There are three reasons, actually. The first is my glaring lack of talent, though I can name probably fifty professional authors that haven't let that stop them.
The second is the appalling rate of pay. While I dream of making John Scalzi money, I'd almost certainly make something below Justine Larbalestier money--and that's no knock on Mrs. L. She is teh awesome, but clearly under-appreciated and underfunded. As are most novelists. That's why most writers have day jobs.
But the main reason Im not a professional novelist is that, to do what Charles Stross does, I'd have to average an output of 1000 words per day. And that's finished work, mind you, discounting edits, rewrites, and those days when you merely manage to vomit something onto the page which deserves nothing less that complete and total abandonment, if not outright exorcism from the memory of the universe. Oh, and if one were to get sick or take a vacation, those thousand finished words would needs be made up on another day, skewing the workday average.
I'm not sure I speak 1000 words per day--certainly not 1000 usefully repeatable words--let alone could average such an output in written form. This is why I do about 6 billion other things besides write: partly because I'm better at them than writing; partly because they pay more. But mostly because it's an output I can sustain.
So, whilst trying to come up with a name for a company I'm forming, my impending partners and I momentarily considered billing ourselves as The Justice League of Social Media. We thought better of it, of course, not because it was too nerdy--the nerdy was a plus in our book--but because it was a serious case of hyperbole.
I mean, the Justice League of Social Media would have to include, like, Clay Shirky and Chris Brogan. The league is the best of the best in the DC Comics universe, boasting Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman on the roster. We're way further down the super-hero food chain. We're, like, the Doom Patrol of Social Media. (Dibs on Robotman!)
For what it's worth, we settled on Third Space Media as our name. This superkeen Wikipedia article explains why.
Details to follow, but for now, suffice it to say interesting times are ahead.
The Written Weird has been quiet for a couple of weeks, mostly because the startup that comprises my day job is shutting down. Not to worry, contingency plans are afoot, and I expect I'll be in great shape 90 days from now. During the lean times, I might even have time to blog more. (Whoa! Crazy talk!)
In the interim, I leave you with this ingeniously amalgamated inspirational message from Overthinking It, which hacks together over 40 famous movie speeches into two minutes of pure awesome. It well bespeaks where my head is at.
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.
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.
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