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Of course whenever someone does something unbelievably cool my first instinct is to critique the various aspects of it from different angles

MCM always brings the most impressive online publishing schemes to the table. If you have not checked out the new 1889 Labs I suggest you do right now just for the wow factor.

Of course whenever someone does something unbelievably cool my first instinct is to critique the various aspects of it from different angles

The new 1889 Labs is a study in internet niching. It’s the kind of site design that would make a venture cap investor’s eye bleeds because there’s no possible way you could scale it for millions of unique visitors … but the beauty it it, I think, is that it’s not intended to be that.

The Good:

• IT’S PRETTY!!! XD
• I love the bestsellers list and new releases lists on the book section. It’s immediately appealing to me as a reader
• the eReader MCM has built in continues to be unbelievably pretty, awesome and easy to use XD I feel like I’m in a Sci-fi movie

The Bad:

• The layout is not particularly intuitive … at least not on the main page. You have all these arrows and tabs and the only way for the user to figure out what they do is by playing with them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it will affect bounce rates because the majority of internet users do not want to figure things out.
• The site is slow on my computer. Which is only a year old and I had custom built to max out the RAM on it @_@. If there’s a ten second delay on my computer when I try to scroll down on an iframe … will older computers crash or spontaneously combust? O_O
• It’s ridiculously unscalable O.o This is a classic embarrassment of riches scenario. The more devoted readers MCM has the more exponentially expensive this site is to run. You can see that he’s devoted some thought to this by pushing the video off to YouTube. Put it this way: there’s a reason Google looks like it does, a reason Craigslist looks like it does and why Amazon looks like it does too. There’s also a very good reason why Google beat the shit out of all of it’s rivals that has nothing to do with silly search generating algorithms. Once you get past a certain point in traffic, even the smallest images become really really expensive to host. With a totally tricked out site? Well I’m not entirely convinced the all these graphics wouldn’t choke even the most generous transfer allowances should MCM writing hit a more mainstream audience
• It doesn’t really organize information so well. Which makes sense, at the end of the day it is still WordPress after all, but the 2010 Promo video speaks of 1889 Labs taking on new writers. As a crusader for digital publishing houses this makes me unbelievably happy … but … uhhh … where? The super neat filmstrip navigation is already pretty full with MCM’s projects. I don’t imagine he’s going to stop his crazy crazy writing pace any time soon … so how many publications can that kind of navigation  handle before it gets really annoying to watch the film strip animation (JScript I assume) slowly hobble around?
• No universial login … I need to login to use the Twitter stream … login again to use Pig in the Box … and login yet again to leave a comment? @_@ That’s an awful lot of logging in

The Unbelievably Cool

• The Twitter integration and stream is so cool it makes me weep with joy XD I honestly didn’t think MCM could do something cooler when he worked up the Twitter integration for 3D1D … this is cooler
• I love that the eReader exports to ePub
• Although I don’t fully understand it. I love the Mystery Box thing. MCM is a master of the incentive :3 There are so many ultra neat things you end up promoting everything he does to everyone you know just to find all the little easter eggs XD

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The Fundamental Problem

First you have basic techniques to determine readership: number of people coming to the site -vs- number of people commenting or otherwise active on the site. However not every visitor to your site is going to read your work. Some may click the back button within seconds. Obviously this junk traffic shouldn’t be counted as part of your readership. Yet counting readership by activity is troublesome too because the vast majority of internet users (Wikipedia estimates 90%) prefer to lurk, a small portion will maybe comment once or twice (9%) and an even smaller portion will be active (1%). (Within the business this is sometimes referred to as Wikipedia’s 90-9-1 rule, it’s not an exact science obviously … but it is, in general, pretty accurate) Counting readers by activity is basically only counting 1% of your probably readership.

Beyond the Basics

Thankfully, technology exists to save us. Here are some slightly more accurate ways to measure readership and their vulnerabilities

• Measure by RSS subscription/blog watchers …. some flaws to this in that not everyone who comes to your site regularly is going to be interested in subscribing. Maybe they don’t understand or use RSS, or they don’t have a blogger (or whatever) account. Plus just because they click “subscribe” doesn’t not mean they ever really come back after that.
• Measure by sales/downloads … only relevant if you offer sales in the first place One could also argue that just because someone buys your book, does not mean they READ it … but I think most of us would make off with our $2 sale and not give a damn about that ^O^
• Measure by analytics … complicated and involves some careful analysis, but using a sophisticated analytics tool like Google Analytics you can separate your quality traffic out from your junk traffic and look at your update days to average how many readers you have.
• Measure by membership … This is the way we do it, can’t get access to the new/fresh content until you’re a member. Has some of the flaws of RSS subscriptions, tends to underestimate true readership but suits our purposes.

Personally I find the membership method to be most accurate … but still, not every website can implement it. So let’s look at the next best option: Analytics. Many of you have Google Analytics, many of you probably only use Google Analytics to a fraction of its true power. Today we’re going to play with some advanced functions to get a better idea of true readership.

Step 1: Open up your Analytics account and click on the Advanced Segment link. Select to create a new segment if it does not bring up that option immediately.

Step 2: Who do we consider a “reader” really? Obviously it’s someone who comes to the site regularly and takes the time to actually read the content. So Advanced Segments allows us to instruct Google Analytics to filter out all traffic that doesn’t fit a certain profile and then redo all it’s pretty calculations based on the specific segment of traffic remaining.

So here’s how I set up the segment for Split-Self:

I want it to count ONLY people who have visited Split-Self’s section AND have been to the site before AND spent more than two minutes on the site. Now, depending on the structure of your site you may need to set this up differently. For example if you’re running a WordPress blog as your principal method of distribution and only have one serial, you obviously do not need to restrict the segment by “Page”

Name it, save it and this is what you get back:

WOW! 97 readers!!! That’s way more than the 12 listed on fluffy-seme!!!— er except this is in no way accurate. Google Analytics, as much as I adore it, is not very good with displaying information on regular visitors. There are special sections where you can look at visitor loyalty and such, but that data doesn’t carry over to other portions of the site. In other words if you have 10 readers who come back every week, once a week to read your serial, Google will tell you have “40 visits” because … well you did! 10 people x 4 weeks …. If you want to distill down to how many people come back once a week, Google can DO IT but has trouble displaying it.

Step 3: So we’ll distill these numbers ourselves. Note that if you have a serial that updates more than once a week this can get a bit complicated and estimates therefore a little rougher. But Split-Self only updates once a week, so all we have to do is click on the date range and tell Google to restrict the data for just one week.

After we’ve done that we have a much better number: 19 readers. And as we look through the segment week by week this number stays more or less consistant, 19 … 19 …. 19 …. A month ago it’s 15-16~ on average, so we also see how readership has grown thanks to whatever cultivation activities we’ve used.

Interesting to note … this pretty much fits with projections based on 90-9-1

Lurkers: 17.1 people

Semi-Active Readers: 1.71 people

Active Readers: .19 people (AmHarte you are officially .19ths of a person ^o^)

Readership -vs- Draw

No doubt you’ve noticed that our segment only looks at RETURNING visitors. It does not account for people who’ve just found your content recently, fallen in love with it and haven’t had the opportunity to come back yet. Shouldn’t we also count those people as readers?

I like to keep these numbers separate to look at how fluffy-seme retains and converts readership. Sometimes you read a few chapters of a serial, like … LOVE IT even, but just never get back to it. I don’t really consider those people “readers” per se, but it’s important to look at how the setup of your site is helping people come back to it or losing people.

So I’ve setup a new segment called “Split-Self Draw”. It looks like this:

Since these people are new, they don’t have access to the member’s only section so we count only the portions of the site open to them in the first place: the archive where they presumably start reading at Chapter 1. We only want to look at people who are actually READING so I up the time filtering to 5 mins and of course we specify that these people must be new visitors to be counted.

Comparing Serials

Now the real fun begins, since fluffy-seme hosts multiple serials we can actually compare draws and see which serials attract new potential readers best. We just go back to the Dashboard and click on the Advanced Segments tab above our traffic chart. You’ll see something like this:

So I want to compare Split-Self to Martin Ostrowski’s Season in the Red, which one are new visitors more interested in? Again I restrict this to one week, not so much because of double counting but because the lines are going to be pretty close together and the longer your range the harder it becomes to read the output in graph form.

Split-Self draws more people, but snarky little Martin Ostrowski gets them more active in the site (10.41 pages viewed per visit compared with 3.61). Here’s another week:

Obviously there are lots of options to play with here. You can look at how spikes in the Draw effect patterns of Readership (in other words, do new readers become regular readers?) you can even segment out traffic from out particular source and look how those visitors behave on your site (I’ll be doing that soon … as a follow up to my early thoughts on MCM’s 3D1D project).

All and all Google Analytics continues to be the most mind blowing awesome thing ever

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I’ve written about my feelings towards donation based funding before: I hate it. I accept it as a useful tool in certain situations– specific one-time $$ goal, specific purpose– but not as a sustainable source of income for a writer that is reproducible year after year.

My problem with 1,000 true fans and its ilk is that it’s unbelievably simplistic and flies in the face of decades worth of fundraising strategy … it also does not account for human behavior.

Here’s the problem: 1,000 true fans essentially is an undefeatable proposition built on circular reasoning. What is a “true fan”? Some one who will spend money on you! Can a person be a “true fan” and not spend money on your work? No. So if I’m putting out my work and I have 1,000 regular readers, but $0 donations does that mean the “1,000 true fans” theory is disproven? No! The theory says, because you have 1,000 fans but not 1,000 TRUE fans … work harder, put out a better product, promote yourself more, get 1,000 true fans.

As I’m sure some of you have already figured out, fluffy-seme is not my day job. What I actually do for a living is finance and fundraising for nonprofits. So I spend a lot of my time working with revenue streams from donations and more typical business type activities. There’s a whole industry in asking people to give you money, it’s actually a bit more complicated than asking 1,000 people to give X amount of dollars.

Putting aside my personal feelings about writers asking for donations, I can see the appeal of it for a solo writer: it’s easy to set up, requires virtually no accounting or accountability, and so many writers and artists have tried it that it no longer stands out as audacious.

But at the same time, writers who want to try this strategy could benefit from learning a few basic lessons from the fundraising community. We’ve been doing this for decades as an industry … so I’ve assembled some food for thought here on how to approach donation based funding for success.

It’s Human Nature

My biggest problem with the “1,000 true fans” idea is that, even if you’re able to cultivate 1,000 people willing to support you financially how do you keep them? Two years ago I was a huge House fan, this year … meh, not so much. It’s not that the new season of House isn’t any good. Actually, so far I like it BETTER than the season where I was a “true fan”. So what happened? *shrug* Who knows? That’s the way fandom works, people do not stay “true fans” indefinitely. Instead they float in and out of stuff: obsessing for a time, then either losing interest altogether or getting distracted by something else. They may rediscover and return as a “true fan” later … or they may not.

In trying to beat the odds, there are two things that help hold fans interest: 1) community and 2) ownership. There have been dozens of studies about how having friends that are also fans helps intensify and extend commitment. It becomes something you bond over and share with other people. It hooks into your sense of identity. As for ownership, this can be dangerous territory. Think of the BNF (Big Name Fan) concept, the BNFs in a given fandom are so hyper committed because they feel like your serial is THEIR serial. They had some intangible role in its creation. Like I said, it’s effective but dangerous because fans committed to you this way can and often do either turn on the creator or other fans for the smallest perceived slights.

So the first question you have to ask yourself is in setting up your donation strategy is: how are you going to hold onto people as fans? Do not make the rookie mistake in assuming that this is about the quality and integrity of your work. Just as the traditional publishing world often prints crap and rejects gems, the quality of the material has very little influence over whether fans become hardcore. 

Why Do People Donate?

Fundraising theory states there are six things that motive people to donate. They are (in order):

1. Anger
2. Fear
3. Self-Interest
4. Exclusivity (perks for donating)
5. Curiosity
6. Validation (confirming you values)

Notice that nowhere on that list is anything about liking the work you’re donating to support. Nor is guilt or sympathy anywhere on that list either. People might give you a few bucks if you wave a picture of starving African babies in front of them (or in this case starving artists I guess), but they’re more likely to resent you and never give again unless the process of giving makes them feel validated in what they already believe. In fact, having worked as a canvaser in my younger days (just about the most horrible job you can have in fundraising) I’ve noticed guilt often makes people quite hostile towards you instead of charitable.

Little case study here: Cassandra Clare before she was a YA writer was a BNF Harry Potter fanfic writer. So one day her apartment is broken into and her laptop is stolen. Her fans cry “Oh noes!”, collections are taken up, donations made and the laptop replaced. Why did these people donate? Self-Interest. People donated in the hopes of creeping closer to a powerful inner circle in their fan community. You see this sort of thing all the time in the New York social scene: people trying to buy themselves into the upper class (the New York Public Library and the Met benefit heavily from this). It was just weird to see it play out in a fandom

But what was even more interesting is what happened AFTER. Like most BNFs Cassie Clare had just as many people, probably more, who hated her guts. Now seeing her get a free laptop from what they perceived as exploitative means, they were filled with righteous indignation and PISSED OFF. Long story short, these people took up a rival cause in the form of another HP fan who had been trying to raise money for her sick mother for months with no success. Once “Laptopgate” broke, the anti-Cassie Clare fans raised oodles and oodles of cash in just a few days (way more than what CC’s collection had produced I believe). Before they got angry, no one cared to give a dime. The sad sorry of a woman sick with cancer didn’t get sadder or more worthy over night, it had just stumbled upon the best motivation to get money out of people: anger.

Next time you get a fundraising appeal in the mail from a charity, check out the wording of it. They spend so much time talking up injustice and urgency because they are trying to make you ANGRY.

Different Donors Different Asks

Okay, hypothetically, let’s assume you do have 1,000 fans willing to give you money for your work … how much do you want? $5? $10? $20? $100? Undoubtedly, you’re thinking to yourself “as much possible!” and then you go and do something stupid: you set up a Paypal button where the donor can fill in the blank with whatever amount they want.

Thing about donors is most of them won’t donate unless specifically asked (best if it’s someone they trust, a friend for example), at which point they ask you “how much?” If your answer is “ohhh…. ummm…. how much do you want to give?” things get awkward and no donation is made. Don’t ask your donor to assess your needs, they don’t like doing that. Donors prefer to be told “please give [this much]” so that they can say yes or no, or maybe counter offer.

So how much?

Let’s go back to the previously suggested $100. Afterall 1,000 true fans x $100 dollars each = $100,000 <– Awesome!

And you tell yourself, if I update once a week … that’s really only about $2 per update. That’s not a lot at all! Certainly my true fans will donate $8+ a month!

Except the reality is your fans are not the Borg. Some of them are SUPER COMMITTED, some of them are less committed, most of them even less so. If you’re only looking for donations from the top tier of super committed fans (read: “true fans”), you’re not going to raise very much. You need to know the right amount to ask each potential donor.

But how do you figure this out?

Allow me to introduce you to the funding pyramid, the favorite tool of many a nonprofit. The funding pyramid breaks donors up into three commitment levels and then tells you how much to ask from them to reach your fundraising goal:

1. 10% of donors give 60% of your money
2. 20% of donors give 20% of your money
3. 70% of donors give 20% of your money

So let’s say we want to raise $100,000 from 1,000 people. We could ask for $100 from each one of them, but some people will be completely unwilling to give that much and a few of them might be willing to give more.

1. 100 people $60,000 = $600 each
2. 200 people $20,000 = $100 each
3. 700 people $20,000 = $29 each

Now if we were a traditional nonprofit these numbers would be just fine, but for an individual writer each benchmark no doubt seems more impossible than the last. So for cases like this I generally tweak the pyramid somewhat, keeping the $$ in each tier the same (in this case $60,000; $20,000 and $20,000) but setting a clear donation amount per donor for each level and solving for the number of donors I would need on each tier.

But it looks bad to offer different donation levels to different people in this case, so let’s also add donation increments. Now we have two variables to play with: how many donors we need on each tier and HOW OFTEN each donor needs to click the donation button in order to get from one tier to the other.

What’s useful about setting it up this way is that it allows you to track your readers and coordinate donation incentives better with your specific needs. I actually think the whole “I’ll write a special chapter for X number of donations” is a rather cute idea. If you know how close you are to your actual goal, which donors you need to move up in order to be successful and what their interests are, you can target your incentives for the greatest impact.

Anyway, so let’s look at our $100,000 goal again and let’s explore two scenarios: one where our donation button asks for a $5 contribution and one where our donation button asks for a $2 contribution.

At $5:

• Tier 1: $100 per donor at the end of the year = 600 Donors donating 20 times a year = $60,000
• Tier 2: $50 per donor year end = 400 Donors donating 10 times a year =$20,000
• Tier 3: $25 per donor year end = 800 Donors donating 5 times a year = $20,000

At $2:

• Tier 1: $100 per donor at the end of the year = 600 Donors donating 50 times a year = $60,000
• Tier 2: $50 per donor year end = 400 Donors donating 25 times a year =$20,000
• Tier 3: $25 per donor year end = 800 Donors donating 13 times a year = $20,000

Notice that in the end we’re drawing from a pool of 1,800 fans, an considerable upgrade from our original model, but $100,000 is a lot to raise on $5 and $2 increments. Of course now you’re saying to yourself “Hey $100,000 is a ridiculous income on writing alone” … so let’s rework the numbers using a more realistic salary for a writer. How about $40,000? The number of times we need people to click the donation button on each Tier don’t change, but the number of people we need on each level does:

• Tier 1: 240 Donors, $24,000 raised year end
• Tier 2: 160 Donors, $8,000 raised
• Tier 3: 320 Donors, $8,000 raised

Now we only need 720 Donors, 320 of them tossing us $5 five times a year.

There are lots of ways this model can be tweaked to give you clear goals of how much you need from who. I’m including an Excel document for those of you who would like to play (the changeable variables are in blue, everything else is determined by formulas). Want less increments (twenty times a year is really a lot… even for $5 donations) change the donation units. Fewer donors? Up how much you want each donor to have given by the end of the year.

Practicalities

Most of you reading this now probably do not expect to make a living publishing online fiction. Probably you’re looking to merely supplement your income by a few thousand doing something you love. In which case you can have some real fun running numbers, figuring out who of your readers should be in which Tier and developing strategy for how to get them there and keep them there. As I’ve stated and (now) overstated … I STILL don’t believe donor based funding can support writers/artists … but if you want to do it, do it with a plan.

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So, here’s a little crash course:

What fluffy-seme is:

• A publishing company owned by its writers
• Publishes digitally
• We publish serials, not ebooks
• Uses community scripts, not blog scripts to release new parts
• We welcome fanfiction and remixes of our work

What fluffy-seme is not:

• A vanity press. If we accept your submission we will not charge you to publish your work. Not rent, not overhead expenses, not promotion fees. Nothing. Like any other publishing company on Earth we cannot guarantee that you will make money publishing here, but we can guarantee that you won’t be expected to pay us to put your work out there.
• Self-Publishing. When we’re open for submissions we consider them carefully and look to find the right works for us. Although authors do control and manage their own sections, this isn’t a ‘open an account and upload whatever’ deal.
• An alternative to Fictionpress and its ilk. We’re not necessarily looking for aspiring full time novelists, but we are looking for people who consider their writing more than just a hobby.
• A writing group. Make no mistake, people will critique your work here, and we like to encourage that. Even still, when we accept a work for publication we expect it to be the finished product we’re publishing piece by piece. We also expect the work to be completed in a timely manner.

fluffy-seme writers need:

• Ability to keep to a schedule and meet deadlines
• A thick skin. People will critique. They won’t always understand your brilliance. Fan communities are what we are all about; if someone posts an interpretation of your story you don’t like you have to be able to deal with it.
• Entrepreneurial Drive
• The ability to know when to take a more hands-off approach. In the beginning fluffy-seme authors need to be very active in their communities to ensure growth and development, but after a certain point having the author present in an obvious way intimidates people and stifles growth. Ideal fluffy-seme authors don’t micromanage (see above) and know when to lurk.

Want to know more?

• Read the business case to get a clearer picture of what we’re about. This site is for your benefit. There’s lots and lots of information about how we work, though of particular interest are the mission and model sections.
• Check out the actual site. The best way to see if fluffy-seme is right for you is to actually look around. We recommend taking a look at the Season in the Red section to see how we want to develop communities.
• Read the Revenue Sharing Agreement. This is what we’re signing authors to right now. It is a legally binding agreement that entitles you to a cut of our revenues, so know it before you submit.
• Read the Submission Guidelines and send us something

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“I think we’re on the right train,” I said as she nervously fidgeted.

“What do you mean?”

I pointed up the car to a cluster of girls dressed in standard Japanese school girl uniforms and towing (each one of them) black rolling suitcases behind them. This was an odd scene for three reasons: 1) it was Saturday and they could theoretically wear whatever they pleased, 2) it was Saturday morning at that … so it’s not like they were coming from Saturday cramschool, 3) this train was heading in completely the wrong direction for the airport … in fact there were no schools, houses, or businesses of any kind where this train was ultimately headed.

And yet when we got to the last station, sure enough, the school girls were still with us. Outside on the long promenades of the convention center there were hundreds more (some not in uniform) but all of them with black rolling suitcases.

While I was going to school in Japan I learned a lot about publishing that flies directly in the face of the American publishing house business model. The event my friend and I were attending was one of many we would attend. It was a doujinshi convention, Osaka Comic City, a one day free-for-all where fan artists and fanfic writers set up tables to sell their stuff. Yes that’s right, sell. The don’t pay licensing fees, the don’t have permission from the creator to do it, the whole thing would give the American industry absolute nightmares and yet the Japanese don’t seem all that concerned about it.

Why? Probably because in addition to filling up their black rolling suitcase with fan produced porn starring their favorite characters, people at Comic City also buy a shitload of official merchandise: books, toys, games, apparel, calendars.

The American industry looks at fanworks and sees only someone else making money off of their work without giving them a cut. The Japanese look at the same activity and see it as someone else riling up the community around one of their products, getting everyone excited and their wallets open, and then throwing them in an environment where the community literally encourages as much spending as possible. The portion that goes into the pockets of the fans after the expenses they’ve had to cover upfront is tiny compared to the $$ that goes to the original publisher while doing virtually nothing.

These fan communities are able to form because basically everything in Japan is released first in serial form: comics, novels, TV shows. American publishing has gotten away from this under the false belief that if you don’t give people a complete product right away that they will be less interested in buying it.

But readers, especially fiction readers, are not passive receivers of information … they think about it, they try to predict the way the story is going, they identify which characters they like, which characters they don’t like and who would have hot hot sex together if given the opportunity. Then in between each droplet of official content, there develops a whole universe of unofficial content that keeps the reader engaged and interested in the story. When you publish a book in complete, final form, the reader becomes interested, but fantasies and theories are underdeveloped in favor of turning the page. Strong ones will come back when the book is done, but most works of literature at least try to be stand-alone … meaning that by the time you’re in the position to sit down and write a fanfic exploring mysteries of character X a lot of the loose ends may have been tied up already, a lot of secrets already revealed and maybe those mysteries already solved for you.

At fluffy-seme we publish webserials because we believe the secret to making a profit off of digital publishing is not charging for content but creating engaging creative communities, and the serial form offers readers the opportunity to fantasize, reinterpret, remix the work as the story develops.

And yes … we like the porn too

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Those of you not familiar with MCM have no doubt been living under a rock in the world of digital publishing. MCM is the mad scientist of the weblit community, always cooking up some totally insane idea of how to do things differently and pulling together equally insanely pretty websites to do it.

Recently he started his newest experiment: 3D1D or Three Days One Draft. You can read all about it here and here, but suffice to say … you remember that Walk for The Cure thing you sponsored your Aunt for once? This is kind of like that … only with writing.

Prime ad space (and I do mean prime) was sold for 51 chapters. $1 for chapter 1, $2 for chapter 2 … and so on for a grand total of $1,326 for those of you playing along at home. Wow, that’s some chunk of change for three days work. Certainly more than most writers make on their self published masterpieces. WAY more than any of us could ever hope to make on an unedited first draft, but of course that all hinges on MCM’s ability to sell out the advertising space. As of this post he’s only sold $386 of it … still nothing to sneeze at I think, but short of the goal.

Because absolutely no one wants to hear my assesment of this from a creative standpoint (including myself), let’s look at it from a business one instead. Success is contingent on two factors: 1) traffic, MCM has built in clever twitter games and a point system that helps cultivate that but the story needs a presence like a flashmob to sell ads once the cheap-o ones are all gone. 2) conversion, it’s easier to find a handful of advertisers willing to buy several pages than it is to find 51 willing to buy one, but in order to do that you have to give them some hope that people will click those ads.

Okay, so the 3d1d project is the most ridiculously unsustainable of all completely unsustainable writing revenue models (at least the way MCM is doing it… 3 days of marathon writing … almost no sleep), but in fairness to MCM I don’t think it was ever intended to be a revolution in the future of publishing. I think it was intended to be just good fun, and of course the ever present cynic in me adds: probably a publicity stunt.

And I add to that, that I really really hope it works, because MCM has been very good to the weblit community and anything good for him is also good for us

So naturally I was pumped to scoop up some advertising (or actually if you believe what you hear on twitter >.> …. LOTS of advertising), but was our participation in the 3d1d experiment a good investment for fluffy-seme?

Because I’m obsessed with ad making, I whipped up three different ads for our baby series Split-Self. These are they (resized to fit this layout)

I wanted three completely different looks so that we could grab attention three completely different ways. Note that the first two directed to Split-Self’s main page, while the second directed to the first chapter.

Let’s look at the stats:

It’s hard to really know what to make of the click through ratio without knowing MCM daily pageviews … but otherwise these are not the greatest numbers. No surprise, visitor’s following the 3d1d story, want to actually READ the 3d1d story … not be redirected to someone else’s story. Good news for MCM as an engaging writer, bad news for him as a guy selling advertising space. Ironies of ironies, more and more success in web advertising is coming down to building sites that people want to navigate away from. If that seems counterintuitive, it is. It’s also why websites have gone from making solid revenue’s in ad space to barely scraping by … the advent of more sophisticated analytics mean that advertisers don’t just want high traffic sites anymore, they want high traffic site with click throughs.

…..So as time goes on, it’s quite possible that Google Analytics will put Google Adsense out of business.

Other thing we notice is that boys with anorexia apparently don’t sell. Fashion industry take note.

Now, this is just preliminary because 3D1D is still going on, and even once it’s done I imagine MCM will leave the story posted with the ads as is. So I’ll update this report later with additional data as needed, but until then … well I dunno, other than the fact that the story itself is actually fantastic I don’t know how successful I’d deem 3D1D from a business stand point.

But knowing MCM this will do nothing to deter the next crazy writing/revenue experiment. And for that, our hats go off to him … because someone has to do this work and we like to sleep too much

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PUBLICATION AND REVENUE-SHARING AGREEMENT (August 2009)

This Publication and Revenue-Sharing Agreement (this “Agreement”) is hereby made between the Author Registrant (entered on the Submission Form and hereinafter known as “You”, “Your”) and F.S Publishing (“fluffy-seme”, “fluffy-seme.net”, “We,” “Us”). We agree to provide the “Services and Revenue,” as more fully defined below, to You, and You agree to fulfill the “Provisions and Promises,” as more fully defined below.
1.      Definitions. The following definitions shall apply to this Agreement.
a.      The “Revenue” shall include the compensation outlined in Exhibit A, and shall be paid according to the terms outlined in this Agreement as Exhibit B.
b.      The “Agreement Term” shall begin with the Commencement Date and shall end with the Termination Date.
c.      The “Commencement Date” shall be the first date upon which Services and Revenue are rendered.
d.      The “Termination Date” shall be the earlier of (i) the date upon which F.S. Publishing removes your User Content and Submissions from F.S. Publishing, (ii) the date of receipt of a Termination Notice from you, or (iii) the date upon which F.S. Publishing ceases operations.
e.      “Submission,” “Submissions,” is a proposal submitted by the author to publish Content on fluffy-seme.net. Submission will include a summary of the content of the work and an estimated length in number of words, minutes or file size.
f. “Content” is any audio, graphic, textual, and video communication you send or transmit to us to review and consider for formal publication. Content can include any and all possible combinations of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, including narrative prose, parables, proverbs, slogans, and inspirational or motivational messages of any type or length, in any format.
g.        “Serial” is any Content that the Author agrees to release in parts on a regular schedule as determined by F.S. Publishing
h.  “Termination Notice” is a written notice to us via U.S. Mail, electronic mail,  facsimile, or personal delivery expressing a desire to terminate this Agreement
i.  “Terms of Service” or “TOS” is the current version Terms of Service displayed and posted on fluffy-seme.net.
2.      Services and Revenue. We shall perform the duties and tasks outlined in this Agreement as Exhibit C (the “Services and Revenue”).
3.      Provisions and Promises. You shall fulfill the duties and obligations and grant the permissions and promises, as outlined in this Agreement as Exhibit D (“Provisions and Promises.”)
4.      Payment. We shall pay the “Revenue” as outlined in this Agreement as Exhibit A, and shall pay in accordance to the “Revenue Payment Schedule” as outlined in this Agreement as Exhibit B.

Most of this agreement is pretty standard and generic. This first part starts off defining the parties entering into the agreement clearly and establishes definitions for each term used in the agreement itself.

5.      Termination. In accordance with the TOS, F.S. Publishing reserves the absolute right to terminate this Agreement at any time, for any reason, without cause, and without any further notice to you. You may also terminate this Agreement, but agree to deliver written notice to us via U.S. Mail, electronic mail, facsimile, or personal delivery expressing a desire to terminate this Agreement (a “Termination Notice”). Upon termination, we will send you any compensation that was pending disbursement to you within 30 days of the termination date.

Establishes terms under which the agreement can be cancelled and procedures after termination.

6.      Representations and Warranties. The parties to this Agreement make the following representations and warranties.
a.      Both parties represent and warrant to the other party that they have the full power to enter into this Agreement without restriction.
b.      This Agreement shall not establish an employer/employee relationship between the parties. You shall be an independent contractor and shall not enjoy the benefits normally afforded to employees under any law. You are solely responsible for the payment of any federal, state or local taxes applicable on the Provisions and Promises discussed in this Agreement.
c.      It is understood that the fluffy-seme.net Terms of Service (“TOS”) remains in full force and effect and that this agreement is supplemental to the TOS.
d.      We shall not be an agent or representative of You, and You shall not be an agent or representative of us, except as specifically defined in this Agreement.
e.      We are not obligated or required to fulfill any provision of this Agreement unless your Submission is published on fluffy-seme.net.
7.      Confidentiality. Neither party shall, at any time, either directly or indirectly, use for its own benefit, nor shall it divulge, disclose, or communicate any information received from the other party that has been identified as Confidential. Confidential Information must be disclosed only those employees and personnel who are responsible for the performance of this Agreement on a “need to know” basis.
8.      Disclosure of Authorship. You grant us full and complete permission to release your full name in association with any Submissions we publish on fluffy-seme.net or anywhere else. We assume no liability or responsibility for any damages that might occur as a result of disclosing your authorship. We cannot guarantee your privacy with regard to you and any of your published Submissions.
9.      Contact Information. You agree to complete an “Author Registration” and provide complete, accurate, and truthful information regarding your identity. We will provide you notification regarding any queries we receive regarding you or your Submission. However, we make no guarantees and assume no liability or responsibility for delaying or not delivering a query or request to you.
10. Competing Works. You agree that during the existence of this Agreement, you will not prepare or cause to be prepared or published in your name or otherwise, any work that shall interfere with or injure the use or publication, and sale or distribution of the Content herein specified.

More or less generic. Sets up what our relationship is to you in clear language and what obligations you have (like …. actually being the author of the work you publish!). Note that the last clause: we do not want our authors to run off with other publishing companies before they finish the series we’re publishing.

11. Copyrights. You agree that any Submissions and Content you send us is owned by you and is an original creation, for which you claim sole authorship. You also confirm that the Submissions do not infringe on copyrights of any third person and do not violate any laws. If we become aware that your Submission was not created by you, infringes on the rights of another, or violates any laws, we reserve the right to remove the Submission and disclaim any liability that might occur as a result.
12. Limitation of Damages. NEITHER PARTY SHALL BE LIABLE TO THE OTHER PARTY FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES OF ANY KIND OR NATURE, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE BREACH OF THIS AGREEMENT OR ANY TERMINATION OF THIS AGREEMENT, WHETHER SUCH LIABILITY IS ASSERTED ON THE BASIS OF CONTRACT, TORT, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF EITHER PARTY HAS BEEN WARNED OR WARNED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY SUCH LOSS OR DAMAGE.
13. General Provisions. With the exception of the fluffy-seme TOS, this Agreement constitutes the entire agreement of the parties and supersedes all prior understandings and agreements of the parties, whether oral or written. If any provision of this Agreement shall be held to be invalid or unenforceable for any reason, (i) the remaining provisions shall continue to be valid and enforceable; or (ii) if by limiting such provision it would become valid and enforceable, then such provision shall be deemed to be written, construed, and enforced as so limited. This Agreement shall not be strictly construed against any party to this Agreement. Neither party shall assign its obligations and interests in this Agreement to any third party without the prior consent of the other. This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the state of New York. Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this Agreement, or the breach thereof, shall be resolved by either (i) adjudication in a small claims court (subject to jurisdictional limitations) or (ii) in binding arbitration administered under the rules of the American Arbitration Association in accordance with its applicable rules.

Not much to say about this part as it is all fairly standard stuff.

Exhibit A: REVENUE
The “Revenue” shall include the following payments and shall be according to the terms outlined herein:
Twenty percent (20%) of Google AdSense revenue, and fifteen percent (15%) of subscription revenue. Amounts payable to you will be paid only by way of electronic transfer through PayPal, according to the Revenue Payment Schedule, which appears as Exhibit B.

AH! The fun part begins! Exhibit A defines exactly what revenue applies in this revenue sharing agreement and how much the writer is entitled to. Please note that, yes, fluffy-seme has other revenue sources beyond Adsense and subscriptions (as of right now [10/04/09] subscriptions have not been rolled out either). Fluffy-seme also has Project Wonderful and affiliate programs and the revenue from these programs is reinvested back into fluffy-seme (PW revenue is mainly used to buy more PW ads on other sites)

Exhibit B: REVENUE PAYMENT SCHEDULE
The “Revenue Payment Schedule” shall include the following payments and according to the terms outlined herein:
Revenue shall accrue in three-month periods (“quarters”) and will be from January 1 to March 31, April 1 to June 30, July 1 to September 30, and October 1 to December 31, in any given year.  Payments shall be made to your PayPal account within 15 days following the end of any quarter. If less than two dollars ($2) has accrued in any quarter, then no payment will be made until the sum of $2 is reached.

Exhibit C: SERVICES AND REVENUE (Our Obligations)
In consideration of your “Provisions and Promises,” the “Services and Revenue” to be provided by Us under the Agreement shall include the following:
a) Publishing your Submission (or any modified version of it) to fluffy-seme.net.
b) Author account with full access to all subscription features of fluffy-seme.net
c) Regular disclosure of F.S. Publishing’s statistics and relevant revenues.
d) Twenty percent (20%) of Google AdSense revenue, and fifteen percent (15%) of subscription revenue.

Note that this portion, and other clauses throughout the agreement, give us the right to alter your work. Although it is not our intention to do so, it’s useful for us to have this right in case you use the fluffy-seme system to publish something ridiculous offensive, libelous, damaging to the site’s server or otherwise likely to get us sued. You won’t do that right?

Exhibit D: PROVISIONS AND PROMISES (Your Obligations)
In consideration for our “Services and Revenue,” the “Provisions and Promises” to be fulfilled by You under the Agreement shall include the following:
a) You agree to provide us with Submissions and Content that is original and for which you claim full authorship and/or copyright.
b) You grant and permit us a non-exclusive, universal, and sublicensable right to use your Submission and Content in any way, at any time, in any media and forum, for any and all purposes we wish, including broadcasts, displays, performances, and any and all ventures.
c) For Content to be released as a Serial, you grant and permit us first print rights to the work in its entirety as specified in your Submission. You also grant and permit us archival rights for your Content until the completion of the Serial.
d) You grant and permit us the right to alter, change, or modify your Submission and Content in any way for any and all purposes including the right to display it on the site (or on any other site or media), in any section, on any page, in any size or variation, including adding any and all modifications, including audio, graphics, music, text, and video. You also grant us the right to publish or post your Submission in association with any other content on the site, on any other site, or in any other media or venue.
d) You grant and permit us full right, title, and interest to use your Submission and Content without having to acknowledge or credit your authorship or having to obtain any additional permission from you.
e) You waive the right to any income or revenue we make from the use or publication of your Submissions and content, not specified in this Agreement, including but not limited to general website advertising.
f) You agree to release us from any and all liability or claims from losses and damage if no revenue is earned. You understand that we do not, in any way, guarantee that any of your Submissions will stay published on the site or anywhere else, and we are in no way obligated to promote and market your published Content.

I admit it, this is a rather scary collection of demands, but basically it’s mostly just butt-covering. Legal contracts are important not for dealing with normal, reasonable, well meaning people … but for dealing with the crazies and their lawyers that might be hiding among the normals. We want the freedom to encourage fanfiction, to use samples of your work to promote fluffy-seme as a whole, to make basic modifications so that your work does not crash or otherwise damage our site and so on and so forth. These clauses are laid out to ensure that we have the freedom to do such things. We are not interested in assuming control over your work. Like all other publishing companies, we’re not going to get anywhere by developing a reputation for screwing over our writers. At the same time, if these rights are not explicitly stated we leave ourselves vulnerable.

g) You agree to negotiate for us to receive compensation (a “Finder’s Fee”) IN THE EVENT that any agency, business, corporation, enterprise, group, partnership, or private individual (“Buyer”) contacts you as a direct consequence of any Submission that we have published AND the Buyer purchases some or all rights and/or permissions for any of your Submissions we have published. You also agree to pay us a Finder’s Fee IN THE EVENT that you contact any Sponsor and sell some or all rights and/or permissions for any of your Submissions we have published, whether they are on an individual or group page. The Finder’s Fee will be a payment equivalent to 10% of the contract or agreement’s total value you make with the buyer.

Finder’s fee. If Random House finds your work on fluffy-seme and offers you a three book deal … you agree to give us a cut of your new riches before you buy that Ferrari

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Publishing webserials is HARD. The writing, the setting up the site, the maintaining the site, the promotion, the more promotion, the crying yourself to sleep because no one seems to be reading, the more writing, the shameless whoring of your soul in order to find a revenue model.

All very very stressful.

Well we’re looking for a few new writers to publish their stuff here on fluffy-seme, because why should we all go through this alone? So if you’ve published a web serial before, are thinking about publishing one or have an unpublished novel you’re tired of getting rejection letters over, this may be a good opportunity for you.

But first some thoughts:

No hard and fast rules here, these guidelines just give you a very basic idea of what we’re looking for. The only unbreakable rule is this: don’t send us submissions when we’re not open for them. Just don’t. Don’t do it. If we’re closed for submissions, it’s for a specific reason

What we’re looking for:

• Is novel length in its entirety. Ballpark figure about 350 pages.
• Splits easily into parts between 6 – 14 pages long (though we tend to prefer around 10 pages figure around 4,000 words)
• Doesn’t fit clearly into one specific genre
• Slash friendly

Slash!?!?!

Point of fact most of our stuff does not contain slash at all, but a lot of our readers like that sort of thing and we embrace it as good honest fun. So we’re not looking for series with slash pairings, but at the very least you should be okay with the idea that our readers may be thinking about two of your male characters screwing while they’re reading your perfectly unslashy story If that bothers you as an author, fluffy-seme is probably not the best place for you.

About Genres

And yeah we tend to gravitate towards the odd ball stuff rather than stories about a main character with unique powers through which he/she must save the world. That’s not to say that if you have a very classic Sci-fi or Fantasy story to tell we won’t consider it, we just feel like certain genres in weblit are over represented and would like to publish different stuff.

Here’s what’s currently being published here:
+Ugly Little Communist House: Imagine a travel guide to Prague and the Czech Republic written by John Nash of a Beautiful Mind. The narrator of ULC has an undisclosed neurological disorder which comes up from time to time as she guides you through the expat scene, the English teaching industry, and the finer points of Czech culture.

+Martin Ostrowski’s Season in the Red: A three book series about the trials and tribulations of professional sports and the media machine as told through the perspectives of hockey players from the former Soviet Union. Wacky and ridiculously slash friendly.

+Split-Self: Sex and the City if Carrie Bradshaw was a psychic vampire looking to feed instead of a single girl looking for love. Deals heavily with the underground cultures of NYC, particularly the microcosm of fameballs and bloggers.

So like we said. We like stuff that’s different XD

What about the length?

Our stuff tends to be a bit longer than I guess what most webserials publish at. I say I guess because it’s never really occurred to me to check and compare notes. Truthfully, we have no hard and fast rules about update length. It’s more about how much content it takes to give the reader something well developed and satisfying while still being manageable in one sitting. For most stories we find the sweet spot is around 8-10 pages, but Ugly Little Communist House tends to publish at a much lower page count per part because it’s written in a style that is rawer and a little jerkier at times.

So while exceptions can and will be made, you should expect to produce at least 6 pages worth of quality writing a week.

For that reason we like new acquisitions to have AT LEAST 50 pages of their serial written before we start publication. This creates a built-in cushion to allow the serial 1) to build an audience and 2) handle writer’s block, scheduling problems, or anything else that may cause you to have problems producing a new part every week.

Why Become a fluffy-seme Writer?

• We’re a business. Incorporated as F.S. Publishing, we’re serious about the future of what we’re doing. It’s not a hobby, it’s not play publishing until we can become “real” authors. We want to see fluffy-seme become a legitimate publishing house, not an also-ran for aspiring literati, and while there are no guarantees that we’ll succeed, we’re committed to the business.
• We’re not a vanity press or a self-publishing scheme. We do not ask you to put up any money to publish your work. Although writers are always free to throw some of their own money into the promotion of their works, we’re not going to charge you fees for our business expenses.
• It’s really tough to go it alone. Pooling resources towards one publishing space benefits everyone.
• We want to build an online environment that attracts readers not other writers. Feedback from other writers is great and has its place, but we don’t want to be another Fictionpress, we want to be a site for readers.

Sound Good So Far?

Here’s what we need from you. Put together a submission including the following information:

• Title: (or working title)
• Summary: (as best you can, we know we’re all special snowflakes whose beauty cannot be captured with summary! ^o^)
• Estimated Word Count of the Completed Serial:
• Have you ever published a webserial before?
• How much (if any) of the work do you have written already?
• Is the serial being submitted currently being published anywhere else? Be it FictionPress or your own private WordPress installation or anything else?
• Are you over 18?
• Writing Sample

The sample should be of the series in question, a couple of pages is really all we need. To submit you can either post you submission to this forum (you will need a fluffy-seme account for this [but free!]) or you can email it to seme (at) fluffy-seme.net. We prefer you put it up on the forum because we like to keep our publishing process reasonably transparent, it will help us gauge potential audience response, and personally I feel like it’s easier for authors to handle the selection process when they see what they’re up against.

Final Thoughts

You are strongly encouraged to take some time browsing through this site and the main site before you submit. This style of publishing is not for everyone and we can think of nothing worse than finding someone we really like, only to realize that they are uncomfortable with our terms and business model. This site right here exists to keep you informed about the business. Use it.

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We’ve found ourselves in a bit of a Catch-22 scenario here though :3 We need more traffic and a stronger community to pull the kind of revenues that will allow us to pay our writers, but to get that traffic we need more content … ugh.

So about a month ago we started playing around with the idea of turning fluffy-seme into something like a co-op. Owned by the writers it published. I like this idea A LOT, one because it will ultimately help us retain quality talent long term and also take risks on new writers without necessarily taking financial risks.

Still that process requires a bit of legal work, an intimidating bit of legal work. So much so that we got scared and put it on the back burner while working on HyperLocal.

(To be honest the problem is not so much the legal work to set it up, as the amount of work to protect the corporation from crazy people with lawyers: identifying the flaws in the model and ensuring that the contracts and agreements have the appropriate clauses blah blah blah…)

Well … the idea came up again and we’ve decided to try it out. An actual co-op right now would take more legal work than we can really afford but– after some debate– we decided we could try a basic revenue sharing model.

A revenue sharing would mean that the authors under such an agreement would get a cut of the revenue made by the site. If we make no revenue, we lose nothing.

So that’s what we’re going with as the first step towards a more formal publishing co-op. Long term vision is to how writers who make significant contributions to the site as shareholders, while other writers are paid a more conventional freelance (per word) rate based probably on experience and such. If I like the way the revenue sharing thing works out, I may keep it around long term with slight modifications to allow us to take on riskier first time writers without necessarily getting our ass in a sling.

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