---+ The Future of Fudge Factor
---++ An Essay of Enormous Girth

If you're not going to read all of this, I need you to at least tell
me this...  if you're a Fudge Factor reader, would you pay money for
Fudge Factor's content?  Most of the options I outline involve paying
authors, which means somebody has to cough up the money for that
somehow.

---++ The way things are

Ever since the Grey Ghost offer, our pile of available articles has 
been shrinking.  At the end of the offer, we had over half a year's 
worth of articles.  In that half-year since, we've received no more 
than a dozen submissions.  We need more than double that to keep going
as we are now.

We've always been concerned about Fudge Factors viability from the
very beginning... the free stuff just tends to run out.  The contest
didn't work, and we can't rely on Grey Ghost giving away a new $40
book every six months to our authors.

So I've been mulling over several options lately.  Not all of them are
presented here... these are just the most likely ones.

---++ The options under consideration

---+++ Option 1: Free and less-frequent

This is the easiest, because it actually means less work for everyone.
We back off the aggressive weekly publication schedule... make it
every other week or twice a month.  Or monthly... whatever rate at
which new articles come in.

I don't think anybody wins here.  Going this route might reach a
stable level, or it might mean even fewer contributions and eventually
fading out.

---+++ Option 2: Donations and author payment

I bite the bullet and take donations (which means I get to do all the
income tax stuff), paying authors a really small amount for their
articles...  a penny a word, maybe.  That would make our average
article about $30.  Which means we'd have to _take in_ $30 a week.
That's over 300 people donating five bucks each every year... I'm not
optimistic about that.

We might be able to go for half-a-cent a word, which makes it 150
people donating $5 each and the average 3000-word article gets $15.

Would $15 or $30 for 3000 words encourage people to write?  That's
getting down into non-incentive territory.  Pyramid Online pays six
cents a word, but they have several thousand paying subscribers.  I
got two cents a word for my article in the 10th anniversary book.

(Alternative: Tip individual authors.  We could do it without much
more work, but I think it would limit the number of authors... it
would be a "you might get paid, you might not" situation.  I'd rather
guarantee each author equal payment.)

---+++ Option 3: Jump formats, charge money, pay authors

This is the most radical, and actually the one I'm most interested
in. :)

Forget the free webzine entirely.  Move to a quarterly digest format,
where we're more of a "collection of articles published in book form"
than a magazine.  Publish it through Lulu.com, where people can get a
nice physical book or PDF, their choice.  I've bought some games
published through Lulu, and their quality is very nice.

We could solicit articles on a royalty basis... whatever money comes
in gets divided up among the authors of that issue, probably based on
their word counts.  We could solicit art for the articles and make it
a real bang-up job.  (We might have to do a small up-front payment and
royalties later.)

So no (or few) up-front costs... my wife and I have the skills to put
together a nice looking book (she used to do publication design work,
and we've both done a lot of amateur design work), there's no up-front
printing costs thanks to Lulu, and Lulu handles all of the store,
shopping cart and delivery stuff.  No setup fee, no minimum
quantities.

I _probably_ wouldn't make any money off of this... all the profits
would go directly back to the authors and artists.  (I reserve for
myself the possibility that I could be crazy for thinking I'd do it
for free when I'm giving up an opportunity to write for myself.)

This could work, but it would be an entirely different creature than
the webzine.  The webzine publishes weekly and is constantly "out
there."  A quarterly publication would have long delays in between...
but it would also be "always available".  Thanks to Lulu, the books
would never go out-of-print.  And we _might_ be able to get Fudge
Factor into game stores, an area the online zine can never reach.
(Lulu has a fairly inexpensive option to make the book available to
bookstores, including Amazon... but we wouldn't see too much profit
from those.)

It would also deprive the Fudge community of a lot of free content.
But I'm not convinced that free is producing the best content or, in
the end, as _much_ content as pay-for would do.  Look at what we got
when we "paid" authors with a free book, and then what we got when we
stopped.

If we don't get enough articles to keep the weekly format going, we're
going to lose that level of free content anyway.

In the long run, I think this might help Fudge more than the free
content.  For future people coming to Fudge, Fudge Factor's archive
would still be available... it would be all-new to them.  But FF
Quarterly might lend Fudge more credibility... it wouldn't be a fan
publication, it would be a "real" publication.

But it would mean this... say a 128 page book for about$20, about nine
or ten 3000-word articles on average.  Fudge Factor would start
costing those who buy it $80 a year.  A lot fewer people would be
reading it than those that read the webzine...  it might be better if
a larger number of people donated twenty bucks a year to the webzine,
in terms of the number of people who get the material.  (Also, the PDF
would cost $13 under that setup.)

A rough estimate, an author of a 3000 word article might make a dollar
for every book sold, depending on how much art costs, how many words
we put on a page, and and what we pay editors and layout (i.e. me and
my wife).  We'd make the same whether someone bought a physical book
or just a PDF.

I have to say I like the idea of putting this kind of thing together.
But would people buy it?  What if it were 64 pages and $12 (which is
about the same payment level to the authors, just half as many
articles)?

(Alternative: After a year, drop the cost of the book to "zero
royalty" which menas the PDF becomes free and the book costs only what
it costs Lulu to print it.  It would be delayed, but the content would
eventually be free.  I'm sure sales after a year would otherwise be
negligible, so cutting off author payments after a year wouldn't be a
big thing.)

---++ The summary

I like the physical book idea... but I don't know if it's the right
idea or even a good idea.  I think it would give authors more
incentive... it's more "in print" than the web is.

If we got enough donations, we could make the web thing work... but
it's going to mean a _lot_ of donations if we're going to pay our
authors enough to make it an incentive.

What do you think?  Let me know... what would you pay for, how much
would you pay?  What do you think would be best for the Fudge
community and Fudge publishing?

-- 
Carl D Cravens (raven@phoenyx.net)
Shell to DOS....come in DOS...Do you copy?
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