Hyperfiction (n.) - A form of fiction that takes advantage of interactive media to elevate a story beyond mere linear narrative. Basically, a story that incorporates hyperlinks to allow the reader to experience the text in any particular order, and to explore story materials that are ancillary to the main plot. For example, a hyperfiction novel might include interactive maps of the setting, video news accounts of events in the story, and blogs or journal entries made by several characters. Hyperfiction is still in its infancy, though Shadow Unit by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Leah Bobet and Holly Black is perhaps the most well known sci-fi experiment in the medium to date.
I bring it up because:Hyperfiction is more than fiction on a hypertext-capable reader, as Elizabeth Bear informs us. This is the point being missed in the recent Amazon vs. MacMillan brouhaha, to say nothing of the announcement of the iPad -- fiction that is native to digital media does and is more than fiction native to analog media. Put another way, producers did more with DVDs than they did with VHS tapes. Interactive features, games, alternate audio commentaries, whole extra cuts of the film, easter eggs, and the like. This is taking advantage of the potential of the medium. To date, we've stuck analog books on digital readers and called them ebooks. But what does a hyperbook look like? How would a hypernovel differ from a novel? We haven't even begun to really ask the question. Until we do, don't expect e-readers to become "necessary" to the average consumer. You haven't replaced their novels yet. You've only copied them.
The gang over at Futurismic finally addressed the elephant in the room as applies to the future of short fiction publishing: Is patronage the only way short fiction will survive? This is the main question I've been wrestling with in my own sci-fi magazine 2.0 concept, because it's become pretty apparent that people just won't pay for short stories in the traditional, buy a magazine site unseen and hope what's in it is good sort of way. It's especially true online, where nobody wants to pay for anything not developed by 37signals.
(For those that don't recall the specifics of Magazine 2.0, the idea is this: Rather than query editors for publication, authors query readers directly. They synopsize a story, post the synopsis online, and list a price for which they are willing to publish it. The readership can donate in whatever increments they like until to a set query deadline, and if the price is met, the story is "unlocked" and published. The zealous fans will do most of the bidding, and thus will pay the freight for the majority who refuse to spend money on content. The 90-9-1 rule is thusly observed and monetized.)
Now, the Futurismic folks don't distinguish between celebrity endorsement and outright underwriting, as both rely on a patron to either pay for the content outright so others can enjoy for free, or for the patron to endorse a product so the fanboys will support it as a show of fealty to their fandom crush. In both cases, the content is a supported charity, not a product. This is what Elizabeth Bear calls the "public radio guilt model" and lots of hallowed institutions (public radio, for example) and a few sci-fi magazines are coping on this system. And Bear would know about online publishing, what with her cofounding involvement in Shadow Unit.
Thus we arrive at the glaring hole in my Magazine 2.0 idea -- audience size. As io9 pointed out a while back, the main reason Baen's Universe online magazine is shutting down is that it couldn't grow its audience fast enough to ween itself off of the fiscal teat of its associated fan club membership dues. It was dependent on a specific type of patronage and when that patronage faltered, the magazine was doomed. You must cast your income net to a diversified group of sources so as not to die when when one of supporters stops supporting.
My magazine 2.0 concept can't work before an audience is built, because there is no money in the bank to publish stories on spec as a means of building an audience. Old-fashioned loss leader publishing startup principles won't work here. Magazine 2.0 presupposes an audience who will look at synopses and bid on stories, but it needs stories in order to build that audience.
The answer, I believe, is distributed patronage. I don't want just one John Scalzi using his powers to save Strange Horizons, I want fifty or a hundred John Scalzis bolstering a couple dozen magazines every month. (In this case, Scalzi may be a bad example, as he is a sufficiently bankable author that he only works on commission these days, rather than on spec; most authors are not so lucky.)
Specifically, when Author X submits a story synopsis to Magazine 2.0, it generates a code snippet for a Donate Now button that Author X can publish on his Web site. Thus, Author X's audience becomes Magazine 2.0's audience, even if only for a brief while. Meanwhile, Blogger Y wants a story from Author X on his blog, so he signs up as a Magazine 2.0 Reprinter, and thus gets the right to reprint Author X's story on his blog as well. At the same time, Blogger Y gets his own code snippet to promote donations to unlock Author X's story. (Or, Blogger Y could just pay the unlock cost himself to get the story immediately.) Thus, Blogger Y's audience becomes Magazine 2.0's audience, even if only temporarily. Any Web site that publishes a donation widget that contributes to publication earns simultaneous reprint rights. If you want exclusive online publishing rights (or, more precisely, exclusive except for Magazine 2.0's own copy), you'll have to pay the whole freight yourself.
As to why A-list authors like Scalzi would play this game: Publicity. As Cory Doctorow repeatedly points out, anonymity is the greatest enemy to author success (which is why Doctorow gives away so many loss-leader free ebooks of his stuff). Magazine 2.0 casts the audience net as wide as possible, meaning Scalzi could make his commission rate just as easily under Magazine 2.0, but theoretically be seen by more people as the donate widget spreads to multiple venues. Moreover, for a select list of authors, Magazine 2.0 could be adapted to solicit for commissioned work, rather than spec work. (Scalzi would write the story only after and unless the donation cost was met, not before.)
Magazine 2.0 is thus a meta-magazine, one that houses all the stories it has unlocked for perpetual online consumption and reprint. It is also a platform for enabling other online venues to acquire short fiction (or, conceivably, any) content, and one that co-opts the audience of each venue and contributor as an ever-shifting, distributed donor base.
The launch obstacle thus becomes publicizing and enlisting the use of the platform by authors and venues, but that's a much less steep hill to climb than bootstrapping a magazine audience. Essentially, magazine 2.0 is a crowdsourced marketplace for authors to sell their spec content, and a method for audiences and publishers to acquire said content. Crazy, but I think it can work.
In a shameless bit of pimpery, I commend unto you my friend Ian "Lizard" Harac's new novella, The Rainbow Connection. I was privileged to hear this fanciful tale in its first incarnation as a short story at my SF writers group and it's teh AWESOME.
Lizard takes the common spec-fic trope of alternate universes inspired by popular fiction and turns it on its head. The protagonist, FBI agent Matt Anders, is an anti-copyright-infringement investigator whose main job is stopping folks from importing stories from other universes that violate our only local timeline's copyrights. For example, while there are terrorists that want to bogart actual phasers from worlds where Captain Kirk was real, our hero's job is to intercept Trekkies who want to pirate in DVD copies of the original series' fourth season from a fan-fic universe where NBC never cancelled the show. Unfortunately, things go wrong when Anders stumbles upon the body of a dead munchkin, courtesy of the land of Oz. Insert an evil conspiracy, an ultra-geeky techno-pirate sidekick, and a talking broomstick, then allow bizarre hijinks to ensue.
Seriously, you want this book, you need this book. And for local folks who want a signed copy, Lizard will be doling out the penstrokes at A Reader's Corner on Saturday, Mar. 7 from 1 to 3 pm, and he'll be attending my Watchmen Movie Premiere party later that same day so, should you arrive copy in hand, he'll be more than willing to put his fiendish John Hancock to the inside cover whilst we all boogie down. And if you're not local, I can probably still arrange for a signed copy, provided you're willing to pay shipping. Contact me for details.
So two things happened today that morphed into yet another business idea I won't pursue. The first is that PBS MediaShift published what is merely the latest in a long line of online eulogies, from various sources, bemoaning the slow death of the Big Three Sci-Fi magazines. Second, fantasy-horror author Cherie Priest spoke to me on Twitter.
This, of course, got me thinking about how to save short-form science fiction as a print medium.
The Big Three--Analog, Asimov's, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF)--have a collective circulation of less than 50,000 readers. The subscriber list for my Geek Trivia e-newsletter is 20 percent bigger than that, which is to say 50K is a dangerously low readership number if you're going to shell out the money required to put your fiction onto bundles of dead trees and physically ship them to people. If my sorry ass is outperforming you, then you're in trouble.
Now, the point of the MediaShift article isn't the usual "they didn't adapt to the Internet" screed, as the Big Three have been steadily bleeding readers for 20 years--before online competition was a real issue. The point is that these are iconic magazines that are dying because they refuse to adapt. They aren't, as Warren Ellis puts it, "designed to be wanted." They're stuck in a 1950s mindset, and it's killing them. That's the first strike.
The second strike is that SF magazines don't pay writers enough to be worth writing for--largely because of high overhead. Which is why so many online fiction venues have popped up, some free-to-read, some not. Heck, even Amazon has gotten into direct short fiction sales, acting almost as a publisher rather than a retailer. The Internet is putting pressure on the Big Three's business model thanks to lower overhead. But these online venues certainly haven't taken the world--even the sci-fi Internet world--by storm.
Which brings me to Cherie Priest. This morning, Wil Wheaton pimped one of Ms. Priest's latest short stories, "Tanglefoot," in his blog. The story is published in Subterranean Magazine online, so it's free for anybody to read, anytime. As soon as I read the two-paragraph pitch about a magical steampunk alt-history of the U.S. Civil War, I not only wanted to read it, but to share it with my fellow Cherie Priest-loving friends, most of whom don't and/or won't read fiction online. So, since I cyber-stalk Ms. Priest (amongst a host of other geek luminaries), I reached out to her via Twitter and I asked where I could snag a print edition of the story for my friends. Her response was quick and apologetic:
"Thanks, dude - but I'm afraid ... well ... you can't. It's a Subterranean exclusive. Next year, 2 books in this world, though."
"Tanglefoot," you see, is an online loss leader for some yet-to-be-published works from Cherie Priest. Even though I can order a print copy of Subterranean magazine, I can't order one with this story in it.
Which is where my idea comes from, courtesy of an old idea I called Ransom TV.
Start an online genre magazine that commissions writers to write stories, and then lets fans pay for the commission. Think of it as a reverse Radiohead album release. In this case, Cherie Priest writes the pitch for the short story, which is listed as a commissionable project. There is a price listed for the commission, and fans are given a Paypal account into which they can donate to get the story written--as much or as little as they want to pay. The faster the commission is met, the faster the story is published. Under this system, writers can earn a decent word-rate for short fiction, because the writers set they word-rate. We also harness a little wisdom of crowds on the selection side, turning the audience into the editor.
Once the story is paid for and published, it's free to be read. Period. No restrictions. If you're a cheapskate (like me) you can just hang out and wait for someone else to pay the freight. If you're a total fanboy (like me) and would pay good money to see a great pitch from a favorite writer fulfilled, you'll donate a fair amount to speed the cause. Moreover, if the site gives you badges, banners and buttons that let you promote the story commission on your site (and does the same for the authors), and combines that with some "ask your friends to donate" e-mail/Facebook/Twitter interfaces, every fan becomes a promoter.
As John Scalzi reminds us, writers shouldn't write for free, but readers generally shouldn't be required to pay online. That said, 37 Signals suggests that paid is the new free, because ad-supported models aren't generally workable except on huge economies of scale. Under this system, you get both. The fanboys pay for the content that the casual readers consume for free. Zealots pay for the lurkers. It totally complies with the 90-9-1 rule.
But that, my friends, is only half the battle. The other half is the custom magazine. I don't want to limit my readership to just the techno-savvy. I need to be print-accessible. The easy part there is making every story a downloadable PDF.
But what if I want something nicer than a desktop printout? What if I want an issue of Subterranean with "Tanglefoot" in it?
Well, I'd combine our PDF system with a print-on-demand service like Lulu, and design a magazine-assembly system that let you "shop" for stories in the catalogue and design a custom anthology that you could have printed. My contracts with the writers would pay them direct royalties for any physical copies printed, so they make money on the back end. (I'd also give them badges that let them promote their printable versions.)
Now my readers can build a just-for-them one-off magazine from my catalogue, have it printed and shipped anywhere. There would be a nominal charge, but we're used to paying for phsycial goods. And if we're feeling really crazy, we could even do a quarterly "most popular" or "editor's choice" magazine, print a modest run ourselves, and actually distribute it to book stores and newstands. Sounds nutty, but I think there might be an audience there.
The side gig has been kickin' my lazy ass of late and the day job is rounding into bizarro mutant form with actual processes and duties and a business model that relies on me pumping out Web video show scripts at a mind-numbing rate (seriously, I'm looking for willing supplicants to do similar work on the cheap; ping for details). The mangy scrap of putrid fucktard fiction I vomited all over my writers group last week was such a waste of fucking time that I was seriously contemplating shelving my lets-be-us-a-fictional-type-author aspiration for, say, a decade.
And then Elizabeth Bear, who is not only published and a mondo mega blogger but also sports stamps of approval from both Ensign Crusher and His Lord John the Scalzi goes and reminds me that, yes, it's supposed to be hard--dispshit--and that it's the hard that makes it worthy, so on and so forth. But she invokes the platitudes so well, you see. And she makes these points, that well and truly have convinced me not to go gently into that cliched, self-pitying night:
I read something somewhere that opined that the difference between garage bands and bands that break out is not musical competence, but having found their own sound. I've listened to this happen to a couple of friends' bands, and it's true, I think.
It also applies to writers. You get stuck at that stage because you are trying to find the things that will lift you our of competence and into the next stage. And I can tell you what those things are.
One is confidence (hard, in a business where one faces constant rejection.) Confidence in the story you're telling. Confidence in your ability to tell it. That confidence is what gives a narrative drive, allows you to stop hemming and hawing and say what you mean rather than talking around it.
Another is voice. Sounding like yourself, the rhythm and swing of your rhetoric, the unique chord progressions that make this identifiably your song and not something anybody could have written.
And the interesting thing there is that that personalization--which is what's going to make people love your work--is the same thing that's going to make some people hate it. Strong opinions are what you're after. And some of those strong opinions are going to be negative.
And there's experience and technique and craft, of course, but those are all part of the competence. And mere competence isn't enough. You have to have that something extra.
See what she did there? She made this all my fault--which I already knew--but she also made overcoming it seem so very damn possible. And lo, cynical pragmatist that I am, I live for the possible. So here I be, resolving to stop second-guessing and just carve out some precious time to write my fucking fictional ass off for a change. All because I cyber-stalk Wil Wheaton's tweets and the magnificent bastard goes and lives up to his Nicest Mothefucker On Teh Internets rep.
So last week I got canned from a job of seven years and seven days. Came as quite a bit of a shock, since my ego hadn't really prepared me for losing what was on many levels a dream job, where I got to write trivia questions, blog about science fiction, dream up Web site features, analyze interesting data, moderate a forum, and basically solve problems all day in an office with sanctioned video game systems, free decaf tea, a scandalously casual dress code, and cube mates who kicked ass and took names. Yes, there were such jobs hidden in the bowels of CNet, if you knew where to look.
I was not happy to be let go. And today it finally occurred to me that I've also--in betwixt feeling sorry for myself--accidentally kind of screwed Diesel Sweeties. I was about to expand my geekish blog franchise into video (something I was really looking forward to) and the good R. Stevens--creator of Diesel Sweeties--was all lined up to to donate some of his mega-awesome t-shirts as my on-camera wardrobe (for you see, one of the unwritten rules of video is never wear the same shirt twice).
Mr. Stevens kicked in with these two ubercool shirts just to get the ball rolling--and then I got downsized with extreme prejudice before nary a video was filmed.
Now, Mr. Stevens will scarcely feel the pinch of this setback--he's hobnobbing with Warren Ellis, so I'm barely a blip on his radar screen--but I still feel like a heel for not living up to my promises. Yes, I just got a career smackdown, and I'm worried about offending a webcomic artist whom I've never personally met.
What's really strange about all this is that R. Stevens and Warren Ellis have been top of mind of late, and not just for the t-shirt scamming. Ellis, Bastard Tyrant of the Intarweebs, and Thane of Comicdom (it's a MacBeth reference; look it up), recently spoke about why he doesn't get all gooey in the pants over the chance to, say, write Batman or The X-men:
Or, if you like: you can only paint someone else's house for so long before you start thinking that it might be nice to own your own house one day.
I'm okay with painting other people's houses for short periods, because I'm good at it and it pays well and on nice days it's fun. But I never ever confuse painting a house for owning that house. And if I spent every waking hour painting other people's houses, I wouldn't be able to build houses of my own.
I spent the last seven years painting somebody else's house, and all that work just got taken from me and dismissed as part of a corporate cost-cutting measure. I was work-for-hire, to use a publishing term, and I never thought that I actually owned anything I wrote, but it all was identified pretty directly with me personally, and when I was let go, they decided to just stop doing the column and the blog that I had toiled to build to success.
Put another way: My work was meaningless, so far as my employers were concerned. That's a bitter pill, since I spent so much of my time and passion building those things. Guess I had to learn the hard way. Time to paint my own house or, in this case, start my own blog. You're reading the inaugural post of that new beginning.
Do I expect to make money at this blog? Probably not, or at least not much. Certainly not enough to live on. I'll need another day job, as John Scalzi advises, but that day job won't be about building a personal brand around me--unless I own the brand.
It's time for me to get serious about my long-dormant writing career. My buddy Ian "Lizard" Harac just got a novel deal, and I can't let him have all the fun. I'll post some of my practice fiction here, maybe even toss out a trivia question or two, and basically try to be interesting enough that my old contacts at SFSignal feel the urge to link to me again. I invite all of you along for the ride.
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