Image via WikipediaI have been frustratingly unavailable to participate in these of late, but suffice it to say, the SF Signal Podcast is audibly awesome. Should you have some perverse need to hear my spoken opinions on various sci-fi topics, you can do so via the following SF Signal episodes:
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.
While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I was the recipient of one of the most professionally handled and forward-thinking social media outreach efforts I've yet come across, and considering that I've done social media for a living on more than a few occasions, that's saying something. Even more impressive, the outreach didn't involve LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any other buzzword standard-bearer of the overhyped social Web.
The outreach effort was from Tor books (the sci-fi imprint under Macmillan) in relation to their online bookstore. You read that right: A dead-tree book publisher most definitely has a clue of how to play in the digital sandbox, as I'll explain below. The entire communication took place over e-mail, with nary a tweet or friend feed in sight.
I know what you're thinking: Where was the social media? As Chris Brogan and my colleagues at Social Media Explorer (Jason Falls and David Finch in particular) continue to preach but no one seems to hear, social media is about the connections, not the tools. Twitter is a means, not an end, and the Tor group was much better served in reaching their goals through old-school e-mail than overly asynchronous tweetspeak or Wall-to-Wall missives.
What goal, you may ask? Getting an insanely insignificant blogger to give a damn about the new Tor book store. In other words, they wanted me to know about Tor's new project, and went through no minor effort to inform me.
It is no false modesty to say that I am the smallest of small potatoes in the blogosphere. I no longer have my still-not-giant Geekend megaphone, and even my appearances on TechTalk and my tweet exchanges with some moderately well known names in sci-fi and comics don't crank my annual unique visitor levels into the four-figures-a-month range. I'm nobody, and I only barely know a few somebodies, all of whom Tor could much more effectively speak to directly. Using me to ping Mary Robinette Kowal, Lar de Souza or David Gallaher is a pointless effort. Tor has or easily could get all their phone numbers, and they'd all be happy to take the call.
So why waste time with me? Because there is nobody too small in social media. One of my Nerd Words columns made the weekly roundup on Tor's own sci-fi blog, and that was all the validation the digital marketing team at Macmillan needed to consider me worthy of courting as a press source. In the land of Google, every incoming link is worth chasing, and Tor put no small effort into getting some links from little old me.
Not that they ever asked for any link love, mind you. Macmillan's digital marketing manager, Ami, wrote a very brief and straightforward initial e-mail (and the only way to get the address she used would be to read all the way through my bio post) which linked to the new store and the press release covering its launch. Totally professional, but friendly and with enough personalized content to prove she knew who I was and demonstrate this wasn't a blind e-mail blast. Top marks so far, but nothing that out of the ordinary, right?
At no point did Ami ask me to buy anything, pimp anything, or link anything. It was a simple "thought you'd like to know" mail, like she was mailing the New York Times and not Mr. Bloggy McSmallTime, along with a promise to answer any questions I had.
Oh, and the pitch? Tor was launching a sci-fi/fantasy-only online bookstore that carried books from every major publisher, not just Tor/Macmillan. They were selling their competitors stuff side-by-sdie with their own. The boldness of the idea was intriguing, and worthy of its own (future) post.
Naturally, the idea of someone taking on Amazon in the book space when B&N, Borders and Books-a-Million are hemorraging cash intrigued me. I'm a sci-fi geek, aspiring author, and once-and-future Web entrepreneur. Books plus Web plus sci-fi was right in my wheelhouse. So I asked Ami a lot of follow-ups, with lots of gotcha specifics.
She answered the same day -- by looping in the store's project manager who would speak to me directly about the site. Pablo got back to me the next day -- asking me to elaborate my questions -- and he answered them a couple days later with some very thorough responses. He then invited me to ping him again, directly, if I had any future questions.
So, to recap, a major book publisher reaches out to a smalltime nobody with a press release about a bold new Web initiative -- with a personal invite, no less -- and then kicks him higher up the chain when he has questions. At no point do they ask for press, cross-linking, or even a simple purchase. There is no quid pro quo. Everything is professional and pitch-perfect. Oh, and they had to do some research to contact me. No direct, immediate or large payoff, just online community goodwill and knowledge dissemination.
That's how you do social media outreach, boys and girls.
And for what it's worth, it worked. From now on, my Nerd Words column will link to store.tor.com instead of Amazon for my book citations, which is a big deal for me, since I'm an Amazon Associate. I'm leaving (a very little) money on the table because the PR efforts impressed me so. The store is pretty good, too, but we'll discuss that later.
Social media is about socialization, not the media. Remember this and you will succeed.
The criticisms I received--and none were mean-spirited--helped me refine the business model I was proposing, and (hopefully) come up with something better. The advantage is that the new magazine concept is less a departure from traditional magazines than the first one. Here's how it breaks down:
Establish an editorial staff that accepts completed, queried stories from authors. Select from those stories the most promising and entertaining queries, and write a compelling synopsis of the work. Using a top-of-market word rate, place a "price" on each selected story. List the synopsis and the price on the magazine Web site, along with a Paypal account and a 30-day deadline. Readers can donate as much or as little as they wish to get the story published, but if at the end of the 30 days the minimum commission is not met, all donations revert to the readers, and the author is free to query the story elsewhere. If the commission is met by the deadline, the story appears online and is thereafter free to the reader, as is the expectation of most online content.
I've called this model a Reverse Radiohead, a slight variation on the ransom model used by other publishers.
The magazine makes money by earning 15 percent of all story commissions (this would be factored into the word-rate price). Authors get a top-market word rate--equivalent to novel work, if not better--and faster query turnarounds than most print mags can offer. Readers get a direct voice in what the magazine publishes, and they can vote with their pocketbooks.
As I said before, this readily complies with the 90-9-1 rule of online participation. The heavily invested one percent of your audience pays the freight of the 90 percent that just want to read stuff for free. I'd also extend the long tail value of the magazine catalogue by allowing readers to voluntarily donate to the author of a favorite story even after the minimum commission is met (the magazine would keep its standard 15 percent). This also gives authors an incentive not only to prefer this magazine, but to keep promoting readership on the site well beyond initial publication--because it could earn them money. It's like a radio/TV royalty check, only on the honor system.
As I mentioned in my initial pitch, I'd build in all the banners/buttons/badges necessary for fans and authors to promote a story and/or the magazine on their own sites (and Facebook, and Twitter, etc.), perhaps even donating directly through there.
Further extending the long tail, I'd co-opt some equivalent of Anthology Builder, so that readers can design and buy a customized print-on-demand physical version of the magazine, which would again pay a direct royalty percentage back to the authors (and the magazine). This brings in all the "I don't read off screens folks" but frees the magazine from all the print hassles.
Finally, since such a system will (like all systems, only moreso) favor established authors, the magazine will underwrite the word rate of at least one "newcomer" author each month, so as to encourage a flourishing of new talent into the writing fraternity.
Granted, all of this assumes you can build enough buy-in and buzz from authors and readers to get the system jump-started, and it still relies on on having a competent editorial staff to screen out the dregs and the trademark-violating fan-fic from amongst the submissions. But I think this magazine model can work because it exploits some of the central advantages that online mags have over conventional print. First, there is no printing and distribution overhead, since no physical magazine is printed (save on-demand, which is self-sustaining). This is a cost center that cripples most magazines, and we can take it right off the bottom line.
But in addition to having no physical product, the "ransom magazine" will have no physical constraints. Plenty of authors have written really great stories that have been turned down by print mags simply because the publication didn't have enough physical space to accommodate the work. An online magazine that doesn't have a set physical layout doesn't have this constraint. Even the online mags in publication today have a rather constrictive limit, simply because they either offer a PDF-printable version, which falls into the same layout trap; because they require their editors to make the final publication call, which is constrained by the time and bandwidth available to the staff; or because they have to pay for the stories on spec, which limits their publication to the number of words buyable with their cash on hand.
By offloading the cost and choice of publication directly to the readership, the magazine could theoretically pay more for stories and still offer a greater number of stories than any print competitor. Moreover, a ransom magazine could have very clear measurement of what stories, subjects and authors get the most readers and the most profit, giving them a decided business intelligence advantage over print magazines. That constantly overworked editorial staff could make smarter decisions faster by knowing what has sold in the past. And beyond the sale, what has been most read, and shared, and linked back to.
It's even conceivable that such a Web 2.0 magazine could also become a directory of record for authors, as they could create profiles on the site touting their backgrounds and bibliographies as a means to encourage fans to underwrite their submitted stories. The same business intelligence mentioned above could also document the relative popularity of each author and story, which leads to all kinds of intangible social media benefits.
Now, if only I can find some willing investors and that aforementioned team of crack editors, I'd chase this idea in a heartbeat. Feel free to volunteer for either role in the comments.
Image via WikipediaThe title denotes the topic of the latest SF Signal podcast to be corrupted by my audible contributions.
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