Posts Tagged ‘publishing’

Five Unconventional Zine Model Ideas

Posted on: by 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?

The Paradox of Choice

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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?