An Open-Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model
(This post is syndicated to the Homeless Moon, and with that comes my gentle request that comments and links be pointed over there! Long ramble on genre magazines follows!)
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 it 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.
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 it 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.