BTW I wasn’t particulary excluding non-print mags, and come to think of it, even lower audience magazines. I think it comes down to reputation eg. Strange Horizons, Lone Star Stories etc. As a writer I want to build my reputation, and the easiest way(!) to do that is get published by someone with reputation.

There’s an interesting ongoing debate about whether small software companies should charge, that’s sort of relevant. Companies like 37 Signals say that if you build something of good enough quality people will pay for it (although they do of course have free, low feature versions). Other people have made millions by keeping things free and slapping on some Google Ads. Both ways seem to be working at the moment.

In thinking about this I’ve also discovered another problem with deciding to publish anything on my own website: FEAR! At least when you sell a story to an editor you know that someone else likes it (apart from your crit group), and therefore it must not be complete rubbish.

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!

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.