Hello!

My luck must be badly rotten. I had a publisher interested in the series of short stories I am producing, and before I get any contract signed, the magazine goes into shutdown.

Maybe I should consider other venues for distributing my stories, since publishing through magazines looks like a failed proposition...

Anybody here has strong opinions about Patreon or similar platforms? Maybe I could set my own digital library subscription model, but I don't think I could get many customers that way. Hmmm... If anybody has ideas I am eager to listen to them.

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Arelor wrote to All <=-

Maybe I should consider other venues for distributing my stories, since publishing through magazines looks like a failed proposition...

Magazines are on their way out (as a print format, at least) and have been
on the skids for a while now.

Anybody here has strong opinions about Patreon or similar platforms?

Patreon has been taken over by the Left and will soon be litigated out of existance for violating their own rules.

SubscribeStar looks good right now as an alternative.

But both rely on a fairly large base of fans kicking in small amounts each month. If your fans are contributing to get content and you don't produce pretty constantly, they could stop.

Have you looked into publishing through Smashwords?


... Help! I've been possessed by a UNIX daemon!
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--- DR. WHAT wrote ---

Patreon has been taken over by the Left and will soon be litigated out of existance for violating their own rules.

Because they threw off that anti-semetic guy and he told his followers to use their (incredibly stupid Terms and Conditions) against them?

Didn't they have a laywer look at that thing first? (:




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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to All on Wed Oct 14 2020 05:40 pm

Maybe I should consider other venues for distributing my stories, since publishing through magazines looks like a failed proposition...

What about compiling them into books to put on Amazon?

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to All on Wed Oct 14 2020 05:40 pm

Anybody here has strong opinions about Patreon or similar platforms? Maybe I
could set my own digital library subscription model, but I don't think I could
get many customers that way. Hmmm... If anybody has ideas I am eager to listen
to them.

Check out Substack.com. Subscription (as in dollars) based Email List manager.

|08~|07Bob|06Rob|08~


... Interchangable devices won`t.

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Dr. What to Arelor on Thu Oct 15 2020 09:24 am

Have you looked into publishing through Smashwords?

That business model is totally dead.

Being in Smashwords does not make you locatable since there are thousands of other writers in there. You may as well set up your own store and hang your work in there.

I think futurologists are foretelling the demise of regular magazines too soon though.


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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Phigan to Arelor on Thu Oct 15 2020 10:44 am

Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to All on Wed Oct 14 2020 05:40 pm

Maybe I should consider other venues for distributing my stories, since publishing through magazines looks like a failed proposition...

What about compiling them into books to put on Amazon?

Amazon is a cesspool.

You have to compete to thousands of writers and they don't help you get known at all. Then they enforce a draconian ToS on consumers. You may as well set your own store since the chance you are gathering readers from organic growth on Amazon is virtually zero.

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Bob Roberts to Arelor on Thu Oct 15 2020 01:05 pm

Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to All on Wed Oct 14 2020 05:40 pm

Anybody here has strong opinions about Patreon or similar platforms? Ma I
could set my own digital library subscription model, but I don't think could
get many customers that way. Hmmm... If anybody has ideas I am eager to listen
to them.

Check out Substack.com. Subscription (as in dollars) based Email List manag

|08~|07Bob|06Rob|08~

... Interchangable devices won`t.

Ok, now whe are talking the same language.

Do they offer a publishing plan (ie marketing and other tools) or do they only host the mailing list and do the payment processing?


--
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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Dr. What on Thu Oct 15 2020 06:44 pm

I think futurologists are foretelling the demise of regular magazines too soon though.

The thing with any dead tree publication is that you must have some form of support for the process. The sheer cost of pressing and binding paper has to be offset by something. I believe the current model of advertisers plus subscriptions is not a winning strategy.

Hatton

... Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Hatton to Arelor on Fri Oct 16 2020 02:38 am

Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Dr. What on Thu Oct 15 2020 06:44 pm

I think futurologists are foretelling the demise of regular magazines too soon though.

The thing with any dead tree publication is that you must have some form of support for the process. The sheer cost of press
and binding paper has to be offset by something. I believe the current model of advertisers plus subscriptions is not a winn
strategy.

Hatton

... Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

Well, there are two sorts of magazines. First there are the cheapo ones which use lots of advertisements for funding, sell for
cheap and use cheap content in order to make costs low. As it is, those are competing with blogs which are just doing the same:
offer cheap content with no quality control or close to none at best.

Then you have the specialized ones which are expensive as heck and feature close to no ads (and the ones they do are highly
targetted). They offer content that is no reasonable to offer for cheap - ie writing the article is expensive in itself.

I used to think the first ones were the ones who were going to suffer, but guess what, the most profitable magazines in Spain
are the cheapos ladies read while hairdressing. If the dung is not going away I can't see the real quality magazines going
either. Suffering because the going crisis? Sure. But not nearly as much.

I have worked with cheapo ejournals and real quality magazines and believe me, actual quality magazines take good care their
content is worth it. They'll keep up you up working at saturday 3 am because step 5 of the experiment your article describes is
not reproductible by the quality team :-)


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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Hatton on Fri Oct 16 2020 03:40 am

Well, there are two sorts of magazines. First there are the cheapo ones which use lots of advertisements for funding, sell for cheap and use cheap content in order to make costs low. As it is, those are competing with blogs which are just doing the same: offer cheap content with no quality control or close to none at best.

Then you have the specialized ones which are expensive as heck and feature close to no ads (and the ones they do are highly targetted). They offer content that is no reasonable to offer for cheap - ie writing the article is expensive in itself.

Yeah, it's the Cosmo (and example of your first magazine) vs CQ Magazine (the latter) concept... but I think both had/have about the same percentage of ads.

Thing is, this has been changing slowly for quite some time.

Hatton

... I never knew a girl who was ruined by a good book.

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Bob Roberts on Thu Oct 15 2020 06:49 pm

Check out Substack.com. Subscription (as in dollars) based Email List manag

Do they offer a publishing plan (ie marketing and other tools) or do they only
host the mailing list and do the payment processing?

They're pretty much focused on the list management, but they have a clever system to help you promote your list by allowing subscribers to sign up to your list for free and get limmited emails then upsell them to a full subscriptions. These focused subscriber only email lists are trendy right now.

Most of the lists I'm on are related to news analysis.

https://substack.com/discover has a list of top publications.

|08~|07Bob|06Rob|08~


... My other computer is a 486.

---
þ Synchronet þ Halls of Valhalla <> San Francisco <> hovalbbs.com

Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Bob Roberts to Arelor on Fri Oct 16 2020 09:37 am

Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Bob Roberts on Thu Oct 15 2020 06:49 pm

Check out Substack.com. Subscription (as in dollars) based Email List manag

Do they offer a publishing plan (ie marketing and other tools) or do th only
host the mailing list and do the payment processing?

They're pretty much focused on the list management, but they have a clever system to help you promote your list by allowing subscribers to sign up to y list for free and get limmited emails then upsell them to a full subscriptio These focused subscriber only email lists are trendy right now.

Most of the lists I'm on are related to news analysis.

https://substack.com/discover has a list of top publications.

|08~|07Bob|06Rob|08~

... My other computer is a 486.

Yeah, it looks nice to me.

If I can couple it up with a web service (which I most likely can) then this sort of arrangement sounds good to me.

--
gopher://gopher.operationalsecurity.es

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Arelor wrote to Dr. What <=-

I think futurologists are foretelling the demise of regular magazines
too soon though.

It depends on the magazine and how it changed over the years.

I remember getting Byte, Creative Computing, Dr. Dobbs, C User's Journal, PC Magazine, Linux Journal and probably a few more
that I don't remember.

Some went away because they didn't change wiht the market.

Others dropped off because they all became the same. So I didn't need 3 and dropped 2.

Still others had horrible bias (cough, cough, PC Magazine) and did reviews of things based on that bias.

Still others were replaced by the Internet.


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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Dr. What to Arelor on Thu Oct 15 2020 09:24 am

Hello there,

I think what I am going to do in the end is to set up a website for the series and adhere to a subscription system such as the ones recommended here. Then I'll have an store attached to the site and will have yearly compilations for sale.

I have a lot of sellable material already. I could sit on my buttocks writing nothing and deliver a whole year of stories to the fans. Now I am experimenting with frameworks for building the website up.

Thank you all for the suggestions!

--
gopher://gopher.operationalsecurity.es

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Hatton on Fri Oct 16 2020 03:40 am

Re: Yet another magazine down

Best science magazines, indeed, cost 6 euro and beyond. But the quality is much, much higher than
the ones costing $3-4 where a lot of them have shady articles if not adverts disguised as news.


-- Unix junkie --

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Re: Yet another magazine down
By: anthk to Arelor on Wed Oct 21 2020 02:23 pm

Re: Yet another magazine down
By: Arelor to Hatton on Fri Oct 16 2020 03:40 am

Re: Yet another magazine down

Best science magazines, indeed, cost 6 euro and beyond. But the quality is much, much higher than
the ones costing $3-4 where a lot of them have shady articles if not adverts disguised as news.

-- Unix junkie --

Heh, even adverts disguised as news can be useful at times.

Caballo Sano (Healthy Horse) used to carry lots of articles sponsored by a horse food manufacturer, and sure, they tried to
sell you their horse food, but at their core they had useful information you could savage. And they had the decency of telling
you it was an sponsored article.

--
gopher://gopher.operationalsecurity.es

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Hello Arelor!

** On Thursday 15.10.20 - 18:47, Arelor wrote to Phigan:

What about compiling them into books to put on Amazon?

Amazon is a cesspool.

You have to compete to thousands of writers and they don't help you get known at all. Then they enforce a draconian ToS on consumers. You may as well set your own store since the chance you are gathering readers from organic growth on Amazon is virtually zero.

This is what I am finding when independent authors try Amazon.
Amazon capitalizes on the bright-eyed eager virgins out there.
Only once is enough. If they don't come back - they don't care.
They will have collected their "fees" from the author. There
will be another eager bright-eyed eager first-timer who will come
along.

Abebooks (originally a Canadian creation) was a pretty good
marketing tool for independent bookshops to catalog their wares.
But about 8 years in, they sold their souls to Amazon. Amazon
had a similar 3rd-party way to catalog books for sale (I was on
both platforms), but after the Abebooks acquisition, Amazon in
turn enforced a minimum sales quota on their (Amazon) system or
be disqualified to list. OK, that was designed to keep places
like mine from capitalizing on the "free" way to catalog my stock
and force us to stay with Abebooks. But I voted with my $s and
dropped both.

Later, Abebooks pleaded me to come back. They offered a lower
interim rate and even 3-free months, or something like that.

I could use Abebooks for my entire inventory if I wanted, but it
wouldn't tie in to my POS/database very well in real-time. The
monthly cost, the daily manual updates, and the potential to be
rated POOR SERVICE, are not worth it.


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