Results of Another Web Publishing Experiment

Dienyddio writes "Shadowmarch, an ambitious web publishing project launched by Tad Williams last year (previously mentioned on slashdot) is to cease the bi-monthly story format after one year. The sad news was broken by Tad on the site. It seems that there were just too few subscribers to make the format pay, this combined with the heavy load placed on Tad by writing two episodes a month and a paper book to pay the bills has proved too much. All is not lost, DAW books has purchased the rights to three books based on the Shadowmarch story. It is hoped that these books will maintain the community side of the site. Tad will also be increasing the number of background stories and details relating to the Shadowmarch world on the site in order to promote fan interaction."

money money money

[squaretorus]

This kind of stuff leaves me cold as a dead goose - so I can't judge the quality of it. But lets assume the quality is:

a: BAD
Then it deserves to fail because lifes too short for bad ANYTHING. Just because you have a funky new delivery mechanism doesn't make the product better.

b: AVERAGE
See a

c: GOOD
Then those people who read it should have shouted about it more - and persuaded more of their network to start paying for it too. As a kid at school (in Scotland) I started buying Batman comics in town. When I told my friends they started buying batman comics. They werent available in the mainstream newsagents at the time - so you had to go into the spooky comic shop with the stinky dudes. About 10 years later the guy that worked there told me that we collectively bought about 100 comics a month from him - from zero to 100 in 2 months in fact. Now that didn't make DC any more money -but it helped him! His little comic shop was selling 100 more comics a month.
The point? I dont know. People have to hear of something to know they want it enough to part with the money!

d: EXCELLENT
Then he'll make more money doing it on paper and good luck to him!

e: BESTTHINGEVEROHMYGODTHEYCANTCANCELTHATTHEBASTARDS
Yeah right!

Re:Books vs. serials

[Todd Knarr]

I don't know, Eric Flint and David Drake seem to be making decent money in royalties off electronic forms of their older books. Not great money, maybe 2 grand a year, but then these are older backlist titles that normally only sell 5-600 copies a year so royalties aren't that great for the paper forms either. And the copy-protected electronic forms of Drake's books barely make enough in royalties every year to pay for a decent pizza. I think it boils down to:

1. People won't pay per chapter for serialized works, they'd rather get it all at once.
2. People won't pay to deal with copy-protection hassles, but they will pay to have it readily available electronically.
3. People won't pay as much for the electronic form as for paper.

I think authors can live with this. See Eric Flint's essays over on the Baen Free Library.

Well I kicked in my 2 cents

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I for one would like to see that model work. Eliminating the publisher, the distributer, the store. Writers and artists get only a small fraction of the money generated by their efforts. Some of that goes to the hawking of the work and the sails.. a creative specialty in its own right, but not one I see as as worthy as that of the creative worker. A necesarry evil maybe like lawyers.

I have an artist friend that signed an exclusive contract with a gallery, then they chose only about 10% of her work and gave her maybe 10 pct of the sale price. Fortunetly she had a job teaching at the Art Institue of Chicago and was able to let the contract run out and still eat. She was new to this country and creative distribution system, not new to art.

And they talk about us foolish Americans

Well I just subscribed to Tad's site. I support the idea of his trying to get direct support for his work if not for the value given from the work itself (we are at a bootstrap point in this model).

Here is an opportunity for someone to put up a site for these types of efforts to help get exposure and marketing. Well that will work until someone sees the profit of it then starts to squeeze. But maybe there will be a breif period when things work like they should, like early Greece or early Internet maybe.

Re:subscriptions

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, if labeling me an anonymous coward looks like a cool thing, because I don't want to share my email address to get another wonderful website "update" or to have my surfing habits tracked through my domain, I'm okay with that. I like being a coward actually, even though friends just call me Raven.:)

listen, I'm at a computer 40+ hours a week, doing graphic design and website related work, and I own more than 500 books, most hard covers, and read a LOT, so i don't buy the argument that "book people" are not that computer literate. I have no problem with e-books, in fact I own upwards of 20 e-books already (with more to be bought in the future) this was an amazing attempt at creating more than just an online story, for those that haven't even been to the site before now, you've missed a lot of quality art done exclusively for the site, short stories, as well as maps, and 2 or 3 collaborative online stories written by Msg. board members that I would have gladly paid for as well. It's fairly simple to categorize and talk blindly about a subject. It's far more complicated to invest your time into doing research on something you are going to have an opinion about. which, after reading almost every post on this matter here, I am convinced hardly any of you took the time to do. please don't use labels or stereotype something you know nothing about, some people would call that misrepresentation, and you don't look too bright when you do that. It's one thing to actually be INTO a large amount of hobbies and follow them, but to put up a pretense of being diversified in your interests by only skimming the surface of certain things, is just being shallow.

Notice I am not attacking anyone here, just stating that you should use a more informed opinion when discussing matters about which you don't have that much knowledge about previously.

Re:Books vs. serials

[Todd Knarr]

Baen's Webscriptions would contradict that. It costs about $3.75 per book delivered in electronic form through it (or more, the terms are $15/month, typically 4 books per month). It's popular enough to be making Jim Baen money on the deal. It's making the authors money in royalties. And from the letters Eric's gotten people are not only paying for the electronic versions, they're then going on to buy the paper versions too.

Note that Webscriptions meets the criteria I gave:

• It offers complete books. Delivery may be over time but books don't get offered until the manuscript is in hand and it's on the way to either hardcover or paperback publication, and Baen guarantees delivery of all books ordered even if they shut down the service.
• All versions are in open formats, freely copyable. No copy-protection hassles.
• They're priced less than the paperback editions, but still high enough to be profitable.