Digital Distribution Creations & Consultations

Would you pay an author $10 to write a 100 word story for you?

In its rawest form, that’s what this whole thing is about—how can authors can make money in an age where all the rules are changing? I’ve thought about this on an off over the last few years but never dedicated enough time to unearth a realistic way forward for authors. Until now, that is.

Last week, I had an idea and decided to run a Kickstarter campaign to see if I could make my idea become a reality. Could I illustrate how authors could make money in the digital age? My scope isn’t as wide as solving the plight of long form fiction authors. No… my mission here is far more finite: I want only to shine a light down one tiny path. This is but one experiment, of many.

Here’s the idea:

1. 100 stories, 100 fans. Get 100 fans to commission a 100 word story for $10 each. To make things easy (legally, in any event), I will write all 100 stories.
2. Different formats. Put those 100+ stories into a collection & offer that collection in numerous formats: $1 will buy you an early email of all the stories, $5 will get you an early email of all the stories in a PDF with some art, and $10 will get you your own story.
3. Bigger donations = cooler rewards. Handwritten stories, personalized books, handmade books, exclusive voicemails, mystery gifts, and the like.
4. Half to authors, half to charity. Once the campaign ends, all the stories will eventually go online, forever, for free to be remixed, sold, whatever. Yet all proceeds from subsequent physical books will be split 50-50 between the author and a charity of the author’s choice.

At $10 for 100 words, that works out to one dime per word. Thus, the name—Dimeword.

To simply things for this first campaign, I’ll be writing all the stories myself. This is much easier for two huge reasons: I don’t have to hire an IP laywer (which can be pricey) and I’m not dependent on anyone’s schedule (which can be unpredictable). I’m also choosing the confines of each story, like genre, the number of characters, tone, etc. If I can, I’ll converse with fans on Kickstarter to see if I can write something more specific they want, but I’m not promising that in advance.

Kickstarter Campaign Dates: December 23 to January 22 August 11 to September 9, 2012

I’d like to launch this campaign very soon, but with the holidays coming up, it seems best to start on December 23 and end on January 22. I’m only crowdfunding for $1,000, which is just $1 from 1,000 people or $10 from 100 people. Given how many kinds of upscale rewards I’m offering, my hope is that the campaign should go smoothly. Ideally, I’d like a minimum of 100 commissioned stories by the end of the campaign so if anyone buys the physical book they won’t get a flimsy comic book but something more substantial. (During the campaign, if you only want to donate $1 and not $10, I’m totally okay with that. Whatever you sponsor, please pass the word about this campaign to anyone who might make a $10 donation for a story… that way you get more stuff for only $1!)

OBJECTIVES

I have many different objectives with this campaign:

• Get my feet wet with a simple and small crowdfunding campaign. Start with a “little bet“. Of course, I want this campaign to succeed, but if it fails, I’ll just retool and relaunch. I won’t have gone ‘all in’ my first time around.
• Leverage the Creation of New Works generative. Kevin Kelly‘s term, ‘generative’ shows how artists generate new value by offering to create new works. The best part of this approach? Copyright infringement is a non-issue because all the content is created entirely by me—I’m not using any other media except the words that pour out of my own head.
• Have a tangible book at the end of it. I like books and love seeing my hard work put into something that will last for a very long time. I know others feel the same—we can all read a PDF, but owning a hard copy is an entirely different beast… and a beast you can autograph, too.
• Connect with Fans. A huge part of this is discovering a group of committed fans and treating them well over time by offering them stuff they can’t get from anyone except me. Behind the scenes, I’m also planning some bonuses to long-term fans I’m opting not to ever explicitly mention in the campaign itself…
• To prove this model works, and invite to other authors to try it. One of the best things about this campaign is that it’s an inherently free business model, i.e., there’s no patent on its design. If this model works, I lose absolutely nothing by encouraging other authors to duplicate my efforts because each author offers something completely different to their fans that I could never offer. On the contrary, my approach can only become more popular if more authors adopt it. Not to mention that by letting the content eventually roam free on the internet, more people can read it and the physical book’s retail profits to half to the author and half to a charity. Here’s why I think it will work: authors get paid directly by their fans when the content is made, fans get cool stuff in addition to the new work, new fans are created as the content roams the internet in perpetuity, and physical book purchases on the long tail benefit the author and a charitable cause. Everyone wins.

THE GENESIS OF DIMEWORD

You could say all this started with a tweet. I was at the Storyworld Expo in San Francisco last week when Suhail Rafidi pinged me. Was I in town? he asked. We ended up having lunch at a delicious Vietnamese restaurant and talked a lot about how authors could sustain themselves in the face of an imploding publishing industry.

After having studied business models in recent years more than I ever thought I would, I feel strongly authors will find a way through the woods. (I’ve actually discussed this topic on the air.) The competitive advantage will probably go to the polymaths—those who can write fiction AND write code AND create compelling design—but there should still be room for those who want to just write, too. All they need is an understanding of basic economics and how the internet has revolutionized the way we interpret and capture value.

Eventually, my business model research led me down a rabbit hole to find unique and invincible ways to sell one’s content while also competing effectively with piracy. And if a business model could go so far as to use piracy to one’s advantage, then authors would really put themselves at the head of the line.

But how?

All this was going through my mind as I was talking to Suhail. Then, something broke through to the surface. Here I was sitting opposite a highly talented writer, someone who loves to write and someone whom I thought would love to experiment with a “little bet”. So I reached into my pocket and pulled out a ten dollar bill and quickly scribbled on it.

Commissioning a personalized immediate exclusive story! 1 story, 100 words, Title: Defaced, Thriller: genre, 3 characters, 11/1/11 at Storyworld Expo, Writer: Suhail Rafidi For Ross Pruden

I was willing to pay Suhail right there on the spot to write a small story just for me. $10 is more than I pay for some DVDs, but this would be a story written just for me, from someone whose writing I admired. Plus, I knew Suhail personally so I was also supporting him as an artist in a general way. All these things seemed to be a promising new business model to help sustain authors.

The advice I’ve heard time and again is start small to build up a loyal following of fans. Could you write a series of stories for an increasingly larger group of people? What if you put those stories together and made them into a book? Even if the book were just 20 stories long, it would still be an excellent way to build fans quickly and offer them something of real value along the way. Over time, the circle of appreciation should expand, too.

The day after I had lunch with Suhail, I met Andria Phillips and she told me about her successful Kickstarter campaign to release her short story Shiva’s Mother under a CC License. She needed $250, she got $616, and four of her backers threw in $100. As Andria told me about her campaign, I was reminded of Simon Sinek’s fantastic lecture where he drives the point home: People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

That was when I thought about doing a Kickstarter campaign to test the idea. I’ve always heard that if you do a Kickstarter campaign, you should be ready to dedicate a lot of time to it, make it your life’s passion for the duration of the campaign to ensure you meet your goal. Unfortunately, time isn’t a luxury of mine, so what if I lowered the final amount to something I felt relatively sure I could meet without dedicating a huge amount of time to it? Could I start with a small campaign—say, just $1000—and build a good fan base at the same time? If I were charging only $10 per story, $1000 seemed feasible. And after adding in all the other benefits with higher price points? Yes, it seemed very doable.

HOW PLEDGES BREAK DOWN

The most important lesson I’ve learned from Techdirt is, bar none: leverage the internet’s infinite copy machine to add value to scarcities only you can offer. That is, don’t try to lock down stuff which by its very nature yearns to be distributed online. Instead, push it out and let it circulate… infinitely. The more people who know about your work, the more they want to buy other stuff that only you can sell them.

With that in mind, I drew up the 16 tiers of donations listed below. Most tiers are under $100 and offer incredible value. For example, just $1 will get you an email of every story written for the collection. $5 buys you an extra PDF of those stories with some fancy art included. These are both things that can eventually be pirated, but they’ll be exclusive content for those patrons, at least initially. So your $1 or $5 isn’t just buying the option to be a patron (generally speaking), but the immediacy and exclusivity of getting the commissioned stories before everyone else.

Now it gets fun. Those who pay $10 or more really reap the benefits of the campaign: they get all the stories in an email AND an emailed PDF and a story written just because of you. $10 seems like a low enough price point to have a small new work be created, but once that new work is created, it costs nothing to distribute over the net so there’s no reason why patrons of smaller amounts can’t get that creation as well (I’m also hoping that patrons who donate $1 might upgrade to a higher tier later in the campaign… or even donate to a later campaign).

Here are all the tiers as I picture them (I added in the last two just for laughs, but there’s no telling what people will pay for so I’ll honor my agreement if someone coughs it up!):

Minimus—$1

• A thank you from the author
• All stories emailed (in the body of email) 8 weeks before the book’s official release

Mysterio—$5

• All of the above PLUS
• PDF of all stories (includes special mystery art)

Patron—$10

• All of the above PLUS
• One story of 100 words created exclusively from your donation (max: 300 stories) PLUS
• An iTunes/ePub eBook of all stories PLUS
• A nod and a wink from the author

Double Down—$20

• All of the above PLUS
• Same as $10 Patron, but the story is twice as long (max: 50 stories) PLUS
• Two nods and two winks from the author

Penmanship—$25

• All of the above PLUS
• Your story handwritten by the author (mailed flat) PLUS
• One hi-res public domain photograph taken by the author

Tweeter—$30

• All of the above PLUS
• Your story tweeted to you by the author in 100 character increments PLUS
• Something really cool

Voices in Your Head—$35

• All of the above PLUS
• Your story left on your voicemail with a greeting from whoever’s nearby

Word to your Author—$40

• All of the above PLUS
• Your story printed, framed and signed by the author PLUS
• Mystery object embedded in the frame

Mantlepiece—$50

• All of the above PLUS
• Your story handwritten (and printed), framed and signed by the author PLUS
• A drawing on the page of whatever the author wants

Webmaster—$75

• All of the above PLUS
• Story created on a unique web page with your name prominently displayed PLUS
• Mystery text in secret writing somewhere on the web page

Publisher—$100

• All of the above PLUS
• Signed paperbound edition (includes a special introduction about this campaign and the infdist.com philosophy) PLUS
• Some snarky notes in the margins in totally unexpected places

Archivist—$250

• All of the above PLUS
• Signed hardbound edition (yes, you get 2 editions: the paperback and the hardback) (max: 40) PLUS
• One of the author’s favorite pens

Collector—$500

• All of the above PLUS
• Limited Edition handcrafted paperbound edition (max: 20) (in addition to the paperback and hardback editions!) PLUS
• Handwritten story will be written on something unique PLUS
• A random mystery paper yanked from the author’s archives

Ultimate Collector—$1000

• All of the above PLUS
• Special Limited Edition handcrafted paperbound edition has a bonus multi-part handwritten story written across each copy of the limited editions (max: 10) PLUS
• A massively awesome mystery gift

True Fan—$2,500

• All of the above PLUS
• 60 minute Skype call with the author PLUS
• A framed photograph taken and edited by the author just for you (max: 1) PLUS
• One bonus story not distributed anywhere

My Liege!—$5,000

• All of the above PLUS
• Everything above hand-delivered by the author who flies out and spends a whole day with you (only in continental U.S.) PLUS
• Sainthood

The final details may vary a little (your feedback is extremely welcome), but you get the idea.

A NOTE ABOUT SCARCITY

The term “artificial scarcity” is bandied about a lot, especially about merchandising, e.g., how really “limited” is a limited item if it can be remade at a moment’s notice? I once heard that Ansel Adams used to burn his negatives to make his photographs more unique (don’t know if that’s true, but the idea abides), and I’ll be taking a similar approach:

All items offered during this campaign will never be reproduced again.

No matter who you are, I won’t create additional units for you. All unique items like handwritten stories and handmade books will be the only items ever made (except for my own collection, of course). So step up and pledge for something truly unique!

THE NUMBERS

I can already hear authors of the Old Model rankle. Here’s why:

Novels: 70,000 – 200,000 words.
$10 for 100 words = $7,000 to $20,000 / novel

“I can’t live on that!” I hear them whine. Okay, maybe that’s true… but only if that’s the sole revenue stream in this model—and it’s not. For a true fan who buys everything you ever make, who supports you no matter what you create because they can’t get enough of you, the scales must tip in favor of profitability for the creator. Take, for instance, Trent Reznor who gave away all his music for free and then sold 2,500 special deluxe limited editions for $300 each to make $750,000 in just 30 hours. This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

More access to content = more fans = more true fans = more money

While I’m only trying to raise $1,000, I’ve designed this campaign to have the potential of raising much more than $1000, especially if a rock star or two decide to snatch up one of the last two tiers (which actually happened to Garath Skarka on his wildly successful Kickstarter campaign). Besides, the main goal at this stage isn’t just to make money—it’s to create a group of highly dedicated fans who want to see more of what you do. What creator doesn’t want to have fans like that?

FORGING A PERMANENT TIP JAR

Despite the name, the driving force behind Dimeword isn’t to peg a random currency unit to an author’s hard work, but to fund the creation of new content and bundle that intitial creation with unique scarcities offered only during that funding period. Not a patron? You can’t get the cool stuff. Want to be a patron? Don’t miss the next campaign. Once the digital content has been created, it can be infinitely distributed at no cost… which only adds more value to its physical copies… which sit like permanent tip jars for both the author and the author’s charitable cause.

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

If this new model is successful, I’ll hire an IP attorney to draw up proper documentation to open this thing up to other authors. Of course, I’d still want all created stories to be set free without any copyright restrictions but you can’t do that kind of stuff with new partners without at least consulting a lawyer who understands the IP landscape.

But think of it—how exquisite would it be to have 100 different authors contributing to a new story collection and/or book collection funded completely by 100 unique fans? It could be a unique discovery tool to offer sample of different authors while also holding them to a standard benchmark of length. And something OCD about me really likes the decimal aspect of this: $10, 100 words, 100 fans, $1000 crowdfunding… it’s just clean. There’s also a lot of possibility that fans themselves can step up to write stories, and even leverage something like Wattpad as an additional venue to exhibit their work.

If you support this project, you’re not just supporting this one tiny experiment, but the potential of a new business model and all the permutations that arise from it. There are so many directions this could go and I’m eager to hearing any ideas you have—please leave a comment. If your idea rocks the house, I’ll be happy to tweak the campaign. Don’t be shy.

Let’s all make this campaign a success so we can move on to the next phase!

Final note: how ironic that the date I wrote on that $10 bill happened to be the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I suppose writing was on the brain.

{ 1 comment }