Category Archives: Dialogue

The New Landscape – Platforms, Crowd Funding, and More

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Last November, I wrote a post called The New Landscape – Access, Discovery, and Media De-centralization. I’ve decided to call that essay the first in a series (The New Landscape), and today I want to take the topic in a new direction, jumping off of this point:

Here’s what I see as the dominant progression for a creator trying to make money from their work (visual art, music, prose, comics, video, etc.)

Level 1 – Start small, give stuff away for free, sell some stuff. At Level 1, a creator is almost totally reliant on big systems, for both discovery and fulfillment/delivery. Basically no one knows who they are, so they join larger infrastructures and services to get the word out about their material through algorithmic and organic discovery.

Level 2 – Building Audience & Relationships — At this level, it becomes viable to diversify their portfolio, maybe by selling some merch (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, patches, etc). Here, a creator can bring dedicated fans onto a growing mailing list. This level enables direct sales and stronger performance on retail sites, but the creator may still be largely dependent for discovery-enabled growth and a lot of fulfillment/delivery.

Level 3 – Big Creators – Here, creators have a dedicated audience large enough they can get a living wage directly from their base, either totally direct or through Patreon/Kickstarter. Maybe they supplement their income speaking/appearance fees etc., having a large enough platform that they are in demand not just as creators, but as entrepreneurs/thought leaders in their field. They may still use large systems, but if they do, they do so from a far stronger position – they are less dependent on any given system, since their supporter base is strong, a base that is specific and mobilized, not platform-dependent.

This three-tier system is a bit reductive, as I said in the original post, but it provides a framework for what I’d like to talk about today: the differences between services/systems for Platform Building and those for Platform Mobilization.

At the Nebula Conference, I got to meet with a representative from Patreon, who helped answer some questions I had about their company and business model. Their rep confirmed what I’d already seen from being a patron on that platform – that it is more of a Platform Mobilizing system rather than a Platform Building one.

(Note – a number of writers I admire have found some success already using Patreon to support their other writing-based income, including Saladin Ahmed, Kameron Hurley, and most recently, N.K. Jemisin, who hit and easily passed the goal she’d set to allow her to quit her day job.)

Defining Terms

Here’s what I mean:

Platform: a creator’s established body of work, professional networks, and the way that they present as a creator. A creator with a small platform may just have started releasing works, or they may not have reached a very wide audience. A creator with a large platform may be well-known for some other work before they entered a creative field, or they might have built it as their career developed. A large platform tends to come with and from a large supporter base.

Platform Building: A system or process that is Platform Building is one that includes discovery systems – good ways for people that have never heard of the creator to find them and engage with their works. Producing content is Platform Building, as every work creates the opportunity for someone to find and engage with your creative efforts. YouTube, Twitch.tv, and any retail system where a consumer can follow a creator can serve as a Platform Building system. Platform Building enables creator and consumer/reader/fan to engage through the work as well as enabling other forms of communication to strengthen those relationships.

Platform Mobilizing: A system or process that is Platform Mobilizing is one where a creator can send or bring their fans/readers/viewers/etc. in order to make a project happen or to allow more direct financial support for a project/creator. Kickstarter and Patreon are both Platform Mobilizing companies, though in different ways, to different degrees.

Example – Mobilizing for Genrenauts

I’m running a Kickstarter right now, and as of the time of writing this essay, the project is less than 10% from hitting the $5,000 funding goal (yay!) When I launched the project, I was a bit worried that $5,000 might be too high for a first Kickstarter, that maybe I needed to aim lower and then try to build momentum by over-funding.

But in reality, I hit 50% of the goal in two and a half days, largely based on existing fans and strong signal-boosting from friends and colleagues. Based on how things are going, I’m likely to hit the funding goal about halfway through the campaign, and then spend the final two weeks pushing for stretch goals. That seems like a perfectly solid way of going about things in a single-creator project.

What has surprised me is that according to Kickstarter’s dashboard analysis tools, around 27% of the pledges made to the project have come from Kickstarter’s own discovery systems. Those include their search engine, their Projects We Love recommendations, and so on. I had not expected Kickstarter to provide so much discovery. I’d estimate that close to a third of the backers on the project had not heard of me before launch. This, in my opinion, means that I’d substantially under-estimated Kickstarter’s utility as a tool for not only Platform Mobilizing, but also Platform Building. There are going to be notably more people invested in the Genrenauts series when this campaign completes than when it had started.

Given the opportunities involved, any Platform Mobilizing system that uses a crowd-funding approach like Kickstarter will likely be working on building in some discovery systems. The company benefits if people come to trust their system as a way of discovering amazing new content, and the creators benefit from crowd-funding with a system that helps do more than just facilitate a direct mobilization of existing fans/readers/viewers/etc. And it definitely works for me as a consumer, too – I’ve backed a fair # of projects that I only heard about through Kickstarter’s search system. Patreon’s discovery tools, in my experience, are more nascent, and have a ways to go. The company is also much younger thank Kickstarter, so this is to be expected.

The Inevitable So What

Here’s why I think this is a useful framework: I’ve been following Kickstarter and Patreon each since pretty early in their public histories, and trying to study what they can and do offer to creators. In publishing we have this idea of The Discoverability Problem, which is that it is getting harder for individual creators to have their work discovered, which makes it harder for new creators to find a following and build a sustainable career. There are so many books being released (largely due to digital self-publishing) and more releases means that there are more works to choose from. In publishing, the loss of shelf space from the closing of Borders and the lessening number of indie bookstores in the USA (a trend that has thankfully reversed, as we’re seeing new strong indies doing a great job around the country) means that writers are posed with discovery being an ever-greater problem.

One of the best ways to be discovered is to build your platform. The more people know you and have positive associations with you, the more chances you have to sell your work.

With the proliferation of social media, there are ever-more places creators can go to try to build their platform. You can be on Instagram, Tumblr, or Snapchat, as well as older systems like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Social media channels are a well-trod way of building platform – incrementally growing your readership/tribe/etc. by consistently entertaining, informing, or whatever you choose to do. This form of Platform-Building tends to take time and a lot of effort. The first few people to any platform will be far more likely to benefit from it, growing their profile as the platform grows.

But any one media company can come or go – the fortunes of a social media company rise and fall. LiveJournal and MySpace are mere shadows of what they once were. Facebook lists on, and Twitter is harried by largely-unchecked abusers and the continual frustration of not being able to edit a typo out of a tweet that’s raking up RTs.

If a creator gets in deep with a single platform, their ability to connect with their fans/readers/etc. is bound up in that company’s fate. This is why people have been harping on and on about email lists/newsletters – if you bring you audience to a system that is much more directly under your control, that ability to connect is much more robust.

And from a mailing list, you can then direct your fans to a new platform, mobilizing them in order to help make a project happen.

This is why I see Platform Building systems as mostly being oriented toward Stage One and Stage Two (see the framework from the earlier post), and that Platform Mobilizing systems are more effective for later Stage Two and Stage Three. It doesn’t seem terribly viable (at least right now) to start a brand-new creative career by going directly to Patreon as your main way of interacting with fans/readers/etc.. For the most part, the people succeeding on crowd-funding/crowd-patronage systems are those with proven success and/or an existing fan-base. But once you have those connections and have earned that support, systems like Patreon and/or Kickstarter can let a creator provide an opportunity for fans, and especially super-fans, to go the extra mile in supporting a creator.

21st Century Creative Economics

Here’s another way we can express this:

Most of my books are available digital-first, from $2.99 to $5.99 per book. I also have paperbacks for $12.99 to $14.99. I don’t have any books out in hardcover, so $15 is the highest price for any of my books. If I have a super-fan who absolutely adores my works and will buy anything I publish, but I only ever ask $2.99 to $15 for my work, then they’ll buy as many of those as I can produce, but maybe I won’t actually provide them with an opportunity for them to support me to their satisfaction.

Then I launch my Kickstarter, with a $100 backer level, and they pick it in a heartbeat. They get a lot out of being able to directly support me and the extra rewards I offer above and beyond the book. And I get a big chunk of $ toward my project, plus a way to engage directly with a major supporter.

This is, I think, the source of one of the big appeals of Kickstarter and Patreon: With those company’s business models, I can offer a wider range of commercial interaction possibilities, and find places where the existing mix of products doesn’t satisfy a fan/supporter’s interest. If I have a fan who makes a really good living and wants to be able to help support me, if I make it easier for them to get more out of supporting me, we might both be able to win – me from greater financial support, them from getting more content from me, more direct interaction, and/or more insight into how I make my art.

This is another way to diversify your portfolio as a creator – offer a lot of different ways for people to support you – ebooks, paperbacks, audio, crowdfunded support, large-ticket experiences (critiques, Google Hangouts, etc.), and so on. And offering that wider mix you may find that you’re not only making more $, you’re giving readers/fans/etc. more chances to connect with you and your work. The perfect overlap of Platform-Building and Platform-Mobilizing.

Speaking of that Kickstarter, please check out the campaign and see if you’d like to join over 180 people helping me realize my creative dreams:

Ebook pricing Storify and the Cult of the Debut

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Today just before lunch, I saw this story on Publishers Weekly. Which reminded me of other reports like this one from the New York Times. But there’s a lot to *why* these reported print #s are likely dropping, and a lot these reports leave out. Which is where this discussion started.

I’d also like to say a bit more about the Cult of the Debut. This is a huge thing in publishing. Authors, Agents, Publishers, Reviewers, Booksellers, nearly everyone in publishing is culpable here. We all participate in the Cult of the Debut. The shiny new author, the undiscovered gem, the instant phenomenon new voice that will Revolutionize Publishing, so on and so on. Houses get into huge bidding wars over debuts they think will be the Next Big Thing, spending millions and millions of dollars on an unproven author.

And as authors, we get so worked up about The Big Debut. We see our colleagues getting six, seven figure deals out of the gate, and we despair, thinking we’ll never have the career they’re going to have. We fetishize the Big Debut as the One True Path to writing success? When in reality, a lot of those big debuts fail, and a lot of authors that do end up becoming bestsellers do so by building an audience over time.

VE Schwab just hit the NYT list with A Gathering of Shadows, the second book in a series, and her ninth book overall. She built an audience over six years, bringing her YA audience to her adult series. She has put the work in over time, alongside her publisher, to make this success happen. Stories like Schwab’s are far more achievable, far smarter of a strategy (even with the extraordinary circumstances of her film and TV deals, which are impressive and laudable in their own right), in my opinion, than throwing big stacks of money at debuts and hoping to win the lottery. Schwab has proven her work to be a good investment, has fostered a strong fan base, and now she is reaping the rewards. This is how to succeed without the Cult of the Debut.

Some people do debut right onto the NYT list. My agency-mate Jason M. Hough did with his novel The Darwin Elevator, but that happened because he busted his ass writing all three books in the trilogy so they could be released back-to-back-to-back, so his publisher had all the ammunition in the world to push the book hard. And then? It hit the NYT list probably in no small part to getting a very strong NPR on-air review during drive-time. But there’s no way to guarantee that kind of buzz or support. You make your bets, you give books everything you’ve got, and you pray. Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes, a big advance is the last advance you’ll ever see.

Me? I’m a career slugger so far. I do the work, I write pretty quickly, and I promote the ever-loving crap out of my work by being active online and at conventions. I refine my process, I look at what in my list is working and what isn’t, and I try to focus on writing to where my existing readers are – the pop-culture-savvy action/adventure kind of story.

A lot of writers carve out solid careers for themselves without ever hitting a Bestseller list, without ever getting a major award. They write, they make smart choices about what books to write when, and they find good publishing partners. They develop their careers deliberately, thoughtfully, and by making good bets. Publishers can and often do this, too. But publishers are still frequently distracted by the Cult of the Debut.

And this focus on debuts goes all the way down – Big Debuts get the budget, so they get the support. Which means they get more ARCs, more ads, more events. They get more time during presentations to buyers and librarians, which means they get more exposure to readers and reviewers. All the while, career writers, the long-term proven creators, just hammer out incrementally stronger books, trying to build their audiences organically because they’re not the New Hotness anymore.

We can all do better. Debuts are fun, and it’s exciting to be the person to spread the news about a brand-new author, but there’s a lot to be said for the experience and honed skill of a veteran writer. That’s what I’m hoping to become. It’s not as sexy a role, but it’s far more realistic.

My latest book is The Absconded Ambassador, Episode 2 of the Genrenauts series. The Genrenauts are a group of storytellers that travel to dimensions informed by fiction genres to find and fix broken stories in order to protect their home world.

The Absconded Ambassador

Big Star Wars Ramble & Discussion

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Hi folks – I just saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Sunday, and now am looking to chat – in a way that keeps spoilers off of social media feeds.

TL;DR review – I loved it.

Therefore, I thought I’d put up this blog post so folks could talk all things TFA without risk of spoiling friends and fellow internet denizens.

That said, everything in the film is fair game from here below, including comments.

You have been warned.

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The Shootout Solution Promonado Round-up: Week 2

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The Shootout Solution is here, and the glorious Promonado, distributing promotion and love and geekdom all across the internet, has reached Category V. You can catch up on last week’s Promonado if you haven’t done so.

First, I celebrated the release itself.

The Shootout Solution Final

 

Serial Box had me over to their blog for an interview.

I sent my mailing list subscribers the password to my development diaries for The Shootout Solution.

Books

Barnes & Noble’s SF/F Blog gave me space to talk about genre-aware stories.

B&N also included the book in its weekly round-up of SF/F releases, repeating the kind review from a couple of months back.

Book Riot Podcast All The Books! Included The Shootout Solution in its longlist of releases. I’m a big Book Riot fan, so this was a treat.

At Tor.com, I talk about Leah as a Stand-up hero, and the three tries it took to get her stand-up routine right.

I gave away some copies on my friend and Speculate Co-host Gregory A. Wilson’s Twitch channel.

I geeked out with the fine folks of the Grim Tidings Podcast.

comics speech bubbles

Stephen Geigen-Miller interviewed me for his Breaking In series.

Library Freaking Journal reviewed The Shootout Solution, prompting joyful flail.

Author Jay Swanson and I talked about genre for writing and marketing on his Creative Mines video podcast.

I rambled about work/writing balance and more with Mahvesh Murad on Midnight in Karachi.

Mary Robinette Kowal gave me space to talk about My Favorite Bit from The Shootout Solution.

And the Audiobook edition came out today – performed by one of the best audiobook performers of our time, Mary Robinette Kowal.

If you haven’t seen them, Tor.com has been posting fun Genrenauts adventure prompts on their YouTube page:

So, that’s the state of the Promonado! Remember, if you buy The Shootout Solution – Genrenauts Episode 1 before November 23rd, you can enter to win a signed galley of Episode 2 – The Absconded Ambassador.

Genrenauts Combined

The New Landscape – Access, Discovery, and Media De-centralization

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Several things popped up in rapid succession that got me thinking. The first was this announcement regarding YouTube Red, the new ad-free paid tier of YouTube. The second was the news of a new Star Trek series, to be aired (almost?) exclusively on CBS All Access, a streaming service. And then, just as I was writing this post, Amazon announced Amazon Books – a Bricks & Mortar test store.

So now, I’m going to put on my digital media scholar hat once more and talk about some high-level stuff going on right now. Some pitfalls and pain points I see, as well as opportunities.

YouTube Red has been some time in the making. January of this year, musician Zoë Keating got a lot of shares and chatter with her post “What should I do about YouTube?” on this very topic. I see this move as part of an overall shift in the landscape toward more and more de-centralization of content, where 1st-party streaming systems and subscriptions replace once-agnostic content aggregation-esque systems like YouTube, Hulu, etc.

Here’s YouTube creator Hank Green discussing some of the ins and outs of this move.

I appreciate him spending the time to talk about the positives and negatives, avoiding a hard knee-jerk reaction. I’m worried about the independent creators who had found an equilibrium between Patreon, YouTube, and other venues who now have to pivot and adjust in a big way. It’s the way of life, but any logistical interruption costs creators money, because have to spend spend more of their time on admin and strategy rather than the actual creation.

And then, just hours later, I saw the news about the new Star Trek show, and that it was going to be almost exclusively available on CBS All Access, a paid streaming subscription which currently costs $5.99 a month.

It looks to me (and others, from what I’ve seen), that this is CBS positioning the new show as a Killer App for their streaming service, which I’d not heard of before today (I’m mostly out of the Media Criticism game day-to-day, thanks to having two other careers).

It’s potentially a very smart approach – and one that most of these proliferating paid services are following. HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Kindle Unlimited, all of them are bringing in or commissioning exclusive content to serve as Killer Apps for their individual services.

But here’s the thing about that proliferation – if every service has its own killer apps behind their pay walls, most consumers are very quickly going to max out on the $ they can or choose to pay for these services.

 

Consumer Side

An example – I have a steady, middle-class day job and I have a writing career. I’m married to someone who also has a steady job, and we have no kids. So we have more disposable income than a lot of US families. Between us, we pay for Netflix, Hulu, and High-speed internet. I get my razors on a subscription, I subscribe to a fiction serial (Bookburners), I’ve been an intermittent subscriber to Oyster and Scribd, as well as supporting a half-dozen creators on Patreon and intermittent subscriptions to broadcasters on Twitch.tv. As a household, we’re probably in the top quartile of subscription service users in the US. And I’m very much at the point of ‘Okay, that’s all I can do’ when it comes to subscription services. If I add one at this point, it probably involves dropping another.

And there are *so many* of them these days:

Twitch, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, HBO Now, CBS Access, Spotify, Apple Music, Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, Amazon Prime, etc.

And that’s not even counting subscription boxes (L00tCrate, etc.) and subscription services outside of entertainment, like Harry’s, Blue Apron, StitchFix, etc.

Economic recovery in the US is happening, but it’s slow, and it’s accompanied by wage stagnation and income inequality (I can’t speak well to the economic situation elsewhere, so I won’t). So the % of people in the US that can afford numerous subscription services without seriously re-framing their budget is still not too large, from what I can tell. Whether this is part of an overall paradigm shift in how people budget and consume content is a different discussion (there are too many ways this could go – I have to focus).

 

Creator Side

Switching hats now – what does this look like on the creator side of the equation?

I see this proliferation of paid/gated services as a double-edged facet of the overall creative & commercial ecosystem. There are opportunities, but they’re potentially fraught.

Here’s what I see as the dominant progression for a creator trying to make money from their work (visual art, music, prose, comics, video, etc.)

Level 1 – Start small, give stuff away for free, sell some stuff. At Level 1, a creator is almost totally reliant on big systems, for both discovery and fulfillment/delivery. Basically no one knows who they are, so they join larger infrastructures and services to get the word out about their material through algorithmic and organic discovery.

Level 2 – Building Audience & Relationships — At this level, it becomes viable to sell some merch (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, patches, etc. Here, a creator can bring dedicated fans onto a growing mailing list. This level enables direct sales and stronger performance on retail sites, but the creator may still be largely dependent for discovery-enabled growth and a lot of fulfillment/delivery

Level 3 – Big Creators – Here, creators have a dedicated audience large enough they can get a living wage directly from their base, either totally direct or through Patreon/Kickstarter. Maybe they supplement their income speaking/appearance fees etc., being large enough that they are in demand not just as creators, but as entrepreneurs/thought leaders in their field. They may still use large systems, but if they do, they do so from a far stronger position – they are less dependent on any given system, since their base is strong, a base that is specific and mobilized, not platform-dependent.

This system is reductive, and by applying it broadly across media, I lose some nuance. Musicians can tour and get money from in-person appearances and sell merch there – novelists and poets largely cannot. Visual artists can sell commissions at conventions for solid income, writers have less opportunities in such situations. Etc.

Some take the pure indie path and are less reliant on the bigger systems, but then don’t have access to their discovery engine.

As the landscape moves toward more gated content, more push for exclusives as killer apps, more and more places to publish and publicize, creators have to have our eyes wide frakking open as we consider every new platform, every new distributor agreement, every new book deal, and so on.

Because things are moving fast, and these big platforms are only allies for as long as we’re useful to them. ACX changed its payout terms last February, and because ACX was the only real game in their town (self-publishing audiobook service), creators were forced to sign the new terms or walk from that service entirely. It’s the same type of choice YouTube creators have been forced into, though with notable differences (ACX was a flat-out rate cut, YouTube might come with additional payment, but requires more opt-in and cuts off other options). Any creator that relies on a single or small # of services/sites/retailers for a large % of their business is vulnerable to disruption, as Chuck says in the link re: ACX.

Anytime one of these big companies makes a shift, it causes huge ripples, and creators, especially those of us reliant on platforms for fulfillment, discovery, or other services/opportunities they offer have to roll with the changing tides.

In my opinion, creators right now have more to fear from Monopsonies and monopsonic behavior, than monopolies. Since so many creators are currently beholden to retailers and/or content services (writers and Amazon/B&N/Kobo/iTunes/Physical Bookstores, musicians and iTunes/Spotify/Pandora), if a creator wants to retail their work but doesn’t have enough reach/audience on their own, they use a seller/vendor. But if there are few enough vendors in their world, and those limited vendors exhibit monopsonic behavior, the result tends to be a major squeeze on the creators.

Paradoxically, the creators are the only reason the monopsonists can survive – if a majority of creators pulled out of monopsonic vendors, those vendors would collapse. But in the meantime, the lost income, the lost access could easily bankrupt a huge % of the creators pulling away from the monopsonist.

In a healthy market, there are a range of options, and creators can respond to a change of terms they dislike by removing their content from that platform. But for most video creators, removing everything from YouTube stands to present a loss of a huge % of their access and income, just as a prose writer would stand to lose a huge % of their access and income if they decided to not sell through Amazon.

Monopsonic behavior also impacts larger creator groups, like publishers – if one retailer or wholesaler gets too strong, it can create problems. It’s the WalMart problem. Wal-Mart pushes down prices, then makes up their $ in volume and by demanding better terms from their vendors, The vendors (publishers, manufacturers, etc.) then get to choose – pull out of the single-largest physical retailer, or accept the terms. Because individually, Wal-Mart doesn’t need most vendors. They need a plurality or majority, but as long as the selection adds up, individual vendors can come and go.

So when you’re one of those vendors, one of those creators, you end up in a really terrible situation. And that worries me. I want a healthy marketplace, where creators (authors, musicians, etc.) and the publishers/labels/etc that work with them have options, have recourse for if/when terms change in a way that becomes untenable.

The sky is not falling. But I will continue to point out rain clouds when I see them forming. Because then the smart folks can put out buckets and save on the water bill, or pull the lawn furniture inside before the storm breaks.

I’ll stop there before torturing the metaphor any further.

What do you all think about these streaming service moves – YouTube Red, and Star Trek on CBS All Access?

—

Mike’s latest book is Hexomancy, the fourth Ree Reyes urban fantasy. Geek magic squares off against a quartet of fate witches hell-bent on revenge.

Hexomancy cover

The Tricky Thing About Reading ‘Neutral’

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The following was prompted by a recent Telegraph article responding to K. Tempest Bradford’s reading challenge on XOJane. (I’m not linking the Telegraph article because I think it’s a steaming pile of crap – it’s poorly-researched, uses terrible argumentation, and includes personal attacks)

A response I see come up frequently when people talk about reading challenges or pushing for greater diversity in reading is some variation of the following:

‘I don’t pay attention to gender or race or sexuality of authors when I read. I just read what I like and what looks good.’

On the surface, that’s a laudable approach – it’s meritocratic, it avoids bias based on the background of the author.

But…

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#TotallyNotFantasy and the Pointless Genre Cage Match

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So, this review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant dropped Monday on Salon, and it’s been making the rounds in my part of the internet.

Last evening, Scott Lynch wrote a few tweets which I took to be responding to that article and/or to related claims that The Buried Giant is Not Fantasy.

I joined in, tweeting about my own fantasy novels and adding the Hashtag #TotallyNotFantasy.

And then…it took off. (more below the Storify)

I think it’s not a coincidence that people jumped in. The ‘It’s totally not fantasy/science fiction’ meme has been around for a while.

Pointless Genre Cage Match

I haven’t read Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant yet. Maybe I’ll love it. And for this conversation, The Buried Giant is really just another work framed in a way to re-hash up a conversation that’s been around for a long time – Genre Vs. Literary, as if they’re somehow mutually exclusive. I’ve seen a lot of literary establishment-approved writers writing genre novels (cool!) and then getting treated by major review venues like those works are ‘transcending’ or ‘redeeming’ the genre, as if we don’t already have grand masters of high literary styling in speculative fiction.

I vehemently defy those assertions. Be proud of what you’re writing, and cite your sources. I’m very happy for writers to be producing genre novels that are then released by non-genre houses. Recent novels like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven or Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf or novellas like Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation deploy the tools of speculative fiction in stories marketed to readers as literary fiction audiences. Sweet! These works can be used by readers to bridge the gaps between speculative fiction and literary fiction audiences. This is great – it helps readers find new stories to appreciate, especially since there are writers in both fields that write hybrid work which can satisfy aesthetic demands of primarily-speculative or primarily-literary readers. They’re just different styles of art, different traditions which have overlapped numerous times.

But if you come into the territory of speculative fiction, grab some unicorns and dragons and orphan heroes and wizards, and then go somewhere else, build a novel, and say ‘Oh, this isn’t fantasy,’ then you and me? We’ve got a problem.

And not just me. Science Fiction/Fantasy’s no-nonsense fairy godmother Ursula K. “National Book Fellowship Medalist for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” Le Guin had some words as well.

I stand with Ms. Le Guin. Not surprising, since her Earthsea books were some of the first fantasy novels I ever read and they have left an indelible mark on my conception of the genre.

Embrace the Power of And

A work can be more than one thing. A novel being fantasy doesn’t mean it isn’t also Literary, or Young Adult. I think genres are most useful as a tagging system – a way of describing and delineating additional points of entry and accessibility for a work.

The genre gutter is an illusion. It’s just another way of casting aspersions, of creating hierarchies between camps of art that are often trying to do different things and have little reason to be opposed. Retreading those hierarchical conversations is about as useful as complaining that an ATV is a terrible vehicle because it isn’t a bullet train. They do different things.

It’s all art. Appreciate it for what it is – learn what the work seems to be doing, and help get it in front of readers that might enjoy that aesthetic experience.

The Content Wars Come to Publishing – KU and Subscriptions

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or Veteran of a Thousand Content Wars 

(with apologies to Hawkwind)

We’re well and properly in the era of The Content Wars in the US entertainment industry – internet music subscription services like Spotify and Pandora, but also into TV/film with start-ups like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon moving into the content-generation business, all-you-can-watch services that gain market share by having the best selection and supporting both the “I want to watch something” and “I want to watch this specific thing” audiences. Subscription services jockey for exclusive content, either by out-bidding one another for partnerships with distributors or by bringing in people to generate exclusive content.

The result? Unparalleled access for consumers, but for *comprehensive* access, we end up paying out several times. I can watch Community on Hulu, but I need Netflix if I want to watch the new street-level Marvel shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc.). And I need HBO to watch Game of Thrones, and Amazon Prime to watch more of Chris Carpenter’s. And many of us are still paying for cable access, and then add on these subscription services.

Publishing

The Content Wars have already been waging in publishing – one has to look no further than Amazon and Hachette’s multi-month impasse, resulting in diminished or non-existent access to Hachette content, in-service diminishing of available content, with the service specifically directing attention away from Hachette content to content from providers they were on better terms with. And before that, we had B&N’s impasse with Simon & Schuster, where new S&S books were passed entirely by the chain in many cases, completely tanking the sales of many books that launched during that window.

And now, the subscription model has come to publishing in a bigger way, with Kindle Unlimited making a lot of noise, though it was beat to market by Oyster and Scribd. Libraries have long served as a way for readers to get access to a large amount of content at a single price (usually free-though-you-pay-for-it-with-your-taxes).

But in the last week, there’s been some more chatter about Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service. The inciting incident is this article on the New York Times, from David Streitfield. (Looking at Streifield’s previous Amazon articles shows some Anti-Amazon slant, but in this article, I think he’s dead-on).

Former SFWA president and Dude Who Knows A Lot About Publishing John Scalzi talked a bit about KU on his blog, and identified one of my major concerns about Kindle Unlimited: it creates a Zero Sum Game for Authors:

In the Kindle Unlimited scheme, the pool of money available to authors is strictly limited by a corporation whose purposes, short- and long-term, are not necessarily aligned with the authors’, and every time someone with a Kindle Unlimited account reads another author’s work, every other authors’ share of the pot  becomes that much smaller. In the traditional publishing model, it’s in my interest to encourage readers to read other authors, because people who read more buy more books — the proverbial tide lifts all boats. In the Kindle Unlimited model, the more authors you and everyone else reads, the less I can potentially earn. And ultimately, there’s a cap on how much I can earn — a cap imposed by Amazon, or whoever else is in charge of the “pot.” As an author, I won’t be able to ever earn more than Amazon wants me to (especially if Amazon requires my title to be exclusive).

Personally, I think Amazon has really flubbed this one. The implementation is wonky (that’s a technical term, folks) – KU borrows seem to count more than ebook sales in the algorithm (anecdotally if not officially confirmed), which skews Amazon’s much-obsessed-over ranking-based discovery engine. I also think they’ve overplayed their hand by limiting KU to KDP Select (and its exclusivity). With the borrow rate notably below the author share for a $2.99 book (where AMZ’s preferred pricing share kicks in, giving authors 70% of retail instead of 35%), all that we’re going to see is more flooding at the $.99 price point as authors try to make back money by gaming the KU system.

And beside all of this, the way KU is working is damaging AMZ’s otherwise-largely massive favor with indie authors, which generate a huge amount of passive income for AMZ retail. Amazon wants indie authors to favor their KDP platform, either as first-among-equals or as an exclusive partner. KU undermines that status for many, though I’m sure there are some authors making a killing in KU – there are always winners with a new system like this, writers whose works are just the right kind of thing for the tastes of the majority of Kindle Unlimited users. By marrying KU access to KDP exclusivity for indies (save for the small minority of indies who are such a large draw that they can command better terms), Amazon is moving the goal posts and forcing authors to chose between anti-competitive exclusivity and access to where Amazon looks to be moving their market.

At the end of the day, so much of this comes down to controlling the territory. The Content Wars, from Hulu/Amazon/Oyster’s perspective, are all about making yourself indispensable, about becoming a Utility – something you pay for every month because you need it to live the way you prefer. Amazon wins when consumers do all or almost all of their reading on Amazon – if your consumer never has a reason to leave your walled garden, they’ll get everything there, and you control what they consume, how they consume it, and what they’re advertised along the way.

Another possible problem with subscription services is that while subscribers might end up reading more books overall, they might pay less for those books – with more of their reading on subscriptions. Oyster/Scribd/KU rely on the gamble that on the whole, enough subscribers will read less than their subscription prices’ $$ worth of books in a month, so that the service can be profitable.

For a $9.99 subscription, that means reading less than $20 worth of books in a month, or 2-3 books a month (presuming that the publisher’s share is modeled on a 50% WHS model). Whether that’s viable remains to be seen. The users who would be most attracted to this model, I’d think, would be super-users, the kind of readers who tear through 10 romance novels a month. But what these subscriptions need to be solvent are casual readers who like the access, the idea of being able to read whatever they want, even if ‘whatever they want’ is actually a tiny percentage of all books currently on the market.

Worst-Case Scenario

Here’s my worst-case scenario, which I don’t think is likely but is very possible:

1) Subscription service(s) become the majority platform for ebook discovery and consumption.

2) Said subscription service (s) pay based on a fixed pool, where retail price or comparative value of books is erased in the process of paying out creators.

#2 is basically the Spotify model for books, which is what Kindle Unlimited is already using. The payout per-borrow is better than Spotify, to be sure, but it’s already trending down from where it started.

The Content Wars are nastiest, from what I can tell, in music, especially for creators. iTunes is the biggest dog in digital music sales, and if you’re not on iTunes, Pandora, or Spotify, your discovery chances are incredibly low (YouTube is your game, in that case).

Spotify and Pandora pay fractions of pennies per play. Imagine your favorite author getting paid $.50 for a read of their brand-new hardcover novel. An industry-dominant subscription model paying on a pool determined by fiat would be disastrous for authors. Consumers might win, and whoever owns and operates that subscription would win, but again, without competition, content providers lose a lot of leverage – they need to be in the only game in town (or one of the only games in town – a small oligopsony is almost as bad as monopsony), unless they’re big enough (like Taylor Swift) to pull their content and use other distribution models.

Kindle Unlimited is not nearly a Spotify, but it’s the closest thing to it. Amazon stands to benefit from making KU more like Spotify, as long as they can keep enough content in the program and deliver a stronger user experience to edge out Oyster and Scribd and therefore control the subscription market the way they control the Ebook market (in the US that is – other territories have a different market share distribution).

Summary

I believe subscription services can be beneficial for publishing, including authors. Oyster’s model is, I think, a good one. They pay full royalties for each time that a user reads beyond the 10% mark in a book, and for now, the publishers that work with them are mostly offering backlist to the service. This means that Oyster can serve as another way to monetize the backlist and get consumers caught up so that they then get excited to pay full price for the newest book.

And really, all of this is still early days for subscriptions, both in publishing and in TV/film and music. I predict that we’ll see metaphorical blood shed in 2015 over these subscription services, but I hope that it’s not the blood of creators.

What do you all think? Do you use Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, or Oyster? And for my fellow creators, what are your thoughts on subscriptions? What would a good subscription service look like to you?

 

Rocket Talk!

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A few weeks ago, I recorded an episode of Rocket Talk, the Tor.com podcast, with host Justin Landon. We talked about Planescape, the New Weird, SHIELD AND CROCUS (as a new weird/superhero mashup), and then we had a bonus discussion about urban fantasy).

You can listen to the episode here.

Since I didn’t get to mention it during the chat, I want to plug a couple works that I think are worth looking at as part of a broader discussion of the New Weird and its effects:

THE CRAFT SEQUENCE (starting with THREE PARTS DEAD) by Max Gladstone
THE MIRROR EMPIRE by Kameron Hurley

and because it doesn’t get talked up enough, THE ETCHED CITY by KJ Bishop.

Happy listening!