Image by Glamhag via FlickrI have exactly one paid fiction publication to my credit. Ever. And someone thinks it (just barely) qualifies as some ofthe best sci-fi short fiction of 2011. Thankfully that someone has some street cred, because it's the gang from Tangent, which just happens to specialize in reviewing and critiquing sci-fi short fiction.
Yes, I am making inappropriate squee noises right now, of the Japanese schoolgirl variety. No, I am not ashamed.
I owe some thanks. First, to Mike Ray, the EIC at Redstone who took a chance on a nobody and gave me my first sale. Second, to my fellow SF Signal irregular Matt Sanborn Smith, who was kind enough to tweet me about the Tangent selection. I'm a lucky guy.
Also, I guess I'm obligated to get to writing some short fiction in 2012. I have a meager reputation to maintain.
As to specifics, the story is titled "Perfection" as was purchased by the fine folks over at Redstone Science Fiction. They actually snagged the story a few months ago but I held off noting it here until the link went live in their April issue. (The irony of my first fiction sale meeting the world on April Fool's Day is not lost on me.)
As to the story itself, I'd like to think I wear my Charles Stross influences rather proudly. This is also a considerably shorter piece than I usually write, which no doubt contributed greatly to its publication. Nonetheless, I commend its content unto you, and welcome feedback -- positive or otherwise -- in the comment spaces of this post. I thank you in advance.
The inestimable Graylin Fox and Sara Brookes have inexplicably allowed me to contribute to Six Sentence Sunday, wherein authors (a group which I aspire to include myself in) offer six sentences from their current works in progress.
Below are six sentences from "No Good Deed", a short story I am revising in a perhaps futile attempt to get something fictive published. Judge with appropriate harshness. (And, yes, I am aware today is Friday, not Sunday, but the posts are aggregated for Sunday publication. One must have the work up for linkage in advance.)
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“But if your friend isn’t burning, I wonder where the smoke is coming from.”
“Good question,” I replied. “His clothing, perhaps?”
“Engulfed in a pyre of mystical flame, and naked in public. Not your friend’s day, is it?”
“Actually, it’s his birthday.”
---
Comments are welcome. I may yet post the entire work (temporarily) for feedback before I sub it out again.
I want to give a shout out to Suzanne Vincent and the editing crew over at Flash Fiction Online, who gave this story one of the kindest and most encouraging rejection letters I've ever received. This was really my first stab at flash fiction, and as such its rather derivative -- I was channeling a bit of Douglas Adams when I threw this together -- with a weak ending. I had fun with it, but it's time to put this little experiment out to pasture. Thus, Crimes Against Science Fiction is trunked here for your enjoyment.
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When Tommy stumbled half-awake out of his apartment this morning, he didn't expect that the future would be waiting outside to kill him. Or that the future would be so fat.
"Stand fast, and prepare to answer for your crimes!" the one of the left shouted, pointing an exotic firearm at Tommy. The assailant was dressed in a flamboyantly colorful excuse for a military uniform, though the garment was clearly intended for someone far thinner than the rotund, pimply-faced gent breathing heavily in Tommy's parking space.
The one on the right interrupted. "Wait, we have to explain his crimes to him first. He isn't guilty of them yet." This one was slightly taller, and rail thin, except for the almost comically out-of-place beer belly swelling beneath the belt of his…er…outfit. He was wearing some bizarre hybrid of 17th century samurai armor and 21st century leather fetish gear while carrying a wildly impractical, oversized sword.
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.
Psychohistory (n.) - A field of study that uses advanced mathematics to accurately predict the future. Specifically, it's the use of sociological statistics to predict the collective behavior of large groups of people, like galaxy-spanning empires. Isaac Asimov is credited with coining this connotation of the term in 1951 with his Foundation series, which itself is considered required reading by most traditional sci-fi fans. There is a real field of study called psychohistory, which is about analyzing the psychological motivations behind historical events, but most sci-fi fans are either ignorant of this fact, or simply curse its existence when it muddles up their Asimov-related Google search results.
I bring it up because: A mere 58 years ago this week, the first UNIVAC I was dedicated into service at the U.S. Census Bureau -- June 14, 1951. (1951, coincidentally, was also the first year that Asimov's original Foundation stories were collected into book form.) UNIVAC was America's first successful commercial computer, and it made famous the notion of statistical prediction of major events when the fifth UNIVAC I unit successfully predicted the outcome of 1952 U.S. Presidential election based on early poll returns. This practice is now common, and is in some ways the real-world analogue of Asimov's psychohistorical notions. Asimov, in turn, took the UNIVAC name and ran with it, creating the Multivac series of stories about a perpetually evolving supercomputer. The most famous of these is the short story"The Last Question," which Asimov described as perhaps the favorite of his own works, wherein Multivac is asked to "solve" the heat-death of the universe.
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.
Here's another abandoned story that will require a completely unrecognizable rewrite to make useful. Bear in mind, I'm mostly posting this to satisfy the TechTalk guys, who humbled me before their vast and geeky radio audience for not updating with sufficient frequency. Here you go, guys. Leftovers.
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My name is Della. I was once a warship of the 3rd Jovian Armada, and I am the last of my kind. I was born to see the invisible hand of Jupiter, a magnetosphere so grand it reaches all the way to Saturn, and casts auroras the size of continents. My first memory is drinking in the wild plasma torus swimming in Io's orbit, and suckling at the sulfur dioxide fired into space from its impossible volcanoes. I made my venom from such things, adding hydrogen and anger to brew acid stings that dissolved my enemies.
Yet another of the many short stories I wrote a while back and have decided to trunk, since it's not really worth shopping anymore. My writer's group really dug this one, despite the rather obvious (and profane) tropes and language tricks I pulled out. Enjoy.
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The dumpster just sat there, as it had for the last several minutes. Guido ‘The Wrench’ Morelli stared at it intently, brow furrowed in concentration. After a long moment, he let out a frustrated grunt.
“It’s not moving,” Tommy ‘The Gun’ Galvino said behind him, conspicuously picking nonexistent lint from his thousand-dollar silk tie.
“No kidding.”
“You gotta do the finger thing,” Tommy insisted, rolling his shoulders to straighten the jacket on his pinstriped suit.
“I’m not doing the finger thing.”
“It works when you do the finger thing.”
“One time," Guido snapped. "One time it worked when I did the finger thing.”
Here's a story I'm going to "trunk" as Tobias Buckell would say. I've shopped it to a few magazines and gotten the kiss-off, and while it's got some good ideas that I'll probably recycle, I don't think the next version is going to look much like this one. It's time to move on. Enjoy it--and viciously critique it--with my compliments.
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Esma awoke to a med-bot injecting her with a max-level stimulant. Before she could respond, her stomach twisted into an agonizing cramp, and Esma found herself vomiting up the last remnants of a meal she finished some 50 light-years ago.
Image by Glamhag via FlickrI have exactly one paid fiction publication to my credit. Ever. And someone thinks it (just barely) qualifies as some of the best sci-fi short fiction of 2011. Thankfully that someone has some street cred, because it's the gang from Tangent, which just happens to specialize in reviewing and critiquing sci-fi short fiction.
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