Print or Electronic Short Fiction Magazines?
Filed Under: SF Business, SF Publishers
There’s some great conversation going on over at the Tor site about magazine models again. John Klima is tackling the whole print vs. electronic delimma.
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.
Five Unconventional Zine Model Ideas
Filed Under: SF Business, SF Publishers, Speculative Fiction, Top Post
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?
The Paradox of Choice
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
This New York Times article hits on something that I’ve been worrying about for some time, which is that it seems that there are more and more people taking up writing, while at the same time, fewer are reading. I thought this was a problem specific to the SF short fiction world, but it sounds like a greater issue in publishing in general.
I’m not gloomy about the possibilities though. For a determined reader, there is more out there to find than there ever has been before (of course, you can say that in any given moment, as old books don’t go away, at least not immediately). What we need are better ways of fitting the content to the consumers. I do think that before the information revolution that came with the rise of the Internet, finding content you would like to consume was easier. There was less to choose from, and you could evaluate your choices more quickly. Now, I suspect many are paralyzed by choice.
Barry Schwartz, writer and researcher, believes that infinite choice is exhausting. He makes a very interesting case for this in a talk that he gave at TED recently. He also published a book in 2004 called The Paradox of Choice (amazon). I haven’t read this book, but I think it’s going to go on my stack of things to read.
One aspect of the article that struck home with me was this:
On the whole, Zaid is unworried about the proliferation of books, though he doesn’t think everyone should set pen to paper. “About would-be writers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-mail message. “The implication was that real writers would not be discouraged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some mediocrities are never discouraged, and some potential real writers would be lost. But there is so much talent around that we can afford it.”
I was discouraged, along with many other 8th grade writers, by James Gunn just as I was starting to be interested in writing. He gave a depressing and detailed talk to us about how difficult that it is to become published, and how little money there was to be made. Even before the Internet, things weren’t all sunshine and roses around here. He was never asked back to our conferences, which was a shame, because I think he brought up some very good points. But I think he shared the same opinion that Gide did. However, his discouragement didn’t stick, and I hope to meet him again sometime in the future to thank him. In some ways, his discouragement spurred me to push on with my writing. At the end of his talk, despite being so negative, he encouraged those of us in attendance to mail our manuscripts to him and he would provide us feedback. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I sent a story I had written recently, a kind of paranormal SF piece. He sent back the most carefully written, wonderfully helpful comments. His generosity has not been forgotten, and along with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, I consider him one of the first to mentor me in the craft.
I want to write more about this paralysis and paradox of choice, and some possible solutions. I think we can find ways to artificially and helpfully limit our choices without stifling new creative work. We already have some services, such as Amazon Suggests and some features on Netflix that help to do this. I’d love to see a system built that tracks as much of the short story market as possible, having database entries for each story. As readers, we would open accounts and flag the stories that we liked. And then, the site would make recommendations based on what we have liked in the past, suggesting new authors, new publications, and new stories that me might not come across otherwise. The system would learn and be trained over time, and soon, it could be a very effective means of limiting choice without burning down markets or running of writers. It’s a long tail tactic and it isn’t going to make anyone rich, but I think it has some merit. I’d look into building something like this, but I think the matching algorithms are way beyond my programming skills, and the data entry part would be difficult to maintain without the help of the individual editors and publishers. No one person could keep the content up-to-date, although I suppose you could offload that responsibility to the readers as well–but then, that sounds like work, and might reduce the potential user base for the site. Also, you introduce the possibility of typos, introducing duplicate data that would make matches much harder.
I will write more on this subject when I’ve read more on the paradox of choice, which has implications in web design as well—something I was thinking about as I designed the layout of my new site, and is the reason you don’t find a full-fledged archive anywhere. I attempt to limit the choice of new readers to my best entries and the latest content, and I put many choices in the footer, kind of pushing them out of the way so that only the determined would find them, and they wouldn’t interfere with the more casual reader. I can’t say how well this has worked yet.
How do you handle the glut of choice available to you in your reading today? Does it result in you reading more, or less? What are your strategies?
