I think it might have to reach some sort of critical mass first, but it seems possible. It's a very long-tail approach, which I think might appeal to some people.
I like the idea in principle. I think this thing would be awesome when there are thousands of stories to choose from; right now, it seems a tad limited. Whether you should do it depends on what it is you want out of it.
What I want out of it (out of all my fiction) is readers, first and foremost. Income is nice, but it's kind of secondary, at least with the short fiction.
I'd also feel kind of awkward if an author put a bunch of stories on there, and I bought it, and then his or her first collection came out featuring those stories. . .
That's not building an anthology. I admit it would be less snappy to call it "Perfect bind a bunch of random stories you picked out yourself and own this fake book." Probably not good marketing.
An anthology, properly done, is a more cohesive thing. Its stories fit together in a subtle blending of tone, theme and stuff. Really. I believe that.
From the writer point of view you might get someone to take a chance on your stuff. That would be good.
From the purchaser point of view, it's like a music site offering to burn you a CD with a nice paper insert. In my mind that seems like offering to charge you extra for something you don't really need.
Oh, and, one other thing...obviously the folks who put this up believe that they can make money. They are not paying the authors up front. Author checks don't go out until the royalties due you hit $20. What if that never happens for most of the authors? Theretically, it is possible. If your royalties turn out to be around (as in their example) 15 cents per book sold, then it'll take about 134 books sold before you hit that level. Though it may not sound like it, that's a helluva lot of books.
In other words, part of the business model here has to be the assumption that for a large number of the authors who put work in (the new authors) they will never hit the point where their royalties become due.
If you want to do this, and you really don't care about making money, you just want to find new readers, I'd suggest using something that gives readers access to your work *for free*.
I agree that it's not a proper anthology. If there were some stories that I wanted but didn't have in any collection or antho, though, and they were available there, I might go for it.
As soon as rights revert back to me, I release all my stuff online under a CC license. Like you say, short stories are advertising, not income. When someone reads one of my stories in a magazine or anthology, if they google my name they suddenly have access to everything I've ever sold. It just seems like the best way, for me.
*googles himself*
Except they end up at my blog, which is not where my stories are. Gonna have to do something about that...
Hey, if you do decide to put some stories on there within the next few days, shoot me an email at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com. I'm going to write an article about it and would like to interview some people who have actually tried it.
At the moment, I have two stories up on AnthologyBuilder, and I will probably add more.
What's the attraction for readers? I'll let Nancy Fulda, whose brainchild this is, explain it in her own words. You may or may not see it that way, but other readers obviously do. People are buying books from this website, and the word is spreading. Yes, the selection's small, but AnthologyBuilder has only been operational for a couple of months. New fiction is added daily.
What's the attraction for writers? As Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out over at Speculations, it's found money. There is absolutely nothing for a writer to lose in this arrangement. Even if no one ever buys your story, you're still not out anything. You can pull your work from the website at any time, for any reason. Anything you make is gravy.
To those writers who are saying they want to wait--why on Earth would you want to do that? As I said earlier, more fiction is added to AnthologyBuilder daily. Get your stuff out there now, while the numbers are still relatively small, giving you a better chance to get your fiction noticed.
I don't see the applicability. We're not talking a new product here; it's still short fiction. What we're talking about is a new distribution channel.
Of course writers should choose their distribution channels with care. I don't submit to non-paying markets, nor do I normally submit to anthologies that offer only shared royalties.
Granted, AnthologyBuilder is a shared royalty anthology, but with at least three key differences:
1. The resale rights are entirely within my control. I don't have to wait for the antho to go out of print; I don't have to wait for any reversion clause to kick in. I may pull a story from the website at any time, for any reason.
2. I don't have to worry about any distribution hassles, like a distributor suddenly deciding to dump a small publisher.
3. The anthology "brand" is determined entirely by the reader. My stories can wind up in the same anthology that contains public domain work by Conan Doyle or O. Henry. Or they can sit cheek by jowl with stories by Jim Hines and Tobias Buckell, both on the preliminary Nebula ballot. Either way, not bad company to be in. And again, the branding is up to the reader. It's as prestigious (or not) as he/she decides.
So as I see it, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. A year from now, I'll know whether it worked or not. And if it didn't, I'm out nothing for having tried.
I recently had a fairly big discussion burst into being on brand dilution and similar concerns from fanfiction in response to a journal post I put up early this month on those subjects. I work in online marketing (among other things), so it's a major concern for me conceptually and in terms of my actual real-life job.
That being said, I don't think this qualifies as brand dilution at all. The work would have to be derivative for it to qualify as such. This is actual distilled work from specific authors. It's propagation of individual authors' work according to reader desires -- the work is unmodified and therefore there is no dilution.
The people that have to worry about this are indeed anthology editors (particularly anthology editors who reprint work), and I think there is certainly author-driven reason to support those folk. But I also think that, like Deb is saying, quality editors of that kind of work have nothing to fear from a website like this, which is another beast entirely.
I think it is wholly a good thing for authors, especially ones still working to achieve notoriety -- and for authors who are trying to pull in new audiences from related audiences. The cross-pollination potential is fantastic.
The only potential author concern here would be if you offered ALL of your stories on this site and then wanted to put together your own short story collection, you might be at risk of undercutting yourself for future sales of your original collection in the future if all the stories were available through AB.
"Brand"-wise I think it would be wisest for a writer to put their most well-known stories up on AB, examples of their best work that they would want to offer up as additions for people to sample their work in paper format when they were putting together a collection including a bunch of their favorite authors. Then in a separate collection you can add other more "acquired taste" stories and toss in an original to drive sales of the new book.
Re the royalty comment above, what they're doing is just bunching together payments because otherwise the overhead on by-the-penny royalty payments makes their model untenable. So long as they aren't requiring you to have a royalty payout in a certain amount of time (eg all royalties go away in 6 months if you haven't reached $20) there's nothing insalubrious about it.
PS, hi Dave! I am Odyssey05 and I think I've emailed you before. I just followed Joanne's link to your journal -- I could have sworn I'd already added you, but I guess not! Maybe I just had your old blogspot address added. Mistake corrected. I really loved "Iron Ankles" and it certainly deserved to be picked out in several of the YBs. Best with the new book!
For my part I would love if you would put some of your SH stories on AB so that I could make an anthology with your work and Matt's and a few others' in it. What I see in the future for this technology is alternate "year's best" collections, charity collections, what-have-yous -- there's tons of potential. It will be interesting to see where it goes and I concur with Matt that it will be something advantageous to be on the ground floor of.
That being said, I don't think this qualifies as brand dilution at all. The work would have to be derivative for it to qualify as such.
Not at all. Moving an existing product downmarket is brand dilution, too.
The people that have to worry about this are indeed anthology editors...
I don't think so, not really. I suppose if everything that came out in a given year was available on the site, the low-end Year's Bests might be in some trouble. But when you buy an anthology you're paying the editor to do the work of finding and selecting the stories for you.
Hi, Matt: I think part of what you're seeing here is people who've put together anthologies, and know first-hand how difficult it is to sell them, even if they're great--hence the skepticism as to whether this is a viable model. And as Tim points out above, there's something to be said for keeping OOP stories online for free.
That said, I'm leaning towards putting a story or two up, just to see if anything happens. Hopefully it'd be another channel to reach readers through.
I can see already that it'd be pretty easy to put together an antho of Odyssey alums :-)
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Ten would be awesome. Especially if they're not already writers. Do you think it's likely to reach beyond the writer circle?
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What I want out of it (out of all my fiction) is readers, first and foremost. Income is nice, but it's kind of secondary, at least with the short fiction.
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That is not to say by any means that everything that gets published is any good...
In my arrogance, let me add...
An anthology, properly done, is a more cohesive thing. Its stories fit together in a subtle blending of tone, theme and stuff. Really. I believe that.
From the writer point of view you might get someone to take a chance on your stuff. That would be good.
From the purchaser point of view, it's like a music site offering to burn you a CD with a nice paper insert. In my mind that seems like offering to charge you extra for something you don't really need.
Re: In my arrogance, let me add...
In other words, part of the business model here has to be the assumption that for a large number of the authors who put work in (the new authors) they will never hit the point where their royalties become due.
If you want to do this, and you really don't care about making money, you just want to find new readers, I'd suggest using something that gives readers access to your work *for free*.
Re: In my arrogance, let me add...
Re: In my arrogance, let me add...
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*googles himself*
Except they end up at my blog, which is not where my stories are. Gonna have to do something about that...
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At the moment, I have two stories up on AnthologyBuilder, and I will probably add more.
What's the attraction for readers? I'll let Nancy Fulda, whose brainchild this is, explain it in her own words. You may or may not see it that way, but other readers obviously do. People are buying books from this website, and the word is spreading. Yes, the selection's small, but AnthologyBuilder has only been operational for a couple of months. New fiction is added daily.
What's the attraction for writers? As Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out over at Speculations, it's found money. There is absolutely nothing for a writer to lose in this arrangement. Even if no one ever buys your story, you're still not out anything. You can pull your work from the website at any time, for any reason. Anything you make is gravy.
To those writers who are saying they want to wait--why on Earth would you want to do that? As I said earlier, more fiction is added to AnthologyBuilder daily. Get your stuff out there now, while the numbers are still relatively small, giving you a better chance to get your fiction noticed.
Or don't. More room for me, then. :-)
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Of course writers should choose their distribution channels with care. I don't submit to non-paying markets, nor do I normally submit to anthologies that offer only shared royalties.
Granted, AnthologyBuilder is a shared royalty anthology, but with at least three key differences:
1. The resale rights are entirely within my control. I don't have to wait for the antho to go out of print; I don't have to wait for any reversion clause to kick in. I may pull a story from the website at any time, for any reason.
2. I don't have to worry about any distribution hassles, like a distributor suddenly deciding to dump a small publisher.
3. The anthology "brand" is determined entirely by the reader. My stories can wind up in the same anthology that contains public domain work by Conan Doyle or O. Henry. Or they can sit cheek by jowl with stories by Jim Hines and Tobias Buckell, both on the preliminary Nebula ballot. Either way, not bad company to be in. And again, the branding is up to the reader. It's as prestigious (or not) as he/she decides.
So as I see it, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. A year from now, I'll know whether it worked or not. And if it didn't, I'm out nothing for having tried.
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That being said, I don't think this qualifies as brand dilution at all. The work would have to be derivative for it to qualify as such. This is actual distilled work from specific authors. It's propagation of individual authors' work according to reader desires -- the work is unmodified and therefore there is no dilution.
The people that have to worry about this are indeed anthology editors (particularly anthology editors who reprint work), and I think there is certainly author-driven reason to support those folk. But I also think that, like Deb is saying, quality editors of that kind of work have nothing to fear from a website like this, which is another beast entirely.
I think it is wholly a good thing for authors, especially ones still working to achieve notoriety -- and for authors who are trying to pull in new audiences from related audiences. The cross-pollination potential is fantastic.
The only potential author concern here would be if you offered ALL of your stories on this site and then wanted to put together your own short story collection, you might be at risk of undercutting yourself for future sales of your original collection in the future if all the stories were available through AB.
"Brand"-wise I think it would be wisest for a writer to put their most well-known stories up on AB, examples of their best work that they would want to offer up as additions for people to sample their work in paper format when they were putting together a collection including a bunch of their favorite authors. Then in a separate collection you can add other more "acquired taste" stories and toss in an original to drive sales of the new book.
Re the royalty comment above, what they're doing is just bunching together payments because otherwise the overhead on by-the-penny royalty payments makes their model untenable. So long as they aren't requiring you to have a royalty payout in a certain amount of time (eg all royalties go away in 6 months if you haven't reached $20) there's nothing insalubrious about it.
PS, hi Dave! I am Odyssey05 and I think I've emailed you before. I just followed Joanne's link to your journal -- I could have sworn I'd already added you, but I guess not! Maybe I just had your old blogspot address added. Mistake corrected. I really loved "Iron Ankles" and it certainly deserved to be picked out in several of the YBs. Best with the new book!
For my part I would love if you would put some of your SH stories on AB so that I could make an anthology with your work and Matt's and a few others' in it. What I see in the future for this technology is alternate "year's best" collections, charity collections, what-have-yous -- there's tons of potential. It will be interesting to see where it goes and I concur with Matt that it will be something advantageous to be on the ground floor of.
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Not at all. Moving an existing product downmarket is brand dilution, too.
The people that have to worry about this are indeed anthology editors...
I don't think so, not really. I suppose if everything that came out in a given year was available on the site, the low-end Year's Bests might be in some trouble. But when you buy an anthology you're paying the editor to do the work of finding and selecting the stories for you.
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Nice to "see" you here, and thanks for the kind words :-)
I think, in the end, that there are good arguments for at least trying this out, so once I get a moment I'll probably put a couple of stories up.
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That said, I'm leaning towards putting a story or two up, just to see if anything happens. Hopefully it'd be another channel to reach readers through.
I can see already that it'd be pretty easy to put together an antho of Odyssey alums :-)
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Love that antho idea, BTW. :-)