Comments on: What can writers learn from Radiohead?

By: Adam Rakunas

Adam Rakunas — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:08:51 +0000

Jason Stoddard and I have kicked around plenty of How To Save SF Publishing schemes, and they all end up at the same point: go online, quit charging your readers to read, use every form of getting cash (subscriptions, donations, ads, selling hard goods), allow readers to post their words and pictures, and have a pro editor to helm the thing to bring the prestige. We called it the Big Scary Idea, and if anyone’s interested, I can send you the document. We would’ve done it ourselves, but there’s never enough time.

By: James

James — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:23:03 +0000

Somehow I can’t imagine Radiohead ever saying

By: ShaunCG

ShaunCG — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:37:46 +0000

Point 3 – true enough, James, but you should also take into account that your blog isn’t set up as a promotional tool for your own writing, which will be a factor.

Additionally, “giving away” is misleading. As increasing numbers of digital ‘zines are demonstrating, the writer gets paid, but the reader gets it for free.

I’d give away more fiction myself if I ever finished any stories!

By: Paul Raven

Paul Raven — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:43:33 +0000

Oh, and additionally – a greater availability of free short fiction should, theoretically, produce a greater demand for short fiction of the highest quality, which people will be willing to pay for (or tolerate ads in support of). I remain convinced that more people would read genre short fiction if they were aware of its existence.

By: Paul Raven

Paul Raven — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:41:02 +0000

Point taken, James – but what I was trying to get at is the idea that publishing your own work acts as an advert to the magazines, whose position as “gatekeepers of quality” should actually be strengthened by there being more fiction available for free … I don’t know for certain, but I imagine if we could see more of the type of story that gets rejected from magazines, we’d probably have greater respect for the work their editors do. But distribution is an interesting point, and that’s where your argument cuts two ways – what the print mags have is strong brand reputation, but compared to online fiction publishing, their distribution logistics are brutally costly – I think it’s that, more than falling readerships, that has made things so hard for print mags. (Though I’d be more than happy for someone in a poition of greater knowledge to set me straight on that.)

Regarding the bandwidth costs, again, point taken – and apparently the bandwidth has been an issue, as demand was higher than expected, leading to slow load times and failed log-ins. But that would be an easy problem to solve by co-promotion – a band with Radiohead’s profile, who’re going to get the sort of bandwidth demands in question, would have been best off going to a company like Amazon who specialise in delivering massive amounts of server bandwidth (the A9 framework, or whatever it’s called) and doing them a deal – “give us a cut-price rate, we’ll plug the service.” The mutual backscratch model works pretty well, and scales effectively from big numbers to smaller, also.