If the tithing model isn’t the future of content monetization (and it probably isn’t), then what is?

In “Selling Paper,” Kaelan Smith bemoans the dearth of viable models for monetizing content in the new digital paradigm. If everybody is giving everything away, how the hell are we supposed to get paid? As a writer, I’d hoped the answer would be simple, but the best Kaelan delivers is a model based on NPR: a combination of government funding and membership donations. It works, to an extent for NPR, so why not for print?

I think his idea is viable, setting aside my own political misgivings about the willingness of publicly-funded journalism to more than symbolically nip the hand that feeds it.

I don’t have any more specific answers myself but…

UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he didn’t look beyond creating uniform prayer books. He didn’t foresee the broad commercialization of mass-produced printed matter that would standardize language, liberate authors from the indignities of the patronage system, and spawn an Age of Enlightenment whose basic anti-aristocratic principles would give birth to the democratic movement and unseat the Church as the ultimate authority on God and religion. I’ll bet more than a handful of monks scoffed at the sight of Gutenberg’s Bible. “You want to compare that with these?” they asked, holding up their own exquisitely hand-illuminated versions. “We don’t think so.”

With the Gutenberg era ending, let’s not be like those monks. Let’s not cling to outdated economic necessities like large print runs, expensive storage, and distribution. Print-on-demand hard copies, electronic readers, even reading right off the Web page. That’s where things are going. Let’s look beyond the bookstore and newspaper closures to the new and still unseen opportunities that are doubtless unfolding on the other side.

APOCALYPSE NOT

Don’t expect Publishing As We Know It to end. As long as people read and authors write, there will be models for monetizing the transactions between them. Even with POD and the Web, publishing is too much work and requires too much expertise beyond the ken of most writers. There will still be massive bestsellers and rock star authors commanding huge advances. But they will be published only by those companies that adapt to the New Way of Doing Things.

What does that New Way look like? Beats me, but I wonder if it might more closely resemble the project-based model used in Hollywood. The Producer finds a Writer with a pretty good novel and convinces the Studio/Publishing House to put up the money. (“I’ve got great blurbs from Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Isabel Allende!”) Funding in hand, the Producer lines up a production team of independents: Copy Editor, Story Consultant, and Book Designer. The Publishing House still handles marketing and publicity, because really, what else does it bring to the table except clout and a bona fide stamp of approval? (Like independent films, self-published books may never “make it” without a big name backing them up.) When the book is “released,” the team dissolves and they all move onto the next project.

PAYING BACK THE LITTLE GUYS

So how would publications like Flatmancrooked turn a dollar the New Way? Will site traffic ever be enough to generate advertising revenues beyond sustenance levels? Contest fees and money raised at events help, but hardly make the nut. All magazines struggle. Short of NPR-like funding (or a fat inheritance) small-scale publishing will
remain a labor of love.

FMC doesn’t pay all its contributors. (Only those selected for the annual print anthology receive royalties.) Like most literary journals, it would love to, but that’s okay. Writers and poets are used to working for free. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Any reasonably ambitious writer wants to build up a list of enough publishing credits to attract the agent who can sell the novel.

In one sense, publications like FMC are really doing a service for these writers, at least those who succeed in eventually monetizing that publishing credit. I’m not suggesting a pay-for-play system. (This doesn’t mean writers shouldn’t support such publications. I pay out more in one year for subscriptions and events and contest fees than I’ve received in the last twenty years.) But maybe we can invent a new kind of royalty.

As it stands now, most magazines acquire some flavor of first rights, which revert immediately back to the writer upon publication. The magazines humbly ask that if the work is ever reprinted, the original publishers get some kind of mention. Can’t we do better? Say FMC publishes a chapter from my novel. Say that my novel subsequently gets bought and turns a modest profit. Would it be unreasonable to pinch off a fraction of a percent for FMC?

One could argue that the agent only looked at my manuscript because FMC gave that chapter its own stamp of approval. “That editor must have seen SOMETHING there.”

Let’s not rely on the kindness of the (now) star author to remember the little guys. Let’s write it into the contract.

On Thursday, Part II.

By Andrew O. Dugas