Nancy Fulda, assistant editor at Baen’s Universe and  editor-in-chief and founder of Anthology Builder, joins us again while Dan Wells is out celebrating his birthday. We discuss the rise of digital SF magazines, and touch on concepts like user-generated content, the Superconducting Copy Machine, and disruptive technology. We talk about print-on-demand vs. self-publishing, we laugh as Nancy puts her foot in her mouth, and then we argue over whether free online content can generate income for authors, as opposed to webcartoonists.

This week’s episode is 20 minutes long, because you’re not in as much of a hurry as we originally suspected, and Nancy made us at least a little smarter.

This week’s Writing Excuses is brought to you by I Am Not A Serial Killer by our very own absent-two-weeks-running Dan Wells. The book is only available in the UK, but you can get now from http://www.bookdepository.co.uk which has free shipping to anywhere in the world.

Writing Prompt: Write a story that convincingly describes the death of the traditional publishing industry 25 years from now.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: electronic distribution of material — the Internet — is a disruptive technology that has enabled the growth of electronic magazines. One model is the Internet as superconducting copy machine, where anything that can be copied will be copied. Print-on-demand (POD) is not self-publishing. E-readers, POD — disruptive technologies are coming. Think about what your generatives are — customization, patronage, convenience, or something else?

[Brandon] Nancy Fulda is joining us once again. We apologize, Dan is in the hospital.
[Howard] I thought it was his birthday?
[Brandon] No, it’s just his birthday, but he should be in the hospital for skipping our podcast. But we have Nancy. Give us an introduction, Nancy.
[Nancy] Hi. I’m Nancy Fulda. I’m the assistant editor for Jim Baen’s Universe. I’m also the managing editor for Anthology Builder.

[Brandon] Okay. And we’ll talk about what Anthology Builder is in just a moment. The first thing I want to talk about is this whole concept of digital magazines. Tell us about Baen Universe’s model. How it works, these sorts of things, in case people aren’t familiar.
[Nancy] Baen’s Universe is an electronic magazine. It’s founded by Eric Flint, of the well-known 1632 series.
[Brandon] Now how do people subscribe? Do they buy a subscription and it comes in e-mail?
[Nancy] An online subscription. You can buy a single issue. You can buy a single story — I believe that’s been implemented now. They give you a password and a link and you can download anything you want from the site. They have HTML, PDF, multiple formats.
[Brandon] Okay. How much does it cost per month, do you know?
[Nancy] I’m trying to remember.
[Howard] She doesn’t have to pay for it.
[Nancy] I get it complimentary.
[Howard] And it’s DRM-free, right? There’s no digital rights management?
[Nancy] It’s completely DRM-free. That’s one of the big selling points of Baen’s Universe. It’s the fact that you don’t have to worry, it will play on anything.
[Brandon] It will play on all your electronic gizmos. The first I heard of this in a big way in science fiction and fantasy was Sci Fiction. Sci Fiction was essentially a marketing ploy by the Sci-Fi Channel. They started up a… releasing a story or two every month on their website, paying professional rates which surprised everyone because they were paying professional rates but not charging anything. It was all publicity. It was marketing for the Science Fiction Channel. Eventually, Sci Fiction went under, the argument being… they realized that readers were not the target audience.
[Howard] Readers are not watchers.
[Brandon] But it has kind of the same model with the pay subscription [garble] Jim Baen’s Universe and also Intergalactic Medicine Show for Orson Scott Card and I know there are others going on.

[Brandon] How is this changing… why is this happening and how is this changing the short fiction market?
[Nancy] Well, any time a new opportunity arises for making money, people will expand themselves to fill it. So what we have… the Internet has come. The Internet is there, and there is opportunity for electronic distribution of material, and so…
[Howard] Kevin Kelly at wired technium blog described this and basically described the Internet as a superconducting copy machine. And that concept… we introduced to the world a superconducting copy machine which made information… anything that can be copied will be copied. And that is a disruptive technology. The disruption has hurt newspapers…
[Brandon] All periodicals are hurting.
[Howard] All periodicals are hurting bad, and at the same time, we are seeing the rise of a new generation of content creators. There’s Jim Baen’s Universe and some of these other things we’ve talked about which are a direct translation of the magazine into the new format, into the superconducting copy machine. There is also user-generated content, things like LOLCATZ and blogs and whatever else.
[Brandon] Does Baen’s Universe published a lot of LOLCATZ? I’m joking.
[Howard] Do you know what a LOLCAT is?
[Nancy] I have no idea.
[Brandon] Well, we’re not even gonna go there.
[Jordo] That’s a can of worms right there.
[Howard] Can of worms that.

[Brandon] I will note that Tor.com, Tor’s website, has started doing the Sci Fiction thing, publishing short stories for free as publicity, which makes a lot more sense for them since the people who are going to be reading their stories are likely to go and read their books. It’s a much better match. One of the things I’ve noticed, and you mentioned this in the previous podcast, the electronic magazines tend to pay a lot better to the authors, because they don’t have as much overhead, I assume?
[Nancy] Yes, less to print. Also, one of the big motivations behind Baen’s Universe’s pay scale is the fact that novelists don’t like to write short fiction, so all of the best authors are out there writing novels and not writing short fiction. So the principle at Baen’s Universe is that we will pay the authors of the commissioned stories a lot, up to $.25 per word, in order to lure them back into the short fiction market.
[Brandon] And one thing is that length is not going to matter. Except for the price you’re paying, length does not matter. Where in a short story magazine, if they buy a 17,000 word short story, that’s half of their space for the magazine. And so they aren’t going to do that very often. But if you write a really killer novella at 17,000 words and send it out to one of these electronic magazines, they could say, “You know what, this is a great story. We don’t have to…”
[Nancy] The space is not actually as big a benefit as people think because what we’ve been finding is that after a certain point if you pack it bigger, people aren’t any more satisfied. In fact, sometimes they’re dissatisfied.
[Howard?] Really? Interesting.
[Nancy] I think it was the movie Henry The Fifth when it came out and it was four hours long. People did not like to go see it and they did not go to see it twice. The same thing happens with online fiction, the eye fatigues a lot more with screen reading.
[Howard] I love, and maybe this is just me, but I love, I’m going to be sitting reading things on my screen, I want to hit page down no more than maybe three or four times, which is a short, short story.
[Nancy] Especially because of the font sizes that you want for screen reading. You want the fonts a little larger so that the eye doesn’t fatigue as fast.
[Howard] I use smallish fonts, but still… I like it fairly short. When I have picked up copies of Asimov’s or when I have picked up short story collections in the past, I will often open to the table of contents and look at what’s shortest. No, seriously. And I’ll read the short one because I love a short, eye-popping story and that may be part of what’s driving this.

[Brandon] What’s the future of this? Do you see the explosion of things like e-readers and the iPhones — a lot of people talked about the iPhone for reading and things like this — do you see this generating a lot more interest in online magazines? Do you think this is the wave of the future or do you think it’s a very distant wave that still hasn’t hit us yet?
[Nancy] I’d say it hasn’t hit yet and the reason is because every time a new electronic reader comes out, for example the Kindle, all of the online discussion forums for writers go into a… I don’t know, a supernova. Everybody’s talking about it, everybody’s worried about the death of fiction. When I talk to my friends who aren’t writers, half of them haven’t heard what it is, and those who have, have no interest at all in an electronic reader. And I know this is a very controversial issue, but there are a lot of people who would say exactly the opposite, but I don’t see it coming yet.
[Brandon] I actually agree with you. I see it coming, but very far. I don’t think this generation’s ever going to transition. I don’t think the next generation may even transition to electronic readers, but I think there will be a point where we do transition. I think the short stories will be a great transitioning point because you don’t necessarily feel that you need to have that physical copy, just like you feel sometimes with a book you need to have the physical copy. But I don’t think it’s going to change as quickly as for instance the music revolution with the iPod and things like that.
[Howard] Well, there’s two examples we can look at. One is how many people still listen to CDs on a stereo, and how old are those people? How many people have taken their CD collection and burned them to a hard drive and still have the CDs? I’m actually one of those people. I burned all of my CDs to a hard drive, but I can’t bear to throw them away.
[Brandon] I still have mine. I don’t know where they are, but I still have mine.
[Howard] My wife keeps trying to say, just get rid of them. But what if all four hard drives that I’ve backed this up to crash…
[Nancy] This brings up a very, very important point about digital media, especially when it comes to archival and information storage. Because it’s happened so many times, how a times have you had something on a 3 1/4 inch floppy, and then after the media revolution, you find out there’s not a machine in the building, on the campus, anywhere within a 10 mile radius that can read that sucker. That’s the problem. The beauty of the book is the same beauty that there was with the scroll. It’s there. And it doesn’t go away even if you change readers.
[Howard] Even with the advent of books, scrolls still worked. The ones in Sanskrit are hard for me to read, but…
[Jordo?] Hard?
[Howard] I just make up noises.
[Brandon] My very first book, written when I was 14, and it’s essentially a Dungeons & Dragons fanfic, but anyway written when I was 14…
[Howard] Did it have orcs in it?
[Brandon] I don’t know if it had orcs. It had elves.
[Howard] So you did break your own rule?
[Brandon] I didn’t have my rule then. I was 14, give me a break. I wrote it on an electronic typewriter that used these weird strange discs. I don’t even know what an electronic typewriter is, even still, but you could type something out and it would record it to the disk and then you could put the discs in and it would type it out again for you. I’ve still got all those discs.
[Nancy] That is a redundant technology if I ever heard of one.
[Jordo] You could type normally on it.
[Brandon] It was a transition thing. You could pretend it was a typewriter. I’ve still got those discs. Nothing in this world can read them, but I’ve got those discs. And they probably don’t have any information on them anymore because it’s been 15 years. But I’ve often thought, oh I wish I could get that story back.
[Nancy] Books last a lot longer.
[Brandon] Books last. I’ve still got all my books that I had during that age.
[Jordo] Let me say this, even though you guys can’t hear me very well.
[Brandon] Jordo’s jumping in. Producer Jordo!
[Jordo] I just wanted to say one of the things, when Howard was talking about ripping your CDs to MP3s is, there is no change in how you consume it. Consuming is exactly the same. When you take your books and move them digitally, the consumption is different.
[Howard] Yes, we consume it differently.
[Jordo] And that’s why the iPod took off, because there was no difference to the user.
[Brandon] No difference, except for the fact that you got to carry around a smaller thing that didn’t skip when you jogged, so there was a big improvement.

[Blatant advertisement break]
[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by I Am Not a Serial Killer…
[Dan] Lies!
[Howard] No, it’s true. It’s true that’s who this book to you is brought by… now I’m starting to sound like a serial killer. This book was written by our good friend, fellow podcaster, Dan Wells.
[Dan] I can’t believe you really said that.
[Howard] He’s a pretty good writer.
[Brandon] I looked for Howard Is Not a Serial Killer and I couldn’t find it on the website.
[Howard] I Am Not a Serial Killer is currently only available in the UK but you can get it from bookdepository.co.uk who ships worldwide…
[Dan] for free
[Howard] For free. So you can just buy it.
[Dan] It’s at 6.29 pounds right now.
[Howard] How much does it cost to send a 6 pound package across the Atlantic?
[End of blatant advertisement break — cut off in midjoke!]

[Brandon] Let’s get off of this topic. Let’s talk about the next topic. You mentioned Anthology Builder. I want to talk about this cause this is the other big change that’s happening, which is print-on-demand. In fact there are a lot of discourses of whether electronic readers will take off or whether print-on-demand is the wave of the future. Tell us about print-on-demand and tell us about Anthology Builder.
[Nancy] Print-on-Demand. The first thing you’ve got to do is separate print-on-demand in your head from self-publishing. The two have become very synonymous, but they’re two significantly different things. Print-on-demand means the publisher doesn’t have a storehouse full of books. What it means is they have the book electronically stored, and when an order comes in, they send it to their printing machine, it prints the book, it puts on a cover, it completes a finished book. Some of them do it as fast as five minutes. Self-publishing means nobody in this world would take you and so you decided to pay money to get it done yourself.
[Howard] I’m self published.
[Nancy] garble
[Howard] We can’t record my pout.
[Brandon?] There’s no one in the room who could describe that pout.
[Nancy] I’ll see if I can dig myself in deeper. Of course, we have people like Howard…
[Brandon] There are reasons to self publish.
[Howard] There are successful self publishers. But I don’t do POD. I don’t do print-on-demand. When I publish, I function a lot like a regular publishing house. I buy 5,000 books in China and I have a set street date and I make pretty good money at it.
[Brandon] I think that a lot of vanity presses have brought a bad name to print-on-demand because a lot of them now use it. It’s a much easier…
[Nancy] Well, and to self-publishing in general, in fact. Because when we think of self-publishing, at least most people, what they think of is these things you seen that have 10 million grammar errors and things like that and as Howard demonstrates, that’s not really necessary to self-publishing.

[Brandon] Anthology Builder? What are you guys doing? What is the pitch on Anthology Builder?
[Nancy] Anthology Builder. What we have got, we’ve got a database of really great stories. We know they are great because we don’t let them in unless they’ve been previously published in a paying market or if they’ve been written by a really good author.
[Brandon] Yeah, you’re not throwing away stories that Orson Scott Card sends you.
[Nancy] Orson Scott Card sends me a story, of course I take it, I don’t care. And so what we do, we have this database. And what you do is, you come to the site, you pick the stories that interest you most, you pick a cover art, you write an introduction if you want, and we printed and we send it to you. And it’s a hefty book, you can…
[Howard] How much does it cost?
[Nancy] 15 bucks plus shipping. Shipping seems to go up twice per year, right now, so order soon.
[Brandon] How much is the author getting on anthology?
[Nancy] The authors are splitting a pro rata of $1.50 per order.
[Brandon] Okay. So about 10%.
[Nancy] Yeah. The authors split 10%.
[Brandon] Split 10% based on word count, I assume?
[Nancy] Based on word count.
[Howard] Which is about what you’re gonna be getting…
[Brandon] For a paperback? That’s a good royalty. That’s a standard royalty for a trade paperback.