Patronage, Short Fiction, and the Online Audience in the Age of Web 2.0

There are some interesting discussions going on around the web about which direction publishing — specifically the publishing of genre short fiction — may be headed. It’s no secret that many of the smaller print magazines are closing down, something I wrote about in Vanishing Print Zines, and that the ‘big three’ have been limping along with ever-declining circulation numbers for over a decade now, facts which leave readers and writers of short fiction asking the obvious question of ‘what’s next?’

A recent article in the Baltimore City Paper, Neverending Stories, takes a snapshot of SF short fiction then and now, noting that the business end of things has been in decline for quite some time, but that writers are drawn to the form nevertheless. A few writers comment that the short story magazines are the equivalent of the club scene in music, a proving ground, a place where new talent is seen for the first time — and Robert Charles Wilson memorably draws a comparison between short SF and garage bands.

But the writing is on the wall, and the article can’t help but note the declining number of readers for the SF short story magazines, and off-offhandedly concludes that maybe one day when we are all reading stories online (the article specifically mentions ‘Twitter,’ which doesn’t make any sense to me) the short form may return to its former glory. But that conjecture has of course been at the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking about the future of short fiction, though with the recent closing of Jim Baen’s Universe there seems a lessening of some of the surety with which some declared the internet would usher in a short fiction renaissance.

The problem, of course, is how does anyone make money with online short fiction? Jay Garmon’s idea for a web 2.0 SF magazine seems a step in the right direction. Simply stated, this type of magazine would allow the online audience to essentially commission the stories they wanted to read by voting with their cash on story pitches vetted by an editorial staff. It’s an elegant solution, though not without its own problems as Garmon is well-aware — for one thing it would depend on already having a sizable audience, and for another it would heavily favor known writers (but, really, so does every form of publishing).

Addressing the first concern of growing an audience is something Cory Doctorow knows a hell of a lot about. Doctorow is, of course, a famous champion for the creative commons copyright and has enjoyed a lot of success energizing and expanding his audience by offering his work for free online. A recent Locus column from Doctorow, Special Pleading, examines the marketing potential of ‘giving it away for free’ in some detail, and offers an overview of his own career. He also hints at his planned ‘With a Little Help’ project, which will be a “short story collection that tries every imaginable income-generating technique for open publishing in order to get some data about which avenues hold the most promise.”

One means of generating support that worked in spades was John Scalzi’s recent call for donations for e-zine Strange Horizons‘ fund drive. In a little over a day Scalzi’s readers donated more than 7,000 dollars to Strange Horizons, which more than exceeded their goal. At a time when the average fiction e-zine is hard pressed to raise a couple of hundred dollars, this sort of thing is extraordinary, and suggests further avenues of potential fund-raising for online venues. Namely, patronage.

So, Is Patronage the Answer?, asks Futurismic in its look at ‘profitable post-web publishing.’ The article notes the Doctorow and Scalzi material I’ve linked to above, but concludes that, so far, there is no clear path to success — only indicators of potential. But on the issue of patronage (whether it be endorsement or actual underwriting) the question is not about its existence or potential, but how best to harness it:

. . . what is becoming obvious is that patronage is crucial to supporting niche publishing – be it direct financial patronage from readers, or the patronage of a vocally supportive figurehead (the patronage of publicity, if you will), or the patronage of an animal further up the publishing foodchain. Underpinning all these is the need to cultivate a supportive audience – turning a percentage of your free readers into donors or buyers, in other words.

The article then returns to ask the very basic questions that web publishers have been chewing on since the experiment began — distribution of ads, premium pricing, perception of readers, etc. It all comes back to the big question on everybody’s mind : just how the hell do we get people to spend money on online fiction?

Jay Garmon responds with a modification of his web 2.0 magazine idea — and, perhaps, with the only real practical answer in a sea of questions, questions, questions — something he’s calling distributed patronage. In Distributed Patronage: How to Save Sci-Fi Short Fiction, Garmon sees his ideal model as “fifty or a hundred John Scalzis bolstering a couple dozen magazines every month.” It’s an interesting idea, one that proposes an almost viral ‘reprinting’ option that would have a big-name author’s story appearing on multiple sites with links and donation buttons all leading back to the central magazine. It’s a mix of publicity and fund raising that would allow a patron-level writer to promote the magazine simply by being famous enough for the rest of the web to want to link to the non-exclusive content originally published by the web 2.o magazine. It’s an amalgam of Doctorow’s distribution, Scalzi’s energized fanbase, and Garmon’s original ‘ransom’ idea of getting the audience to bid on the stories they wanted. This ‘crowdsourced marketplace’ would, in fact, be a ‘meta-magazine’:

. . . one that houses all the stories it has unlocked for perpetual online consumption and reprint. It is also a platform for enabling other online venues to acquire short fiction (or, conceivably, any) content, and one that co-opts the audience of each venue and contributor as an ever-shifting, distributed donor base.