Nov 16 2007
An Open-Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model
There's been a lot of discussion on the state of short fiction magazines recently in the specfic community. Warren Ellis seems to have started it with a post on subscription numbers primarily of the Big Three in genre, Cory Doctorow brings up excellent points about online marketing, Scalzi jumps in about the lack of relevance of the big three to this generation's writers, and then Paolo Bacigalupi chimes in with a series of excellent posts about SF magazines in general.
These guys have already given the issue pretty thorough treatment, and I'm sure I've missed others (my apologies -- the internet is full of things), but I thought I'd point my laser of online marketing and video games at the subject to see what might happen.
I'm really not that concerned about the big three. They seem content with their lot, unless that's just the public front, and in the end there may not be much they can do if their publishers keep them in the box of print markets with no budget for online marketing. There are distinct techniques and things that can be done to promote print properties online, but unless the business minds behind those endeavors are willing to front that cost, which is ultimately unavoidable, I suspect the decline will continue.
We are reaching or have reached a turning point in the delivery of fiction, and when those turning points happen, industries must evolve or die. Successful evolution can mean radical or gradual change, but it does NEED change, as exemplified by the modern businesses that continually innovate.
And here's the latest thing. The paper subscription model is inherently flawed. Print media is falling all over the place, while at the same time, we have more small presses popping up every day because of the increased ease in publishing. The market is diversifying, and even the titanic music industry has come to realize that the subscription model is no good -- given the option to select their own content rather than buying an entire $15 CD for one or two songs that they actually like, buyers flock to the freedom and decreased waste. This, incidentally, is why I did not renew my subscription to F&SF this year -- when it runs a great story, it's great, but the number of stories I didn't like per issue eventually tied up too much of my time and energy. It became easier to just wait until the end of the year for the Best Of anthologies to hit and pick up those -- which is another trend specific to genre fiction.
If the music business can make this realization, and shift its gigantic weight to start putting CD burning stations in malls, can it be that difficult for speculative fiction to adapt?
I love the old magazines, I truly do; I have collections of old F&SF, Asimov's, and others from the heydays of Robert E. Howard and Asimov himself -- but to expect that a business model that many decades old can remain viable while technology and creative approach rapidly reinvents itself is simply absurd.
So I think Paolo and others are on the right track that starting from scratch is what's necessary. The Big Three certainly can evolve, and I hope that they do, but experimentation and innovation typically don't come from the established players in a field; Amazon and Google are exceptions.
The place where I come to disagree with Paolo and others that have talked about new magazines -- and I should point out first that I thought his blog posts were extremely thoughtful, forward-thinking, and the best that I've seen in this discussion so far -- is in the focus on marketing alone, and what appears to me to be a lack of understanding in the specfic community on how online marketing and online business building works.
What the Big Three have done effectively, and what constitutes a tribute to their longevity (which, in the big scope, is noteworthy), is build community. That is ultimately what online marketing exists to do, and represents a shift in the technology and approach to marketing as a whole. Saturation advertising has a provable low turnaround; high precision viral marketing is exponentially more effective (and I strongly believe that anyone running a small business today really needs to read that book I just linked). Get the viral going and use it to carefully cultivate a sustainable growing community and you generate an engine that feeds itself, markets for you, and brings in both business and revenue. The Big Three have lasted this long because of that construction of brand identity and community, to which subscribers develop loyalty and emotional attachment.
Modern smaller magazines today are not focusing enough on this community growth. They aren't growing their online forums, they aren't giving their subscribers the opportunity to express themselves and connect with each other, they aren't holding location-based annual events specifically designed to get subscribers connecting and generating their own communities. They aren't providing social tools or branching into the explosively growing social networking movement. They aren't organizing their subscribers in online communities to raise money for themed charities. They aren't running enough contests. They aren't talking to their subscribers and making them feel like part of the community and experience. The closest thing I've seen to this kind of modern marketing campaign in genre fiction is Fantasy Magazine's recent "blog for beer" effort, which, though cute and neat, is really pretty sad as the sole example of effective modern social marketing in the community.
For the existing magazines, there are some modern online marketing basic
- People love free stuff. This stuff doesn't have to be high investment. Give them a single download and it's better than none. Have your artists make resolution-sized wallpaper versions of magazine cover art and archive them on your website.
- People love to express themselves. Give them tools to create a media kit out of artistic elements from the magazine (because one thing the magazines do have is the sustainable budget for really high quality new fantasy artwork, something the online magazines will not have -- get mileage out of it) and you will have people advertising for you by using your MySpace, Livejournal, WordPress etc themes and skins.
- People love to give stuff away. Put codes on limited content and then give subscribers the codes, with no restrictions on who they can pass them around to. Corollary: people like exclusive content.
- People love to be generous. Run a campaign giving proceeds and awareness for a charity and you leverage your media insertion for a good cause and make your subscribers feel good at the same time. See "Free Rice", which is currently running rampant all over the damn internet.
- People love to play really simple stupid casual games. Give them the opportunity to play a lightweight, simple game (as with Free Rice, answering trivia or vocabulary questions works), slap a leaderboard on it, and you have a high degree of web activity and blog conversation about achievement ladders.
Those are off the cuff ideas, and don't get me wrong -- this isn't trivial and it isn't easy. But its growth potential is enormous, and i t IS what the competitors are doing. However, the thing to remember with this kind of marketing is that the growth of community is the end goal. Anything that hurts that -- like saturation advertising, bringing in people who disrupt your community chemistry, providing poor customer service -- should be immediately addressed. And your community doesn't have to grow FAST -- it just has to be stable, and you have to be consistent. This is the one mistake that small magazines make so often, approaching marketing from a BOOM perspective, and then not being able to handle the repercussions across the long haul. It comes down to an absence of a business plan.
So back to the magazine-from-scratch. This is something I've had in the back burner of my mind for a long while, and an undertaking I wanted to broach eventually, but my own writing takes precedent, which puts it years off. I greatly admire the proprietors of small magazines like Electric Velocipede and Not One of Us -- the vision of their work creates a kind of community all on its own, and their focus means that they've stuck around while other small magazines have come and gone.
But if I was going to build a magazine from scratch, this is what I would do. And this is what you can do, if you're so inclined.
An Open Source Model for Online Magazines
Start up a website and tap trusted and competent people for editorial positions. Assume from the beginning that the first year runs at a loss; aim to break even.
Magazine runs as an online subscription ordinarily. One story delivered by email once a week to a paid subscriber list. The beginning of each story is posted to a blog; subscribe to read the rest, or purchase a story by item for $1. Once a month, stories are combined into a nicely formatted PDF with high end cover art, posted to the website for free download, and the link emailed to the subscription list. The PDF constitutes an "issue". Two issues per year will have guest editors from other magazines; subscribers can suggest/request guest editors on the forums. One issue a year will feature hyperlink fiction, which can link outside or within the story ("choose your own adventure" style).
Each story has a tip jar. Readers on the website can tip stories if they like them, in any denomination. House takes 10% of donations; the rest go direct to the author via Paypal or are donated to the charity of their choice.
One story a week plus breaks for planned holiday and maintenance weeks equals 48 stories a year. Of these 48, 12 get bound into an anthology at year's end to be released the following spring. In November, voting opens on the website for subscribers to select 2 of the stories for the anthology.
Payment for initial online publication is $.01/word. However, if the story is selected for the anthology, the author gets two contributor copies plus an additional $.03/word payment.
In addition to the web forum features indicated above, forum users will also be able to give discounted gift subscriptions and gain points for bringing new readers into the community. Nonfiction appears on the website monthly and is linked in the weekly newsletter. Subscribers can purchase membership at different levels, which will be displayed next to their profile on the website; annual large contests will be held for best fan-created items such as crafts, artwork based on stories in the magazine, and numbers of new subscribers brought to the site.
---
That's a start. It's simple, and it's not high gloss, like Paolo's Armored. The crossover potential between video games and genre fiction is another long discussion entirely. But generally speaking, I do not think the glossy print magazine format is a great one either for the genre community OR for the video game community. Plus, it kills a lot of trees. The Armored notion is fundamentally a different kind of business, scaled differently and with different intentions (bringing new readers to fiction), but I think those intentions can be separately achieved -- and, again, that's another topic entirely.
These guys have already given the issue pretty thorough treatment, and I'm sure I've missed others (my apologies -- the internet is full of things), but I thought I'd point my laser of online marketing and video games at the subject to see what might happen.
I'm really not that concerned about the big three. They seem content with their lot, unless that's just the public front, and in the end there may not be much they can do if their publishers keep them in the box of print markets with no budget for online marketing. There are distinct techniques and things that can be done to promote print properties online, but unless the business minds behind those endeavors are willing to front that cost, which is ultimately unavoidable, I suspect the decline will continue.
We are reaching or have reached a turning point in the delivery of fiction, and when those turning points happen, industries must evolve or die. Successful evolution can mean radical or gradual change, but it does NEED change, as exemplified by the modern businesses that continually innovate.
And here's the latest thing. The paper subscription model is inherently flawed. Print media is falling all over the place, while at the same time, we have more small presses popping up every day because of the increased ease in publishing. The market is diversifying, and even the titanic music industry has come to realize that the subscription model is no good -- given the option to select their own content rather than buying an entire $15 CD for one or two songs that they actually like, buyers flock to the freedom and decreased waste. This, incidentally, is why I did not renew my subscription to F&SF this year -- when it runs a great story, it's great, but the number of stories I didn't like per issue eventually tied up too much of my time and energy. It became easier to just wait until the end of the year for the Best Of anthologies to hit and pick up those -- which is another trend specific to genre fiction.
If the music business can make this realization, and shift its gigantic weight to start putting CD burning stations in malls, can it be that difficult for speculative fiction to adapt?
I love the old magazines, I truly do; I have collections of old F&SF, Asimov's, and others from the heydays of Robert E. Howard and Asimov himself -- but to expect that a business model that many decades old can remain viable while technology and creative approach rapidly reinvents itself is simply absurd.
So I think Paolo and others are on the right track that starting from scratch is what's necessary. The Big Three certainly can evolve, and I hope that they do, but experimentation and innovation typically don't come from the established players in a field; Amazon and Google are exceptions.
The place where I come to disagree with Paolo and others that have talked about new magazines -- and I should point out first that I thought his blog posts were extremely thoughtful, forward-thinking, and the best that I've seen in this discussion so far -- is in the focus on marketing alone, and what appears to me to be a lack of understanding in the specfic community on how online marketing and online business building works.
What the Big Three have done effectively, and what constitutes a tribute to their longevity (which, in the big scope, is noteworthy), is build community. That is ultimately what online marketing exists to do, and represents a shift in the technology and approach to marketing as a whole. Saturation advertising has a provable low turnaround; high precision viral marketing is exponentially more effective (and I strongly believe that anyone running a small business today really needs to read that book I just linked). Get the viral going and use it to carefully cultivate a sustainable growing community and you generate an engine that feeds itself, markets for you, and brings in both business and revenue. The Big Three have lasted this long because of that construction of brand identity and community, to which subscribers develop loyalty and emotional attachment.
Modern smaller magazines today are not focusing enough on this community growth. They aren't growing their online forums, they aren't giving their subscribers the opportunity to express themselves and connect with each other, they aren't holding location-based annual events specifically designed to get subscribers connecting and generating their own communities. They aren't providing social tools or branching into the explosively growing social networking movement. They aren't organizing their subscribers in online communities to raise money for themed charities. They aren't running enough contests. They aren't talking to their subscribers and making them feel like part of the community and experience. The closest thing I've seen to this kind of modern marketing campaign in genre fiction is Fantasy Magazine's recent "blog for beer" effort, which, though cute and neat, is really pretty sad as the sole example of effective modern social marketing in the community.
For the existing magazines, there are some modern online marketing basic
- People love free stuff. This stuff doesn't have to be high investment. Give them a single download and it's better than none. Have your artists make resolution-sized wallpaper versions of magazine cover art and archive them on your website.
- People love to express themselves. Give them tools to create a media kit out of artistic elements from the magazine (because one thing the magazines do have is the sustainable budget for really high quality new fantasy artwork, something the online magazines will not have -- get mileage out of it) and you will have people advertising for you by using your MySpace, Livejournal, WordPress etc themes and skins.
- People love to give stuff away. Put codes on limited content and then give subscribers the codes, with no restrictions on who they can pass them around to. Corollary: people like exclusive content.
- People love to be generous. Run a campaign giving proceeds and awareness for a charity and you leverage your media insertion for a good cause and make your subscribers feel good at the same time. See "Free Rice", which is currently running rampant all over the damn internet.
- People love to play really simple stupid casual games. Give them the opportunity to play a lightweight, simple game (as with Free Rice, answering trivia or vocabulary questions works), slap a leaderboard on it, and you have a high degree of web activity and blog conversation about achievement ladders.
Those are off the cuff ideas, and don't get me wrong -- this isn't trivial and it isn't easy. But its growth potential is enormous, and i t IS what the competitors are doing. However, the thing to remember with this kind of marketing is that the growth of community is the end goal. Anything that hurts that -- like saturation advertising, bringing in people who disrupt your community chemistry, providing poor customer service -- should be immediately addressed. And your community doesn't have to grow FAST -- it just has to be stable, and you have to be consistent. This is the one mistake that small magazines make so often, approaching marketing from a BOOM perspective, and then not being able to handle the repercussions across the long haul. It comes down to an absence of a business plan.
So back to the magazine-from-scratch. This is something I've had in the back burner of my mind for a long while, and an undertaking I wanted to broach eventually, but my own writing takes precedent, which puts it years off. I greatly admire the proprietors of small magazines like Electric Velocipede and Not One of Us -- the vision of their work creates a kind of community all on its own, and their focus means that they've stuck around while other small magazines have come and gone.
But if I was going to build a magazine from scratch, this is what I would do. And this is what you can do, if you're so inclined.
An Open Source Model for Online Magazines
Start up a website and tap trusted and competent people for editorial positions. Assume from the beginning that the first year runs at a loss; aim to break even.
Magazine runs as an online subscription ordinarily. One story delivered by email once a week to a paid subscriber list. The beginning of each story is posted to a blog; subscribe to read the rest, or purchase a story by item for $1. Once a month, stories are combined into a nicely formatted PDF with high end cover art, posted to the website for free download, and the link emailed to the subscription list. The PDF constitutes an "issue". Two issues per year will have guest editors from other magazines; subscribers can suggest/request guest editors on the forums. One issue a year will feature hyperlink fiction, which can link outside or within the story ("choose your own adventure" style).
Each story has a tip jar. Readers on the website can tip stories if they like them, in any denomination. House takes 10% of donations; the rest go direct to the author via Paypal or are donated to the charity of their choice.
One story a week plus breaks for planned holiday and maintenance weeks equals 48 stories a year. Of these 48, 12 get bound into an anthology at year's end to be released the following spring. In November, voting opens on the website for subscribers to select 2 of the stories for the anthology.
Payment for initial online publication is $.01/word. However, if the story is selected for the anthology, the author gets two contributor copies plus an additional $.03/word payment.
In addition to the web forum features indicated above, forum users will also be able to give discounted gift subscriptions and gain points for bringing new readers into the community. Nonfiction appears on the website monthly and is linked in the weekly newsletter. Subscribers can purchase membership at different levels, which will be displayed next to their profile on the website; annual large contests will be held for best fan-created items such as crafts, artwork based on stories in the magazine, and numbers of new subscribers brought to the site.
---
That's a start. It's simple, and it's not high gloss, like Paolo's Armored. The crossover potential between video games and genre fiction is another long discussion entirely. But generally speaking, I do not think the glossy print magazine format is a great one either for the genre community OR for the video game community. Plus, it kills a lot of trees. The Armored notion is fundamentally a different kind of business, scaled differently and with different intentions (bringing new readers to fiction), but I think those intentions can be separately achieved -- and, again, that's another topic entirely.
29 responses so far
[...] please go have a look at Erin Hoffman’s excellent post on The Homeless Moon about the future of the print fiction magazine in the genre market. She addresses the realities of [...]
Lots of great stuff in there–thanks for the informative and insightful post.
I agree wholeheartedly about community-building being the most significant aspect. I too really like the idea of Fantasy’s “blog for a beer” (which is why I have been participating). Also I’m with you on glossy magazines full of glossy ads being maybe not the best thing for the trees or the industry. Actually there’s a ton of stuff I agree with here.
I like the idea of trying out the “pay $1 for a story” model. I’m sort of skeptical about it coming off as successfully as with the music industry—though your analogy of the publishing industry to the music industry strikes me as right on in a lot of ways. Music has a cache that short fiction does not. I think it must be taken into account that part of all this lamentation about the short speculative fiction market’s death throes is based on short fiction’s obsolecence as a form of entertainment. Sad as that is–and I’m not trying to be downbeat or fatalistic about it, just practical. There are still plenty of people who download their music illegally for free despite the new $1 per song market, because music has sufficient popular appeal to make that work. Meanwhile, getting your one-shot reading fix for free off the internet is in fact still legal. There are some great writers out there blogging at a ridiculously high entertainment value. Cabinet of Wonders, a favorite of mine, routinely blows my mind—whereas for short fiction, like you, I usually need to wait for the Year’s Bests for the mindblowing quality. So if I were to modify your model for my own purposes, I would expect to have to compete with free stuff like blog content. I would probably offer stories in full for free, and rather than rely on donations to individual stories, do some kind of fund drive a la public radio (Strange Horizons does this). It wouldn’t need to use saturation advertising, and it wouldn’t (unlike public radio) need to deprive people of their content fix in order to solicit donations. For additional sources of revenue, I might offer stories in more exclusive formats with a price tag attached–for example, ask a quarter or fifty cents for an e-reader-ready pdf format, or a dollar for an audio format. Dunno how plausible either of those would be given the overhead, but the idea appeals to me.
It might also be worth giving some further consideration to making this hypothetical venue a more appealing market for artwork. Up-and-coming artists have a hard a time as writers, I think, and having consistently good artwork would go a long way towards taking advantage of the multimedia element that makes the internet so great: free, full-color, treeless replication of beautiful images. Of course, good art costs money, and the reduction of overhead that comes with not having to produce hard copies of all this art in glossy format will only go so far. But again, I’m not yet really clear on how the budget numbers for any of this stuff would shake out.
I do very much want to trumpet the notion of magazine design as an open-source effort. I hope others jump on this bandwagon.
Erin, thanks for the great post, this is really interesting stuff.
“This, incidentally, is why I did not renew my subscription to F&SF this year — when it runs a great story, it’s great, but the number of stories I didn’t like per issue eventually tied up too much of my time and energy.”
I think that you’re conflating two things – 1) print is dying with 2) you aren’t getting the things you want from the stories you read in print. That highlights some questions for me.
From what I understand from your post, your problem with the F&SF isn’t its format specifically (you don’t actually hate reading the printed word on dead trees) but the content that the editors are choosing – and you point to a more successful digest for your tastes: the Years Best Anthologies – also a dead tree experience.
Your own solution to this problem would be to provide a more a la carte buying environment for fiction. But the other way this could be attacked, and which I was really trying to get at with the _Armored_ concept is not so much that you go after gamers but that you set out to provide an extremely reliable reading experience. I think one could do the same thing (and probably more successfully than with _Armored_ ) if one created an Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance magazine (more readers, already closely aligned with a reading experience). My sense is that this consistency of experience (read: artistic limitation) inspires more reader loyalty than what you get from the big three’s eclecticism, because most of the stories in the magazine would satisfy the expectations of the reader, rather than giving them something that they possibly don’t like — which is what it looks like is the core issue for you with the print mags.
The number of readers who simply appreciate a well-written story, regardless of its other merits are awfully small, and the number of people who love a good yarn that fulfills their expectations are large. I certainly fit into the latter camp myself. So if I were starting a new magazine, whether a dead tree version or a new online version, the most important thing I would do, is to not try to emulate the big-three’s eclecticism, but to instead focus on consistency of magazine identity and reader experience. I think that’s where you get initial buy-in, and what you eventually build a sense of community around.
I’ve got some more thoughts but the family (now back and in almost full working order
) calls. Again, thanks for the great post.
[...] Hoffman over at Homeless Moon has an interesting post on how she would try to transcend the print paradigm for magazines. Lots of stuff to chew on. I started commenting over there, and realized I was on the verge of [...]
Some great comments here. I agree with Mike that applying the music industry approach has strengths and weaknesses. As a musician, I have a myspace page for my band, and I see the wide range of music fans that flock to that site and others. I don’t know if the appeal of personal networking sites runs as deep in the short fiction audience, which seems much older and much more traditional in terms of e-tech. If you’re talking a magazine targeted for YA, then absolutely have myspace skins; but for a general SF/F mag, I’m not sure it would be an asset.
I also think Mr. Bacigalupi is spot-on about magazine identity and reader experience as the key to building interest and community. I think the best way to start any magazine would be with a mission statement of narrow artistic focus. Black Gate and their web-based newsgroup is a great example of this. Readers seek out the BG website because they like that type of fiction, and that newsgroup has discussions of current authors, classic works, genre boundaries, and all sorts of other community interaction. The artistic limitation lets readers know exactly the type of fiction they’re going to get, and the newsgroup offers a community based around it. I’d love to see if a more consistent application of that approach could make a solid impact in our field.
Great comments. All I can think to add is I think an online magazine would have a better chance at survival if it had a brand behind it. Because many of us are Odyssey Workshop Graduates, I think it would be neat to have that kind of endorsement or pipeline for fiction, it would give readers a kind of ‘gold seal’ of quality. One idea I just thought of, kind of like theme anthologies, what if the magazine ran tie-in stories built around holidays — like on Earth Day publish a lot of environmental fiction with profits from the tip jar going to a worthy cause. Halloween would certainly be a high traffic day. Romantic stuff on Valentine’s. And so on. This would encourage repeat and regular visitors, a kind of shared community reading experience. Also, besides just talking theory, it would be nice to really put something out there. I’d be willing to put money forward to support such an effort.
Wow, thanks, all, for the comments and lovely pingbacks.
Mike, I think the item-based payment model is a lot more robust than you’d think. A huge amount of the success of music downloading wasn’t out of people wanting something for free, but out of them wanting to be able to select their own songs. The proof of this is in iTunes, which uses really lousy technology but delivers item-based music payments — and they are making HUGE piles of cash. GoPets also runs on a similar principle. In fact, considering the GoPets model and its success, I would modify my open source magazine model (I should put up a new post about this) to emphasize heavily on the tipping experience but offer it in subscriber chunks. For example, GoPets has a “premium” subscription, because although consumers in Asia are fully ready and using the item-based payment economy model, the US isn’t quite ready yet. What the GoPets users do is pay a monthly fee for in-site currency that they then use to buy individual items. A similar model could be used with the subscription format. Imagine, for instance, if you had a subscription of $10/month, or $5 or $2/month, and then you got to *assign* that payment to specific stories, $.50 at a time. You rack up website “cash” on an account, and then you divvy that out to the stories you really enjoy. Then slap a voting mechanism on the whole thing, and you have a no-maintenance scalable ranking system that pushes popular stories to the top of the pile.
The thing is, people LIKE to express their approval of content by making small donations. Witness Scalzi’s success with _Agent to the Stars_. And it is economically provable that people will spend $10 faster in $1 or $.50 chunks than they will spending $10 at a time. That’s what item based payment is about, and this phenomenon is so successful in other media that they devote entire roundtable sessions — multiple ones — at the Game Developers Conference every year, and the sessions are full to overflowing, we’re talking 40 usually executive-level developers at once that make sure they’re at these sessions. The revenue potential is huge. I would be willing to bet that you could successfully run an item-based payment model magazine with short genre fiction and *not pay the authors anything* directly and they would still make more money than they would selling to a standard magazine. The problem is you couldn’t currently get SFWA status this way, because there’s no guaranteed payment format.
As far as the music market model applying to fiction — it’s an economic model, not specific to media; music was just a big example and is one of the pioneers in the success of the item-based payment system. Netflix is another example and is currently tromping the hell out of subscription based services like HBO and Cinemax to the point that those establishments now have to provide similar services to compete (HBO On Demand). I don’t think short fiction is a dying market, but it is a much smaller market than music or movies — but that doesn’t mean that the economic model, too, won’t work on a smaller level.
Paolo, thanks for visiting! And for the trackback! I’m glad you enjoyed the post. I probably have followups as well.
To clarify, I don’t think print is dying. I think it’s changing shape. I do think that the *subscription* based print format is antiquated and waning. I think there are ways to make it effective, but what we’re seeing in that format increasingly is that the advertisers themselves are starting to run the magazine (see Martha Stewart magazine, Lowes has a magazine, etc).
I do agree completely about vision and consistent experience being the core to community. This is absolutely true in building any kind of community, and is the first rule of word of mouth marketing — you have to have a quality product. And social communities are fragile; like I said, doing anything that will drive your community away or apart (like bringing in a bunch of people who don’t fit in) is destructive to the overall goal. So 100% agreed there and I think your concept with _Armored_ is indeed good for providing that vision. I have some thoughts on what the crossover rate is between the teen gaming audience and genre fiction, but I suspect it would not be as strong, like you say, as a fantasy romance thing.
But I think a successful fantasy romance magazine would be perilously close to what _Realms of Fantasy_ already is, and my understanding is that they aren’t doing too well, either. But I suspect that’s a package problem — they have too many advertisements and bombard their subscribers with catalog spam, among other things. But bottom line, I think too much of this audience is spending its time online, and the print format *for magazines* — not for books — is on its way out. If the New York Times is having trouble, the trouble of the smaller guys is going to be that much more severe, and in my opinion not a battle worth fighting. But if you were to start _Armored_ I’d certainly give it a shot for a year.
I think in terms of your and Shara’s discussion about a magazine for girls I might be able to provide some insight as well, but again, a separate post — but this is what GoPets is doing. And actually one of my initiatives since recently re-joining the company is setting up a story backdrop for the world and an accompanying fiction aspect. The “problem” (depending on how you look at it) with the teen girl fiction market is that girls don’t just want to read… they want to create. Creation is huge, thus the fanfiction community is huge. I strongly believe that the strongest possible teen girl fiction magazine would focus on worldbuilding for the girls to play in, feature manga-style comic book art, and have a huge degree of interactivity with the community, printing letters to the editor and fanfiction stories in the “world” of the magazine. If you could do this, and if you could protect from child predators at the same time (the primary difficulty in marketing to minors), you could have a hell of a product. I do think, though, ultimately, that a modern publication cannot be competitive without an online community element.
Just a couple comments:
Whether iTunes is making “HUGE piles of cash” is debatable. Most people estimate that Apple’s profit margin on selling music is pretty small, and that iTunes is primarily profitable for them because it drives sales of iPods (and now iPhones), for which the profit margin is substantial.
Also note that there is already a website using an item-based payment model for fiction, including short fiction: Fictionwise. Obviously different authors have different experiences with Fictionwise, but here’s a data point from Rob Sawyer: over a fourth-month period, a story of his that was available for free was downloaded over 5000 times, while the most that any story of his which cost money was downloaded was 23 times. (source: http://sfwriter.com/2006/07/evo-and-rob-on-size-of-online.html )
Jeff — Welcome! I appreciate the comment and vote of support. If I thought I had the time to run something like this now I certainly would, but I have too many paying gigs (and I’m kind of expensive these days!) demanding time. But I will keep you on the ‘interest’ list for the future!
Hi Ted — welcome to Homeless Moon.
Thanks for the comment. Very interesting re Rob Sawyer. I know I have paid for short stories off of Amazon, which also runs a similar model. My problem with the download model at all is that it is cumbersome. I think that it won’t be fully viable until synthesized with the Sony Reader style hardware and distributed via wifi, podcast-style. But I think it is coming and that, for instance, Amazon is smart in getting their claws in early.
But you’re right about the still-testing aspect of item-based in iTunes. I don’t think you can measure its success on music sales alone, though. For instance, significant revenue (and by that I mean largest royalties) for a lot of artists these days actually comes from ringtones, which also operate on an item-based model.
What I think would make this idea work right now is its synthesis with the current donation model. Instead of having to run subscription drives, a website could run item-based. Again, in the magazine model above, all content goes free after being on the site for a specified period of time — and the tip jars stay present. There is no download involved and thus no impetus for the consumer to buy before they have seen the product. This also differs from the iTunes model.
And a third comment: people usually listen to a song multiple times, but people rarely read a story more than once. (I haven’t played GoPets, but I suspect that most of the items that players buy can be used more than once; pet clothing presumably can be worn again and again.) This difference may mean that a payment model that works for downloadable music may not work for downloadable fiction.
Wow, some great ideas! I’ll have to see what we can work into Clarkesworld Magazine. We’ve been moving further into social features and playing to the strength of being online. I’m somewhat amused that you mentioned “choose your own adventure” fiction since that possibility came up over dinner at World Fantasy.
Welcome, Neil.
Thanks for stopping by. We met briefly at Albacon last year (not sure if you recall), and I’m glad to see Clarkesworld doing so well! And glad if anything I provided was useful. Yeah, CYOA is on the buzz — it’s been rising for the last couple of years. The books are even coming back in print. They really were a pretty good idea, and I think the format hasn’t been used to its fullest potential. I think there are some very interesting things that could be done with a serious multiple viewpoint story told in that style with hyperlinks. I have sort of ‘prototyped’ in my head, for instance, a murder mystery where you would draw different conclusions based on how you navigated through the links, not with a “to do x, click here, to do y, click here” but a more seamless integration into the fiction itself…
Thanks! I’m ashamed to say that I’m not sure. I’m awful with names and primarily remember people by faces. Never works well online.
I somehow missed the resurgence of CYOA. I do think the idea is cool and has a lot of possibilities. Online versions could constantly evolve and become bizarre little shared world projects that were much more sophisticated than the original books. Speaking of which, I wonder how that company would react to such an undertaking.
I’ve been trying to focus on a reply but there’s just too much to say at one time. So let me say that I like a lot of your basic ideas about an online magazine. A lot of them, particularly borrowing a pay per tune concept from Itunes, I’ve fiddled with myself, relating to a shared universe rather than a magazine though.
I’d say that print magazines and online magazines continue to be very different animals, and will for some time. As you say, all technology is changing rapidly although magazines continue to be published in an appallingly wasteful manner. I’m not thinking of the “big three” when I say that, but magazines in general. If you saw how many magazines are destroyed per ration of magazines purchased–well, they all wind up in the recycle bin one way or the other, I guess. If I had to guess, I’d say at least 50% more magazines are printed than are sold, based on the rate of which we pull and destroy them at Borders.
Online magazines are serving a younger group of readers, and I don’t see that changing until that group ages. I see future customers of online services as expecting a lot more visual and audio experiences. In other words, downloading or streaming animated or live-action shorts will appeal to a larger customer base than text stories.
I’m not saying there is no place for text fiction magazines on the internet. I agree that building a community is critical. I think the tip jar method of payment works well, especially if used as payment for stories. An author could agree to put a story online, and be paid .25 for it each time a reader clicks the pay button. A quarter for a story is affordable for anyone and would likely pay the author more than a nickel a word. (Besides, I hate the payment per word system anyway, but that’s another subject.)
I really do believe that you are on the track of the future though, even if I disagree with some of the details.
Neil — no worries, crossing between RL and the internet is difficult and I wouldn’t have expected you to remember.
But I always feel odd not mentioning that I’ve met someone in person when I first talk to them online. I agree about the potential of CYOA and the creation of miniature shared worlds. To some extent that’s already happening with interactive fiction, but I also think the concept of ‘hypertext fiction’, which Strange Horizons mentions specifically being open to (but I’ve never seen any on the site — I may just have missed it) has a lot of unexplored potential as well.
If you ever want to discuss the social networking aspects and potential with magazines, feel free to drop me an email — I would be happy to help out Clarkesworld and this is pretty much what I do for a living, or one of the trades, at any rate. I think it’s terrific that you’re exploring in that direction.
Maggie, thanks for the comment.
I’m not sure where we disagree, since I think I agree with pretty much everything in your comment — I guess the interesting point is how you bridge between the older readership and the new. Is it necessary to keep feeding that magazine machine? The thing I notice when I pick up magazines is that I will, as other people have mentioned in referencing this article, buy a magazine off of a shelf out of loyalty to whoever I know who has a story printed in it — but while I don’t recycle or sell print anthologies, yeah, the magazines head to the recycle bin.
What I really want to see is the high end physical eReader with wifi delivery. It’s one of the reasons I’ve considered being an early adopter (if you can still be an early adopter) of the Sony Reader. It’s a shame we’re still probably a ways off from that kind of infrastructure being in place. I would love to be sitting on the couch working on something, Reader beside me, and hear a little chime that a new story from a subscribed magazine had come in…
[...] “An Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model” (though I don’t know how open source figures into that, [...]
Actually, I think I was one of the first voices into the fray–here’s a perspective with links to blogposts from March of this year:
http://xcentric.com/2007/11/03/saving-the-magazines-part-72185/
But, yes, to add to the current discussion: what you’re talking about is technically a monetized crowdsourced model, with rewards based on the popularity of the piece. We’ve talked about this at length in my day job, and there are several gotchas you have to consider:
1. Is the market big enough to make this economically attractive? I’m not sure that it is.
2. How do you deal with transaction fees, if this is not an ad-supported model? Small payments have a large percentage eaten by transaction fees. Without a working micropayment model, this may be a non-starter.
3. What benefit, if any, does this model provide over an open, unthemed site? Does speculative fiction need to be segregated, and, if so, why?
Hi Jason. Welcome to Homeless Moon, and thanks for the comment. Interesting post on your blog. It encourages me to see someone in the professional SF community interested in reaching out to virtual world and video game enthusiasts. I left a comment on Jay Lake’s livejournal recently about the animosity between the speculative fiction and video game communities, which I see as so unnecessary and harmful. There is crossover between the media on a high level, but wedges between the groups placed long ago before the big rise of video games are having long term effects currently in separating the two very interest-correlated communities. It’s unfortunate.
In terms of economic attractiveness, I think it really depends on what your goals are. I strongly believe that given investment I could run an economically viable and even profitable magazine along the model I described, a media community along the lines of Penny Arcade. But the goals widely differ. Most speculative fiction endeavors are inherently going to be niche market operations, communities of people who are not going to *want* their communities to get above a certain size. A market like that is likely best off running as a non-profit, like Strange Horizons. But to answer your question I do think that a micropayment donation model is equally as viable as the support drive or subscription based models — so if the goal is breaking even, as those non-profit markets do, I think the answer to your question is yes.
There are a couple of ways to do micropayments, but they’re actually not that complicated. Paypal will exact transaction fees, but they are percentages, and in large part services like that wind up being net profitable in terms of garnering larger numbers of sales resulting from user trust, as opposed to getting them to give you their credit card information directly. However, personally speaking I don’t like Paypal, and if I were going to execute on something like this would probably get my own authenticated credit card payment service (which would also have transaction fees) and build the system around currency exchange — meaning the user purchases quantities of tokens with real life money which they then distribute to authors individually and those authors are paid on a royalty basis from the parent (ie me). But there are many micropayment options these days. Hell, given the GoPets API a magazine could actually theoretically run as a GoPets third party partner and use GoPets currency.
By “segregated” do you mean made exclusive, in terms of content? I think that Doctorow is correct in that it is a marketing and visibility advantage for an author to have their work publicly accessible on the internet, so I would say no, it shouldn’t be hidden. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give advance access to it to a subscriber base or item-based accessor pool prior to its general release as the PDF issue. If you mean segregated in terms of purchased story-by-story, I don’t know that, given the internet model where all fiction is accessible, it could possibly be a disadvantage to allow readers the freedom of choice to support specifically the stories that they enjoy. I think that there is far too much authoritarian attitude on the part of head editors and a loss of perspective in terms of the goals of a magazine, which is ultimately to serve a readership.
The question of this model’s advantage over the open site (Strange Horizons, Helix, etc) is, to me, the big question and would require field testing to fully answer. We can speculate from here — I believe that the model I suggest is significantly more conducive to the generation of community and therefore long term readership, as well as being freedom-modeled and therefore placing a greater individual value on stories. In essence, I think that the granulation of the item-based model in terms of these stories ultimately results in a greater degree of feedback and information flow between the reader and the magazine, and I have trouble seeing how that could be a bad thing.
[...] attention should be paid to An Open Source Model for Online Magazines: I think it’s wrong in many particulars, but, as an Open Source model, it’s supposed to [...]
Erin,
This is a very thoughtful and great post.
I can tell you right now that this online site’s greatest contribution to the authors would be the aggregated payment systems from around the world. It takes a bunch of time, and of course it is easy to start with PayPal. But an in-site micro-currency would be really cool.
Imagine if you could subscribe for a nominal amount say $1.95 a month and you get pretty much access to the whole site & stories. But there is a tip jar at the end of every story and you are free to dump in as many karma tokens as you like (~$0.10). Like a casino, once your cash is converted into a token, you will naturally be a bit more free spending. And if I did not have to pull out my wallet and type in a bunch of junk just to give someone $0.10 to $5, I would do it all weekend long.
And YES I want some CYOA, I am looking to read some with my sons…
I would be interested in helping fund this…
-Erik
[...] The Homeless Moon » An Open-Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model But if I was going to build a magazine from scratch, this is what I would do. And this is what you can do, if you’re so inclined. [...]
Sounds like a good format. If you want to make this happen, let me know how I can help. I’ve been investigating ways to make a competent publishing model and this answered alot of questions.
J.Walls, Publisher South Bend Scene, Liquid Magazine, Avant Garde Comics, Preface, Analecta
[...] An Open-Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model – Homeless Moon’s interesting dissection of, and proposals for, lit distribution. [Ta, Ben] [...]
[...] follows on, of course, from the latest round of discussions about sf magazines and the survival thereof. But you should go and have a look at it, because it’s [...]
All very excellent advice. I think I’ll be looking into adapting some of these ideas for Pantechnicon. Cheers!
Trudi, welcome to Homeless Moon! And thanks for your comment. If you do implement any of the ideas, or others related to them, please drop me an email! I’d love to hear how they work for you.