From the very beginning it was very important to us to PAY our writers. We probably could have put up a Craigslist ad or opened up submissions and gotten many many talented people to put up their work for FREE, but we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to wait and figure out a way to pay something, even if what we paid was actually very very small. Some $ is always a better situation than slave labor.
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.
Admin, President and all around person in-charge of fluffy-seme. Doesn't like writing bios, but likes writing pretty much everything else. Can be reached at seme@fluffy-seme.net 
