Short-story as a service
SSaaS, other than sounding like the reptilian word for impudence is an idea I had in my mind for a long time. It’s sort of a software engineer’s way of selling my short stories. The idea is that the stories are hosted on a site in a nice, Medium-esque format and peeps either pay per story, for a subscription or in a Patreon-style way. The short-stories are mostly scifi stories - of the exploring-strange-scenarios type, not the pew-pew type.
I haven’t done any customer surveys to find out first if anyone even wants this - the oppostite of the common advice on the podcast - so phasers are definitely set to derp in this regard. I definitely have a well defined target audience, it’s just hard to know if they only exist in my head.
At least the last couple thousand years have shown that we like stories and we don’t mind paying for them. Today, however there are far more things vying for our limited attention. I like to think it all boils down to the quality of the stories and by extension, renown. Would Bradbury have been equally as popular had he sold his works through a subscription?
I have lots more to say about this, but you’re not here to read a book, so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through on your way to parts unknown, please do share your thoughts.
Tried selling SciFi short stores on Amazon in 2016 and it failed totally at that time. I published one anthology and also created an audiobook version on ACX. Hasn't made it's investment back yet.
Recently, I revamped the whole thing and put them out on the web with a one-time free paywall. Site: http://wearemadrobots.com/
It's a test with only one post to HN so far and letting google picking it up and index.
I was even planning on adding a self-publishing feature on the site, so authors can post their stories and earn money. But I haven't proceeded with that any further. Is that something for you? Maybe we can chat and see if we can help each other.
In case it helps: Patreon is super popular right now amongst the various fanfiction writers and their fans. Fanfic writers start on AO3, get super popular, and then start a Patreon where people pay to get stories not posted in AO3 or other public platforms.
Inside the Patreon, there tends to be monthly voting for various writing prompts and the writer fulfills the winning prompt, patrons unlock how many new stories they get from the writer based on how much they pay, etc.
Interviewing some of these fanfic writers and patrons may be helpful in understanding your market and what gaps they see in using Patreon for SSaaS.
Thank you Richa, that’s very helpful!
Hey, Zoltán. As a sci-fi fan, I'd love to see a product like this be successful. Here are a few of my immediate thoughts:
I'd love to talk about this is more detail. We can continue in the thread, or you're welcome to email me at bryan.a.karlovitz@gmail.com
Hey Bryan,
Thank you for the points! They are certainly encouraging.
Also, thanks for webtoons, it's very nice to see how astonishingly popular it is - though cartoons require lot less brain juice to consume.
While my original plan was, as you perceived, to create a service for peeps to sell their short-stories. I've bumped into so many questions and issues however, that now I'm thinking of only using it to publish my own work.
Regarding authors, I was actually thinking the opposite. I think authors are mostly eager to grab an opportunity to make money from their works. I don't recon they would take much convincing to join the party, as the licensing agreement would be very permissive. The rights stay with them, they can keep publishing their works elsewhere and they keep the majority of the income.
Here are the reasons why I got discouraged from building this as a free for all service. (The one caveat to these points is that they are all kind of imagined and only potential issues.)
My thinking was that for this to spread and become even ramen profitable, the quality of the works need to be consistently great. That is to ease people's (assumed) high aversion to committing time and money to reading short-stories. To do that, the service would either need to be exclusive with a vetting process for the authors or the content itself would need to be heavily curated. That would potentially ask for lot of hours of reading from me where the majority of those works will be rejected.
Also, since I don't like outright refusing people's work, I wouldn't be able to just send them a 'nope', but give them some actionable advice on improving their writing. That may also take a lot of time. It's not a huge problem, because I don't mind doing it that much (unless it's some excruciatingly bad piece of work), but time none the less.
It's hard to filter plagiarism and keeping it in check seems like a constant case of whack-a-mole. What if someone was earning money that way for 3 months before being noticed? Do I sue them for the money? By all accounts it takes ages and I imagine it's a lot of hassle. If I don't sue them, what's stopping them from doing it again? This might be paranoid thinking. What's bothering me here is that not only I have no best course of action, I have no course of action.
According to my calculations, the reader / writer ratio needs to be huge for the authors' earnings to become even meaningful.
I'm very eager to read your thoughts on this.
I've considering this too and I think you got 2 possible directions.
From my POV many of the web novelist sites are in category 2 and work with masses. With the occasional hit and those are pushing the sites forward.
Plagiarism and copyright were my main concerns. It's user-generated content and people will put that on your site. Additionally, I think you need to deal with the link spamming farms too.
Happy to chat more about it in public or private.