Been busy the past couple of days, so back-tracking the thread a little to speak to some specifics. Basically, I think this whole thread ends up being about expecting things it's unreasonable to expect given the current state of reality. Also, here're the slides we looked at on Tuesday:
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhnfq4b4_56f3mggddn On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 10:50 AM, cd <[email protected]> wrote: > > I just wish we had numbers. How many subscribers did they have? What > was their overhead? Etc. Same for Strange Horizons, EscapePod, etc. > An estimate of those would really help understand what's possible and > what's not. We can have some idea based on that release, and you want more you could probably reach out to Mike R. and ask him politely, and if he's at liberty to say he might just tell you. This is SF, after all, not the big publishing biz. You either know or can get his email, he probably knows who you are (and that might not matter anyway). We do know some things, though, as I said: We know they were paying people salaries, we know what rates they were paying for stories and how many stories they published every month, we could use Alexa to guess their site's bandwidth usage and uptime and make some educated guesses about minimum monthly hosting costs (infrastructure), we could find out if they had a fixed office or used Baen Books resources, and based on all that you could make some educated guesses at their minimum outlay. Just having listed those factors, though, it seems clear that their costs are going to be several multiples of those of Escape Artists, at a minimum. So Escape Artists has to pull in a fraction of the revenue to cover costs, and are probably funding some operational stuff (like their computers and any core audio equipment) as personal, not business, expenses. I wouldn't be surprised if the ad revenues were better for EA, too. What's interesting to me about the examples you cite is that they break out into two groups: "Serious" and "hobbyist." I don't mean that as a slam at Escape Artists -- I think what they're doing is fascinating and I heartily applaud them for having the temerity to try. I use the work "hobbyist" because it's pejorative, and because I think people think of it that way: "If it's cheap, it must be crap." Cheap things are often crap. But there have also been many wonderful things for which no one ever received much money. The entire output of Charles Ives, for example. Strange Horizons and Baen's U seemed to me to both be trying to essentially move the old model to the web by publishing A MAGAZINE and getting people to pay for it. They wanted to have Teh Cheap and maybe even Teh Free and eat it, too. Whether Mike R. et al. thought that's what they had to do, I don't know (but would like to - another thing it would be nice to know). The pure-online publishers who are staying in business are AFAICS either: 1. Running so lean they can work off pocket-change; 2. discarding old models in favor of appealing to new vectors (Escape Artists); 3. trying new models for author compensation and distribution (e.g. GUD Magazine); 4. two or more of the above. > > > (I confess I was always annoyed by the Baen rejection letter, which > seemed to me to betray a misunderstanding. It says in it that they > are trying to compete with Joe Six Pack's beer money. But that's not > right. Joe Six Pack already bought cable, it's sunk cost, so you're > competing with Joe Six Pack's "free" (no additional cost) Stargate > episode or Mansquito. And that's a very different thing. I'm not > sure short fiction can compete with free Stargate, for someone who > wants to watch Stargate. I mean, let's face it, compared to Mansquito > reading a short story is work. Now, this might have just been a > figure of speech for Baen -- Baen has a solid audience of military sf > fans, and they could, or at least should, have been targeting those if > self-sufficiency was their goal.) Well, what do you want to write, Craig? It sounds to me like what you're saying is that you want your medium to get a type of attention that by its nature it doesn't get. Also, while you have a key to this at the start, you don't seem to be following through on the cultural aspect: "Joe Six Pack's beer money" marks a whole cultural category, and that's what you need to look at w.r.t. the lit rags like McSweeneys, Iowa Review (Michigan? I don't even know), Rosebud et al.: Their support is cultural support. See more thoughts on that below. > > > Also: is there an audience problem here? Do SF audiences not feel > that they should pay for SF? Something like McSweeneys, or any part > of the not-broadway theatre world, or the ballet, or classical music, > or all of poetry, or much of jazz, survive because there are audiences > ("fan bases") that feel they have to invest in these things. I gather > that that feeling is completely absent from almost all SF fans. Maybe > we need to train our audience. All those things you cite are part of larger cultural millieus that have a particular history and typical origin for their followers. For many years, theatre has been regarded as something you're expected to pay handsomely for. Lit mags range from cheap to dear, but the cheap ones are not highly regarded and publication in them is not prized. ("Quality" notwithstanding -- as folks like Robert Pirsig would remind us, "quality" is a loaded term.) McSweeneys, Granta, Rosebud and Michigan Review have specific fan audiences, it's true, and there may be little overlap. But they share a common origin in an excluded world with a tradition of elite pretensions that -- and this is key -- are associated with high cost. SF is by contrast originates in an excluded world with a tradition of elite pretensions that are associated with *the cheapest modes of publishing available in any given time period*. Train the audience? Haven't people been trying to do that for years? (Let's all say it together: "OMNI MAGAZINE...") Anyway, the culture that supports the Grantas and McSweeneys and lit rags of the world is one in which people regard one as a pitiable specimen if one doesn't accept it as given that The Arts Must Be Supported. Throughout most of that culture, there are cultural signifiers about what constitutes True Art and what constitutes schlock.* We don't get out of schlock basement, and there are lots of reasons for that: Our signifiers, to be sure ("wookie suits" -- that one's for Jonathan -- conventions [Literary Movements have * conferences*, not *conventions*], etc.), but there are also issues of training and temperament. Most of us were not brought up with a knee-jerk devotion to standard literary idols, and those of us that were have tended to specialize. (I suspect a lot have fixated on Classical and folk literature, rather than later "Classics.") And temperament: We are mostly analytical thinkers by temperament. Performance arts like Jazz are in a totally different space. As I've said before, I don't think it's valid to compare performance with literature. It's not even apples v. oranges, it's *apples v. a grocery bag full of uncooked pasta and raw sausage*. You just don't go to a bar and listen to a guy read his novel for two hours on a Friday night, but that's what Steve Earle and Patty Griffin make their living off of: People coming out to listen to them do something for an hour or two. Where you do see people going to a club to hear a reading, it's an exception and it's a small group making that exception, and the "performer's" pay is less direct than it is w.r.t. a musical, theatrical or dance performance. (Buy the book. "Buy the tchotchke" is a key part of a middle-income musician's life, but they are still getting paid for the performance. Middle-income writers aren't.) -- *This starts to get more complicated w.r.t. stuff like McSweeneys or The Believer, which graze in that uneasy median between ironism and earnestness where David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers built their houses. At some level, all this stuff is imaginary -- it's "consensual hallucination", to borrow Gibson's term, no less true of RL culture than of Gibsonian cyberspace. > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
