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."

Comments

Books vs. serials

[Todd Knarr]

I think this and prior attempts don't show that publishing on the Web doesn't work so much as they show that publishing books in serialized installments doesn't work.

Re:Books vs. serials

[No Such Agency]

I'm not sure that serialized books "don't work", so much as that people are so accustomed now to their serialized entertainment being televized weekly (or even daily!) that waiting for only 2 installments a month might not be very appealing to that many people. {loser}This is just my gut feeling, based on how long a week can feel when you're waiting for a new episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to hit the tube{/loser}. Add to that the reluctance of many people to pay for electronic text (Hell, even Stephen King couldn't make that work!) and this venture had a lot going against it. Too bad, because I really like the idea of authors being able to sell their work online, even if half the readers end up not paying them to read it. After all, I'm sure many authors get lots of new fans via second-hand book sales and libraries!

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.

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.

Micropayments

[colmore]

OK, I know it's been said a million times before, but we really need micropayments. And $1 paypal donations don't count. It seems like there's a lot of money to be had with micropayments, so why hasn't something started up?

I guess I'm asking an open question. Micropayments have seemed like such a good idea for so long, why hasn't it happened yet?

Old Joke...

[colmore]

What's the difference between an internet author and a large pizza?

A large pizza can feed a family of four.

(replace "internet author" with artist, musician, open-source programmer, etc.)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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:money money money

[Aanallein]

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

He will. He's one of the most popular authors of quality fantasy (as opposed to the kind written by the likes of Goodkind), and any book with his name on the cover is almost guaranteed to sell very well.
It was a certainty way from the start that Shadowmarch would never make anywhere near the amount of money he makes with his books. So Tad was writing War of the Flowers (or whatever it will be renamed to if he finds a title he likes better) for money, and Shadowmarch as an experiment of how things could be.

Shadowmarch was never started for the money; yet unfortunately it has failed (in part) because of it.

And that is a damned shame. Because Shadowmarch was indeed an experiment of how positive things could be. There was no publisher involved; it was just Tad and a few friends who set up and took care of everything - publishing the episodes in plain HTML to guarantee readability (even 20 years down the road), thus making it possible to grep through those episodes looking for references you'd missed before.

Beyond this, the reason for the project, Tad wanted more immediate reader feedback; what did we like, what did we want to know more about, which clues did we pick up? Before Shadowmarch he only got feedback starting close to a year after finishing a book; by which time he'd long since moved on to the next work.
Yet with Shadowmarch, feedback was constant and immediate. And as a reader, this was awesome beyond belief; I'd gladly have paid a lot more than the price of a hardcover (rather than quite a bit less as was the case now) just to be able to see our comments have a noticable influence on the story; to see the world evolve before our very eyes.
Shadowmarch will go on. We'll see more of the world in the three books DAW will be publishing, and the website with its awesome community will continue to exist as well. Yet the awesome experience of this project has not managed to survive, and I fear that means a very real end to my hopes for the future of 'epublishing.'

Re:marketing

[RealisticWeb.com]

I have to agree. This reminds me of when adcritic.com went out of business. I used to love the site, and I went to it all the time. Then one day *poof* I went and it was out of commision. What troubled me is that they never put out a plea for help! I for one would have payed money for the service, but I was never asked to. I know in this situation, they already had a subscription service, but did they ever bother to put out a red flag? Did they put up a donation link and say "We are running out of money, if we don't get more subscriptions and donations, we are going to have to sell out" ? Did they get thier loyal fans to go tell all of thier chat room buddies to check it out, and give a donation or buy a subscription? It just seems like a waste to me to have a "community" based site, and then not take advantage of it when it's really needed.

Let's bear in mind

[Rogerborg]

That Tad - by his own admission - isn't that hot on writing to a schedule. And I agree with him on this; when left to his own devices, he produces seriously high quality work. When the deadlines kick in, he becomes much more generic and (dare I say it?) can border on the mediocre.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy his work, I just think this ticking-clock scheme was a bad idea for his style of uncompromising "it's done when it's done" creativity.

An insight into "information wants to be free"

[dinotrac]

First, congratulations to Tad for finding someone to publish ShadowMarch. I've not read the installments, but getting someone to foot your bills so that you can write is a good thing.

Second,
this may be a small insight to those who believe that "free as in beer" is what all entertainment should be. I remember a gazillion posts on why it's ok to simply take music et al without concern for whether the artist gets paid. Two common threads that I can recall were:

1. We don't want to pay those stinkin' middlemen record companies and publishers.
2. Hey, creators create. There is and always will be plenty of stuff.

I have to agree with 1. I don't want to pay those stinkin' middlement record companies and publishers either. They really are a nasty bunch of thieves. OTOH, they will get people to pay for Tad's work and let him pay a few bills. The publishers make the fotune, but Tad can write without doing in the family.

2 is problematic. It seems to presume either that the most artists have no concern for the material world -- no desire for family, home, lights turned on, etc -- or that all art is equal and that every Joe down the street can write or sing with the very best of them. Such people should spend a weekend tied down in front of a constant stream of Suddenly Susan episodes. It isn't true of programmers and it isn't true of artists.

Re:subscriptions

[AdamJ]

btw, book people are generally not that computer literate. i mean sure they can use email and sht but they generally dont spend the time to read of of a website when they can go and buy a book to cozy up to. especially since the book they can put on their shelf and display when their finnished. but this is a whole other can of worms.

I think you're completely confusing two things here. Computer literacy has nothing to do with why many people prefer a proper book to reading on a computer. I'm extremely computer literate, but I don't exact relish curling up in my bed with the Athlon, nor do I want to be reading e-books during a RPG session.

Lose the "btw, book people are generally not that computer literate. i mean sure they can use email and sht" and you have an interesting point, but claiming that computer illiteracy is one reason that e-books haven't caught on dilutes it.

Hobbyists vs. Pros... and why both fail.

[2Flower]

Online publishing isn't always intended to be one's primary source of revenue. I think this example and the Stephen King experiments show that at least for now, we don't have a workable system that will allow someone to live off what they're writing online. (Closest I've seen are extremely popular webcomics like Penny and 8-bit, but they also have side businesses and advertising and sometimes don't meet their goals.) It's not time for pro writing online yet. I have faith that a workable formula will be found, but until then, it's not a bet I'd wanna take.

For folks like me who are just publishing because they like to write and something compells them so that they HAVE to write, with the end result being freely available, it's much easier. I've got a day job that pays the bills so I can come home and write. Works pretty well in terms of keeping me in the black...

The problem then becomes 'Death by Popularity'. As much as we love the internet as a bastion of free speech and free expression and so on and so forth, bandwidth is decidedly NOT free. The slashdot effect can pretty much wipe out your website -- and then your ISP will cheerfully charge you for all that traffic brought on by thousands of happy readers enjoying your work.

Even pro sites and webcomics have this problem, where they start small, get popular, and get crushed by bandwidth costs from so many people simply digging their stuff. It's even worse for aspiring independent bands; the RIAA can afford to pipe thousands of MP3s off a website (even if they don't wanna), but Joe Q. Guitar Player might not be able to.

I really hope someone comes up with a technology or a revnue model that works. I'll keep writing regardless of whether or not it turns a penny, but it'd be one less headache if I didn't have to worry about my work costing me an arm and a leg to get out there.

Obligatory whoring plug for said work: Unreal Estate, a scifi comedy. It's got open source reality innit. Whee! Now let's see if it survives the link being posted to slashdot. (Probably will since nobody reads comments, right? *EL WINK*)

Re:Not bi-monthly.

[AdamJ]

Bi-monthly and semi-monthly are synonymous in modern English. According to dictionary.com:

bimonthly (b-mnthl)
adj.

1. Happening every two months.
2. Happening twice a month; semimonthly.

adv.

1. Once every two months.
2. Twice a month; semimonthly.

However, it also says:

"Usage Note: Bimonthly and biweekly mean "once every two months" and "once every two weeks." For "twice a month" and "twice a week," the words semimonthly and semiweekly should be used. Since there is a great deal of confusion over the distinction, a writer is well advised to substitute expressions like every two months or twice a month where possible. However, each noun form has only one sense in the publishing world. Thus, a bimonthly is published every two months, and a biweekly every two weeks."

dictionary.com reference