This is a very thoughtful and great post.

I can tell you right now that this online site’s greatest contribution to the authors would be the aggregated payment systems from around the world. It takes a bunch of time, and of course it is easy to start with PayPal. But an in-site micro-currency would be really cool.

Imagine if you could subscribe for a nominal amount say $1.95 a month and you get pretty much access to the whole site & stories. But there is a tip jar at the end of every story and you are free to dump in as many karma tokens as you like (~$0.10). Like a casino, once your cash is converted into a token, you will naturally be a bit more free spending. And if I did not have to pull out my wallet and type in a bunch of junk just to give someone $0.10 to $5, I would do it all weekend long.

And YES I want some CYOA, I am looking to read some with my sons…

I would be interested in helping fund this…

-Erik

In terms of economic attractiveness, I think it really depends on what your goals are. I strongly believe that given investment I could run an economically viable and even profitable magazine along the model I described, a media community along the lines of Penny Arcade. But the goals widely differ. Most speculative fiction endeavors are inherently going to be niche market operations, communities of people who are not going to *want* their communities to get above a certain size. A market like that is likely best off running as a non-profit, like Strange Horizons. But to answer your question I do think that a micropayment donation model is equally as viable as the support drive or subscription based models — so if the goal is breaking even, as those non-profit markets do, I think the answer to your question is yes.

There are a couple of ways to do micropayments, but they’re actually not that complicated. Paypal will exact transaction fees, but they are percentages, and in large part services like that wind up being net profitable in terms of garnering larger numbers of sales resulting from user trust, as opposed to getting them to give you their credit card information directly. However, personally speaking I don’t like Paypal, and if I were going to execute on something like this would probably get my own authenticated credit card payment service (which would also have transaction fees) and build the system around currency exchange — meaning the user purchases quantities of tokens with real life money which they then distribute to authors individually and those authors are paid on a royalty basis from the parent (ie me). But there are many micropayment options these days. Hell, given the GoPets API a magazine could actually theoretically run as a GoPets third party partner and use GoPets currency.

By “segregated” do you mean made exclusive, in terms of content? I think that Doctorow is correct in that it is a marketing and visibility advantage for an author to have their work publicly accessible on the internet, so I would say no, it shouldn’t be hidden. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give advance access to it to a subscriber base or item-based accessor pool prior to its general release as the PDF issue. If you mean segregated in terms of purchased story-by-story, I don’t know that, given the internet model where all fiction is accessible, it could possibly be a disadvantage to allow readers the freedom of choice to support specifically the stories that they enjoy. I think that there is far too much authoritarian attitude on the part of head editors and a loss of perspective in terms of the goals of a magazine, which is ultimately to serve a readership.

The question of this model’s advantage over the open site (Strange Horizons, Helix, etc) is, to me, the big question and would require field testing to fully answer. We can speculate from here — I believe that the model I suggest is significantly more conducive to the generation of community and therefore long term readership, as well as being freedom-modeled and therefore placing a greater individual value on stories. In essence, I think that the granulation of the item-based model in terms of these stories ultimately results in a greater degree of feedback and information flow between the reader and the magazine, and I have trouble seeing how that could be a bad thing.

http://xcentric.com/2007/11/03/saving-the-magazines-part-72185/

But, yes, to add to the current discussion: what you’re talking about is technically a monetized crowdsourced model, with rewards based on the popularity of the piece. We’ve talked about this at length in my day job, and there are several gotchas you have to consider:

1. Is the market big enough to make this economically attractive? I’m not sure that it is.

2. How do you deal with transaction fees, if this is not an ad-supported model? Small payments have a large percentage eaten by transaction fees. Without a working micropayment model, this may be a non-starter.

3. What benefit, if any, does this model provide over an open, unthemed site? Does speculative fiction need to be segregated, and, if so, why?