize that I’ve pro­duced a failed story, or novel.  Efficiency is key when time is money.  And I’m try­ing to be effi­cient enough to jus­tify the time.

It’s all vaguely ridicu­lous, to attempt to man­age your cre­ative writ­ing work the same way you try to man­age your web devel­op­ment work. But for now, I just don’t have any other option.   Hence back­ing off of writ­ing again, at least until I know where I will be liv­ing in August.  Hopefully not in a parent’s basement.

If you can afford it, give your­self the gift of fail­ure.   You’re going to do it any­way, so you might as well learn to for­give it.  I’m try­ing to do that myself.

On Depth vs Diversification and Commitmentphobia

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

At any given moment, your business/​career is at a cross­roads.  There’s one really big deci­sion that every­one must con­sider at some point.

Is it bet­ter to spe­cial­ize further,deepening your mar­ket or niche com­mit­ments, or is it bet­ter to diver­sify your inter­ests, keep­ing your eggs in mul­ti­ple bas­kets.  On the one hand, you develop your skills fur­ther and you can achieve a mas­tery of sorts.  On the other hand, you pro­tect your­self against crashes.  Say, for instance, that you have made it a spe­cialty in devel­op­ing real estate web­sites.  Then, in 2008, the real estate mar­ket crashes.  There’s wide­spread agree­ment that you’re one of the best at what you do—but the need has dra­mat­i­cally dropped off.  You can be very good at some­thing that nobody needs done.

It’s that fear that leads to a cer­tain kind of com­mit­ment­pho­bia, where one is unwill­ing or unable to spe­cial­ize in one area only.  Why only write copy when you could also work on a novel?  Why only build web­sites for real estate agents when you could learn to develop iOS and mobile appli­ca­tions?  If one fails, then per­haps the other will succeed.

Or to put it in writer terms, why spend months and months pol­ish­ing a sin­gle short story when you could write a dozen and see which one sticks to the wall?

Specialists have an oppor­tu­nity to rise to the top of a field or craft.  Spending six months on that short story may make it more likely that it will win awards.  But you’re less insu­lated against fail­ing.  If your field becomes obso­lete, or the story fails to sell, you’re in more trou­ble than if you diver­si­fied your efforts.  You may not climb to the top when you diver­sify, but you’ll be insu­lated against fail­ure from any one indi­vid­ual project or mar­ket.  So which is it to be? I think nearly every­one makes this cru­cial deci­sion in some aspect of their life.

There’s no one true answer to this ques­tion. Both options are valid.  That’s part of what makes the deci­sion so hard to make.  The worst choice you can make is not to choose—to waf­fle back and forth.  

Our time is sadly finite.   Every minute we spend is a minute we never get back.  I won­der how dif­fer­ently we would treat our­selves and each other if we were con­stantly aware of it?  I think we would be forced to real­ize the self­ish­ness and the gen­eros­ity of our actions more.  I don’t think of it this way, but the hour or so I’ve been draft­ing this blog post is time I have gifted to you, in the hopes that my conun­drum and my per­spec­tive on it pro­vides some mea­sure of insight to yours.   Our time is a gift that can be given freely, or horded for ourselves. 

There’s another conun­drum with which we all have to struggle.

What’s Going On in My Life

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Both more and less than I would like is the short of it.

The long of it is, I had 3 weeks of com­pletely fal­low work time in February.  I took this as an oppor­tu­nity to try and reor­ga­nize my mar­ket­ing efforts for Clockpunk Studios.  I put together a new design, refo­cused all of my copy, and tried to show off what I’m capa­ble of in design and cod­ing.  I’m proud of the work I did.  There are some things I wish I could have spent more time on, but could not.   You should go check out that new design if you haven’t yet.  Especially check out the con­tact form.

Yesterday was a really rough day for me because the above­men­tioned new site was rejected from a major CSS gallery.  My biggest fear for a long time has been that I’m no good at what I do, and that other pro­fes­sion­als think I am a joke.  This rejec­tion brought those fears home to roost and I didn’t take it ter­ri­bly well.  I def­i­nitely take writ­ing rejec­tion eas­ier, but I think that’s because I never rely on my writ­ing to pay the bills.  Any money that gen­er­ates is a sur­prise.  Having my career seem­ingly inval­i­dated by such a small motion hurt.  And think­ing that it inval­i­dated my career was absurd anyway.

Truth is, quite a few peo­ple like the work I do for them.  I’ll never win awards, but hon­estly, hav­ing clients happy with the work is mostly all the recog­ni­tion I need.  If only I could pay the bills with client satisfaction.

While last year was a great year for me, this year has started out pretty rough.  Starting around mid December, busi­ness started drop­ping off and it’s only con­tin­ued its trend down­ward.  Possibly this is related to some kind of busi­ness trou­ble for pub­lish­ing as a whole.  I almost cer­tainly need to do more work in devel­op­ing my busi­ness out­side of that niche.  But I do like the niche!

I’ve ded­i­cated myself so thor­oughly to the busi­ness that I’m not giv­ing myself any other out­lets.  This blog has been weak lately, as you may have noticed.  I haven’t writ­ten any­thing sig­nif­i­cant this year either.  And I haven’t picked up my cam­era since June. 

This is the dark side of being an inde­pen­dent busi­ness owner.  Its suc­cess or fail­ure rests solely on your shoul­ders.   You can never sit back and coast.  And when the going gets rough, it really gets rough.  You never expect it.

I’ve got some new projects to get me through March, but beyond that, I have noth­ing lined up.  This will really be the year that deter­mines if my busi­ness has any long term poten­tial.  If things don’t turn around by July or so, I’ll start look­ing for a job along­side Sarah.

More Crossovers in Web Design and Writing: Kill Your Darlings

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s often heard advice in writ­ing that you should kill your dar­lings.  I don’t take this to mean you should kill your char­ac­ters (although really, why not?).  What I think this typ­i­cally refers to is hav­ing the open­ness, the will­ing­ness, to cut pieces that you love in ser­vice of the greater story.  You may have a line or a scene that you just love, that you think shows all your bril­liance.  But in the scheme of all things story, it doesn’t work.  It slows things down, or takes the reader out of the story.  Maybe it’s too shiny, or maybe it’s just irrel­e­vant.  You need to be will­ing to swal­low your pride and kill the bit to make a bet­ter piece.

I was reminded recently that this holds true for web design.  I’d built this tabbed nav­i­ga­tional struc­ture for a web­site that I really liked.  I thought it was clever and use­ful and I spent a lot of time cod­ing it.  But come time for con­tent to be loaded into the site, it just wasn’t work­ing.  I tried chang­ing the design of it visu­ally, but that didn’t fix the prob­lem.  The prob­lem was that it was just slightly too dif­fer­ent from the usual UI pat­terns.  It was con­fus­ing.  Ultimately, we cut it down into some­thing that was more rec­og­niz­able and standard.

I’m sorry I haven’t been blog­ging lately.  Oddly, I blog less when busi­ness is slow.  All my think­ing time is devoted to how I am going to get work, get paid, and avoid des­ti­tu­tion, rather than what I can blog about.  Maslow’s hier­ar­chy in action!

I’ve spent the last two weeks devel­op­ing a new Clockpunk Studios web­site.  When I’m burned out on star­ing at that, I switch over and learn CodeIgniter for devel­op­ing apps.  My brain is full of cod­ing things right now, and not so much with the prose.  I’m hop­ing that all this time and energy trans­fers over to a broader appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge.  The more I know about pro­gram­ming, per­haps the bet­ter I can write TAKEDOWN NOTICE.   And if not, well, hope­fully I’ve expanded my skillset with new ways to pay the bills.  It’s win/​win, really.

Lesson in Progress: How to Balance Travel and Freelancing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve spent this week get­ting increas­ingly wor­ried and agi­tated about tak­ing this trip to Kansas and then on to Ohio for World Fantasy Convention. In fact, by the time you read this, I should be past Denver and on my way east on I-​​70.

The idea of vaca­tion and travel is some­thing I’ve strug­gled with how to man­age since start­ing my own busi­ness as a web designer for authors and pub­lish­ers.  I have to admit that one of the aspects about the lifestyle that appealed to me most was the abil­ity to set my own sched­ule, not just on a daily basis, but also on a weekly or monthly one.  If I want to take some time to go spend with my fam­ily in Kansas, I can. Theoretically.

The truth is, though, that travel costs money, which means I need to work more to pay for the trip, but by tak­ing the trip, I’ll be work­ing less.  So I end up with this sit­u­a­tion where I’m try­ing to jug­gle projects and travel, and I haven’t even talked about how the graphic design work isn’t done very eas­ily on a lap­top (writ­ing and writ­ing code, how­ever, goes very smoothly).

So while it seems from the out­side that you can have a lot more free­dom in this area, the truth is, when you have a day job, you may have strictly lim­ited time off, but at least then there’s some­one to cover for you.  When you’re a one man show, you have to either make sure you have some­one in on your project with you, or you have to be pre­pared to drop the daiquiri, pull out the lap­top, log in, and fix the problem.

I’m hop­ing that this trip has a min­i­mum amount of dis­rup­tion of my work. I’ll be dri­ving on Friday/​Saturday, and will be ready to work hard Sunday. I’ll work a reg­u­lar sched­ule Monday through Wednesday, but then Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I will be at World Fantasy Convention and not really work­ing a reg­u­lar set of hours. I’ll drive back early Sunday morn­ing to Kansas, mak­ing the 12 hour trip hope­fully in record time, col­lapse, and get up Monday and work a full day.  Then I will either spend all of Tuesday dri­ving back to Colorado, or I’ll work a half day, drive and stop halfway at a motel, then be home Wednesday mid-​​afternoon to put in some work Wednesday afternoon.

So that’s a lit­tle exam­ple of the plan­ning I have to make for myself.  I try to keep it flex­i­ble, in case I’m in the mid­dle of Kansas and someone’s server explodes, or if Monday morn­ing, there’s a ton of stuff hit­ting the fan, so I need to stay over a cou­ple of days to get things in order.  The key here, as in most things, is main­tain­ing flexibility.

Really?  That flex­i­bil­ity that seems so appeal­ing cuts both ways.  You have to be ready for it.

Thinking Ahead to the Future of Clockpunk Studios

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been think­ing a lot lately about what my options are for grow­ing my busi­ness.  I quite enjoy run­ning a web design and devel­op­ment com­pany with a staff of one, but it behooves me to think about what the future will hold, and if I want to achieve cer­tain goals in life, I will have to grow as a busi­ness.   The way I fig­ure it, I can grow via the fol­low­ing methods:

  • hire reg­u­lar sub­con­trac­tors to assist with projects, and take on more projects.
  • raise my rates
  • increase the num­ber of bill­able hours I do in a day
  • hire full time staff
  • find pas­sive income streams

Hiring reg­u­lar sub­con­trac­tors is tricky.  You want reli­able and depend­able free­lancers who are skilled, but don’t cost so much that you might as well do the work your­self.  It’s dif­fi­cult to find those peo­ple, but if you are one of those peo­ple, please con­tact me.  I’m very inter­ested in hear­ing from you.

Raising your rates is a risky game of chicken, and you never know when you might price your­self out of your niche.  I’m def­i­nitely push­ing the upper bound­ary of my main author web­site niche.  Publishers are happy with the costs, but new, indi­vid­ual authors find my ser­vices on the pricy side.  I don’t want to leave them behind entirely if I can help it.  They’ve been the core of my busi­ness since I started part-​​time a few years before I founded Clockpunk Studios.

Increasing the num­ber of bill­able hours is also a tricky game to play.  The more hours I’m focus­ing on income, the less time I’m spend­ing work­ing on main­tain­ing my skill set and look­ing for new work.  Like every­thing in small busi­ness, it’s a bal­anc­ing act.  How much time does one spend on each part?  I’m fairly happy with the num­ber of hours I work right now, so I’d like to avoid this growth method if I can.

Hiring full time staff is some­thing I’d love to do in the long run, but right now, that’s not going to hap­pen.  I’m think­ing of it as a five year goal.  I need to con­quer a lot more ter­ri­tory to make this pos­si­ble, and doing so will involve restruc­tur­ing the basis of my busi­ness (incor­po­rat­ing, for one).

Passive income streams are the holy grail of the infotech-​​based small busi­ness.  The idea here being you do some upfront work and develop a prod­uct which pays div­i­dends over time with­out much effort.  I’ve played around with stock pho­tog­ra­phy, and the best that’s man­aged to do is help defray my costs of buy­ing stock art for my projects.  I’m also toy­ing with devel­op­ing and sell­ing WordPress themes on pop­u­lar theme mar­ket­places, but it’s start­ing to look a lit­tle over-​​saturated out there.

Then there’s the whole online-​​game project, but it’s a huge gam­ble and dif­fi­cult to jus­tify the large num­ber of hours of devel­op­ment time before it stands a chance of return­ing on the investment.

The truth is, the future is prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion of the above.  I’ve recently started out­sourc­ing some small tasks here and there where appro­pri­ate, and I’ve recently bumped up my weekly hours quota.  And I’m still inves­ti­gat­ing the idea of devel­op­ing WordPress themes for sale.

Do you have any thoughts or sug­ges­tions?  Please feel free to share them in the comments! 

Like Wearing Beautiful, But Uncomfortable Shoes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Last week, I turned down a new client because I felt the bud­get wasn’t enough for me to do the job I wanted to do.  It was a client that I’ve really wanted to work with, and I thought long and hard about bend­ing my rates to accom­mo­date them, but ulti­mately, I decided to stick to my ini­tial reac­tion, even though I was uncom­fort­able with the deci­sion. As I often do when I worry about some­thing, I posted a note on Facebook to the effect that say­ing no to work would never be some­thing I could be com­fort­able with.  A class­mate from high School, closet writer, and astute observer of  peo­ple, Stacey Hoover Coleman, had this to say:

This might not make any sense to you, but hear me out. You remind me of a lady in REALLY beau­ti­ful, high, high, high, heeled shoes. She loves them, they’re the right size, and wouldn’t trade them for the world, but they’re uncom­fort­able as all hell.

At first, I didn’t quite fol­low what she was say­ing, but she clar­i­fied further:

…I’m say­ing YOU run­ning your own busi­ness is like wear­ing fan­tas­tic but uncom­fort­able shoes. You love it, you don’t want it to change, but it makes you mas­sively uncom­fort­able, too.

Instant les­son learned.  She’s right.  It does make me uncom­fort­able. And I think I would be much more wor­ried if it didn’t.

The thing about run­ning your own busi­ness based on project work is that you have to be hus­tling con­stantly.  There is no “coast” set­ting on a busi­ness like the one I am in.  There’s no secu­rity (not that your aver­age office job offers much either). 

If I were ever to become com­fort­able, then I would lose an edge, and I would run the risk of my busi­ness fail­ing. Which would be finan­cially dam­ag­ing, but it wouldn’t kill me.  Let’s just state that’s an out­come that I wish to avoid, and not talk about the impli­ca­tions of fail­ure right now.  I’ll save that for another post.  Back to discomfort.

Discomfort is a moti­va­tor for me.  I think most peo­ple, in a state of dis­com­fort, are moti­vated to seek com­fort.  The way that I react to the dis­com­fort of a lack of finan­cial secu­rity is to seek more work and more ways to make money, to put more dis­tance between me and the unde­sir­able busi­ness out­come described above. It’s not likely I’ll ever achieve com­fort and com­pla­cency, but that’s okay.  So long as the moti­va­tion is there, I’m going to survive.

What I need to be com­fort­able with is the real­iza­tion that I prob­a­bly won’t get to be com­pla­cent or com­fort­able in this busi­ness.  I need to let go of the notion that to be happy, I need to have com­fort and secu­rity. I can be and am often quite happy while being discomfited.  

So my busi­ness is like a pair of beau­ti­ful, uncom­fort­able high heel shoes.  I’ll never give them it up will­ingly.  But from time to time, and mostly pri­vately, I will com­plain.  Quietly.  

To Rewrite or Not to Rewrite? That is the Flowchart.

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I recently received a rewrite request for a story I had sub­mit­ted.  Over my time as a writer, I’ve received rewrite requests that I’ve accepted, and rewrite requests I have turned down–for a lot of dif­fer­ent rea­sons.  I real­ized that my think­ing that goes into the deci­sion of whether or not to do so is some­what com­plex, and I got to won­der­ing if it was some­thing that a flow­chart could describe.  After a lit­tle bit of play­ing around this morn­ing, I have cre­ated just such a flowchart.

rewriteflowchart

Click on the thumb­nail image to view the full size chart.  Did I miss any steps that you would have con­sid­ered?  Do you think I am insane for draw­ing up a flow­chart for some­thing like this?  Share your thoughts in the comments.


Three Design Business Concepts

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I am reach­ing a point where I think I need to brand my cre­ative ser­vices with its own web­site, port­fo­lio, and so on.  So I’ve been try­ing to brain­storm some busi­ness names and con­cepts I can design the site around.  I haven’t really hit on any­thing solid yet, but here are some of the ideas I’ve bounced around on my IM list and in my own head.  Sarah’s tired of hear­ing about them, so now you get to instead!

“Monster Stomp Studios”

Logo Concept:  A daikaiju mon­ster from a low angle, lift­ing a mas­sive foot to DESTROY!

Tagline:  “Small Studio.  Big ideas.”

Disadvantages:  I am not the world’s great­est illus­tra­tor, and I want a car­toony illus­tra­tion for that logo, I think.  Like a chibi Godzilla knock­off.  So I’d prob­a­bly have to out­source the illus­tra­tion to another designer and that doesn’t look good on my main work site to have done that.  I need the design to be com­pletely my work.  So if I stick with this one, I’ll have to really work hard in sketch­ing and illus­tra­tor to cre­ate a good logo.  I need to learn to draw bet­ter anyway!

Write Design

Site Concept:  Natural media, paper, pen­cils, inks.  Lots of edi­to­r­ial style marks on things, cor­rect­ing typos.  Focusing on the writ­ten word.  Great typog­ra­phy, lots of handwriting.

Tagline:  “Design solu­tions for authors and publishers.”

Disadvantage:  My con­cept is mean­ing­ful, but there are a mil­lion Write Design web­sites out there.  It’s too com­mon of an idea, and I almost cer­tainly won’t be using this one, which is sad because I like the idea of mak­ing a web­site with real paper.  Which leads me to the next

Little Fish Big Pond Studio

Logo/​site con­cept:  con­struc­tion paper!  Blue sea back­ground, styl­ized fish and other sea cutouts here and there.  Maybe some javascript  ani­mat­ing a few mov­ing around.  Masthead involves a bunch of lit­tle fish in a school,  with one solo fish a dif­fer­ent color out lead­ing the pack.

Tagline: “How do lit­tle fish sur­vive in the big blue sea?  They stick together.”

Disadvantages:  A few other design com­pa­nies out there using a sim­i­lar con­cept.  This one posi­tions me specif­i­cally as being a small busi­ness designer, which may be a niche I don’t want to put myself into.  I really like the design con­cept though, and now I just can­not help but want to build a site out of con­struc­tion paper cutouts.  It would look awesome!

Other ideas/​concepts that aren’t ripe yet:

  • some­thing that can play on sci­ence fiction
  • some­thing spin­ning off of Roundbottom?
  • some­thing super grungy and crunchy
  • some­thing that I can use my pho­tog­ra­phy skills for
  • Something about Kansas, using the tall grass prairie as a design element
  • dinosaurs! (no, I don’t know what that means)

It’s hard work being a cre­ative genius, but someone’s gotta do it.  Eventually, I’m going to hit on the per­fect con­cept that’s going to show my skills at their best.  I know it.  I just need a bit more time and thought.  Advice is gladly accepted.

To Save SF Short Fiction, We Had to Destroy It

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

(Warning, the below is poorly thought out and writ­ten hastily. I will write more later this week.)
Doug Cohen has recently launched a sub­scribe to a SF mag­a­zine drive via his Livejournal.

I have a sus­pi­cion that telling the SF writ­ing blo­gos­phere to sub­scribe to short fic­tion mag­a­zines in an effort to save short fic­tion is like instruct­ing a bunch of buggy whip mak­ers to buy buggy whips to save the buggy whip man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try.  I know Doug means well, and I don’t mean this as a crit­i­cism of him, but I am very doubt­ful that telling a small group of active online fan­dom to sub­scribe to mag­a­zines will make a bit of dif­fer­ence in the gen­eral decline.   I’ve been just as guilty

The gorilla in the room that we rarely acknowl­edge is that nobody wants to read short fic­tion.  If they did, then there wouldn’t be this mess. I’ve heard and read hand wav­ing about the changes in dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els, but hon­estly, I don’t buy it.  In this day and age, if you have a burn­ing desire to read sci­ence fic­tion short sto­ries, you can Google up a mag­a­zine in less than a second.

Do I think that the pub­lic could be mar­keted towards to encour­age the read­ing of more short fic­tion? Maybe.  A good mar­ket­ing team can sell just about any­thing.  Do I think any­one has the money to back a large cam­paign like this?  No.  SFWA would be the only orga­ni­za­tion that I could see such an ini­tia­tive com­ing from, and they’re a mas­sive joke; an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to inter­nal pol­i­tics and rumor­mon­ger­ing more than the decline and col­lapse of the indus­try around it.

There is no solu­tion.  The public’s inter­est has moved on.  If you’re a writer, go write video games, movies, tele­vi­sion, or books, in that order of pop­u­lar­ity.  That is where the public’s inter­est is right now, and if you don’t like it, then I’m afraid that you should prob­a­bly get used to the idea that short fic­tion is a small, niche hobby of lit­tle impor­tance.  I’m fine with that.  I find that I enjoy writ­ing it, and that’s enough for me.  Short fic­tion for me is a way to learn writ­ing, but I won’t regret leav­ing it behind if I were to crack another (more pop­u­lar and bet­ter pay­ing) medium, or find some amal­gam of sev­eral of my own.

I don’t sup­port the record indus­try for its fail­ing busi­ness model. I don’t think the SF print mag­a­zine world deserve spe­cial treat­ment either.  I do, in fact sub­scribe to quite a few mag­a­zines.  But it’s not out of any effort to save them from the dust­bin. There’s plenty to read online, and will be as long as weirdos like me keep writ­ing it.

I’ve been around and around the fund­ing mod­els for online mag­a­zines in my head.  I’ve con­cocted the most ridicu­lous Web 2.0 mod­els for online pub­lish­ing that you can imag­ine.  But none of them will work, because there’s no evi­dence what-​​so-​​ever that there is enough pub­lic inter­est to jus­tify the build­ing of such a thing.  Every model fails, because there just aren’t enough peo­ple inter­ested in read­ing and sup­port­ing a mag­a­zine mon­e­tar­ily for it to even sus­tain itself.   Don’t quote Strange Horizons at me, either.  Their fund drive doesn’t seem to be doing too well this time around.

Science Fiction, meet the long tail.  It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.