Thanks
Xica

I agree that it’s a model most apropos to niche content.

“This method does have its critics. In a discussion thread on rec.arts.sf.written, a poster identifying himself only as htn963 fears that the work will suffer from authors being given incentive to let the quality slip—after all, they’re already paid for it, no matter how good or bad it might end up being. And in Fledgling’s case, there is no guarantee that the finished work will be professionally edited as it is uncertain that it will see eventual print publication.”

This is certainly possible. The other possible criticism is that it will create even further genre ghettos. My favorite example is Eden Studios’ Terra Primate — which was created after someone gave Eden a considerable amount of money to produce the Planet of the Apes-style RPG. That’s pretty inside baseball of a topic even for RPGs.

But this isn’t all that different from a traditional freelancing model, the only difference being that fans of a series or genre are going directly to the author rather than through the publisher. Obviously, an author might be able to get away with poorly edited work for awhile, but if the quality falls, presumably so will the people willing to pay for the production of the next one (again, all that is happening here is the go/no-go decision on a work is being made more directly by fans).

I’d think a much bigger problem would be what happens when there are 3,000 such projects rather than 30 or 40. One possibility is that very narrow subscription-style services might emerge. So rather than giving $25 individually to 4 authors who write, say, zombie novels, some sort of subscription aggregator emerges where I pay $100 for the next 4 novels from that group, and then these succeed or fail on the ability to convince people to subscribe or not.

“There is also the fact that schedules can slip due to writer’s block or other matters. Diane Duane’s schedule for The Big Meow has slipped considerably due to various personal crises and other projects taking greater priority; originally intended to be completed by August, 2006, it was only halfway finished as of November.”

If this ever became a significant portion of income, those who can keep up with the demands of this sort of arrangement would succeed, and those who can’t will fail.