Personally, I think if you can do print, do it. But electronic editions should be a given. It costs maybe an hour of your time to take your files and convert them into the popular formats. There are websites that do it for you. If anyone wants to know about those, I’ll dig up the links.
Cory Doctorow has talked about this in the past, and I agree with him. Sell a normal subscription for print, but those people get a free electronic version as well. The electronic version supports the print version. It’s easier to search, and, honestly, easier to share, which at the size we’re talking about? People pirating your stories around is a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for people to spread the word about your publication is a plus.
Also, sell a cheaper straight electronic version. If someone really wants to just get a PRC file every month, then let them. But I think you’ll find that the electronic version is a selling point of the print version. I can’t guarantee it will increase sales, but I think it’s the best of both worlds. It’s your chocolate in my peanut butter, my peanut butter in your chocolate. Mmmm!
I’d be ecstatic if every book I bought came with an electronic version so that I can search it afterwards, or even better, while I’m waiting for the book to arrive via Amazon. In fact, yesterday, I ordered some web application design texts and after I placed my order, Amazon tried to sell me a $15 e-book copy of one of the books so I could start reading right away. That’s great–only I sure as hell ain’t going to pay another $15 for a $50 book for that promise (and probably find that it is full of DRM that prevents me from really using it).
There are things I can do so much better on a computer or e-reader than I can do with a book. But paper is still easier to read until we see e-ink really take off (the Kindle is apparently cool, but I’ve never seen one in the wild). The two formats are complimentary, and I’d really like to see someone try out the model I’ve outlined above. I’d subscribe, anyway, and I currently subscribe to no magazines (although that’s a factor more of my recent unemployment than it is any problem with the magazines).
Are you publishing a print zine and giving away e-copies to your subscribers for archiving and easy indexing? Let me know in the comments.
Someone passed this link on to me via delicious. Does anyone know anything about Beneath Ceaseless Skies? What’s their operating model? Looks interesting, content-wise, and there’s some nice art featured. I’m not familiar with the editor, however.
Today is RSS Awareness Day. I usually don’t put much stock in these arbitrary awareness days, but RSS has changed the way I think about information fundamentally, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about that today, with a focus on how zines have adopted the technology, or not.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In practice, RSS involves a feed and a feed reader. Think of these components as like a webpage, and a browser (except that feed readers can work in browsers, and feeds syndicate the content of websites, but let’s not go there just yet). The feed reader parses the content of RSS feeds and presents them in a format that you and I can read. The RSS feed is generally made up of a form of XML, and is a single file containing all the recent updates to a website, generally the blog stuff. RSS feeds are the underlying technology in podcasting as well.
In simple terms, RSS feeds allow you to aggregate content from a bunch of different websites, keeping track of new content, without having to visit the websites themselves. There is more that can and will be done with the tech, but right now, this is the primary use.
Why I Love RSS
I have a mental illness that manifests itself in an intense fear that somewhere, something is happening on the internet that is cool, and I am not reading about it. My RSS reader is my medication, and I take an hourly dose. If not more.
Prior to using feed readers, I had a blog roll, and I would manually click through the links, checking each website one after another. I’d get to the end of the list and start over again. Ostensibly, my feed reader (Google Reader being my drug of choice) saves me time by collecting new entries from all these sites, sorting them, and allowing me to treat them more like email than websites. Each post comes in as a separate item, and I mark them as read or unread, and can sort them into different folders for organizing.
Up until a few months ago, I was subscribed to nearly 300 feeds on subjects ranging from biology to web design. I realized that all this information was overwhelming me, so I stepped it down to half of that. Most of what I removed were science fiction related feeds. I realized, at a certain point, that not everyone in the field had something to say about the genre that I was interested in.
Despite the ability to become overwhelmed, I still love RSS because it does provide efficiency in something I would be doing anyway–trying to keep track of a million things. It brings me constant sources of new information, and on a good, day I learn a dozen new things that prove useful in the long run. Many of the links that I blog (and that blogging feature is currently not working and I do not know why. Paul Raven, could you shoot me an email with your delicious settings? Somehow, I’ve got mine wrong) come from my feeds.
Speculative Fiction and RSS
One of the last things I did before closing up shop at the Fortean Bureau was to move the site to a content management system and provide an RSS feed. I don’t know if I was the first to do this–probably not–but there’s still sporadic adoption especially among the ‘zines.
My point being, if you are an online magazine publisher in this day and age, you need to adopt RSS as a marketing tool if for no other reason. RSS reminds me to check these sites. The ones without, I am more likely to forget about, unless, ironically, someone else in my feeds mentions the new content. You don’t even have to syndicate the full text of the short stories for me. Just a title and author (please, please include author in your feed information. Fantasy doesn’t do this, and I think it’s problematic. It looks like the author of every story is “Sean”) is sufficient to function as a reminder. It’s like a newsletter notification, only less obnoxious (why, I am not sure. I guess because you only ever get RSS from what you set up for, so there’s no such thing as RSS spam).
If you have a blog, you have a feed
As to the rest of us, if you’re using any of the common blogging services, you’re almost certainly serving up a feed somewhere. Ask yourself if your design displays the RSS feed prominently enough that interested parties can subscribe. Those of us who use Firefox have it easy. Firefox automatically detects whether a site has a feed and displays an orange icon in the address bar of the browser, but only if the RSS feed is properly indicated in the header of the html document. Some sites have feeds, but fail to put that link in the header template, so we have to hunt the page for the link. You lose potential readers the longer they go without finding it. And yes, I know that my new design doesn’t have an RSS Link featured prominently. I’m terrible at taking my own advice, but I am going to offer a very detailed RSS sidebar in the future, allowing people to subscribe to particular types of information that I write about seperately. It’s coming soon.
RSS: It’s not just for posts anymore
RSS feeds have gained some interesting new tools and uses recently. Yahoo Pipes allows anyone to mash up various RSS feeds and create new types of content. Blog management systems like WordPress now offer RSS feeds for individual posts, so that you can follow the comment discussions. RSS use is growing. It could stand to be a bit easier, as mashable.com wrote recently, but it’s a technology that is going to stay around for the forseeable future. It really does save time. If you’re not already using a Reader, I highly suggest you consider one. And if you’re not providing an RSS feed of your content, you’re missing out on readers.
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but call me Jeremy. I am a writer, photographer, and web designer currently living in Northern Colorado, seeking either freelance web design work or fulltime employment. Drop me a line if you have any questions, comments, advice, or heckles. I love hearing from new people. If you’re inclined, you can follow me on Twitter, where I share various links and talk about the same things I talk about here, only with fewer characters.
The structure and nature of short stories haven’t really changed in the digital age, as far as I can tell. They’re still told the same way mostly, same perspectives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3-7000 words). E-zines are for the most part straight forward adaptations of the print magazine format, to [...]
Since I started getting serious about photography, I have followed a relatively predictable pattern. As soon as there has been snow on the ground, I have quit shooting for the year. I hate snow, I hate the cold, and I have never found winter to be an inspiring time for any of [...]
As a designer, I’m always stumbling across useful resources and tools online, but for whatever reason, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writers’ lives easier. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. It just means you have to dig a little deeper. Today, I thought I would share some tools that [...]
At least in the science fiction community, there’s a lot of false community wisdom floating around about the editorial process. Some of them may have been true once. Some were probably invented to mess with the heads of noobs. Some of them are carefully nutured lies, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Well, no [...]
That seems like an unusual idea, doesn’t it? That wielding a camera to capture single moments in time really has anything valuable to add to the process of writing stories? But it has, I think. Each time I pick up the camera, I think about writing, and each time I write, I think about [...]
