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arachnejericho's blog there are 240,000 sold. The article she cites goes further to mention an expectation that there could be between another 500,000 and 750,000 units sold in the next four quarters. So let's look at the numbers? Somewhere between 3/4 and a million users. People wonder why I keep saying: get your SF & F magazines out there for the unit? There's currently (Well, as of two days ago when I last checked) only 16 magazines available. At all. The only two SF&F magazines available are Asimov's and Analog. But think about this: right now they make up one eighth of the options for customers under the heading Magazines. (If you throw in Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's you find that genre magazines make up 1/4 of the currently available options!)
Look, maybe not everyone is going to want to subscribe to magazines on their Kindle. And you can make things available other ways, such as F&SF has as noted here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/2008/07/29/fsf-and-kindle/ by Gordon Van Gelder. Now, I'm hardly privy to the details that Amazon is willing to negotiate with publishers. People who want to go out of their way to obtain something for their Kindle will. So, dedicated fans of F&SF won't likely have a problem grabbing their copies off Fictionwise, and loading them up to their devices. Still, I can't help but think that right now, is an opportune moment for the SF & F markets to get in on the ground floor of something. Being one of the few choices available for new users of the device has got to make your odds of picking up random subscriptions better. I mean, imagine being one of only 16 magazines on a newstand. Don't you think that Asimov's is seeing some kind of uptick in sales being there? (Yeah, that's idle speculation.) When a friend of mine used to work for Ebsco subscription services, he told me that their whole concept, sales-pitch, etc, was based on the idea that somewhere around 4% of everyone who sees an add for something, will buy it. The more people you get your item in front of, the more people you'll get to buy. I have no clue how accurate that is. I'm about as far from a sales type person you'll find. I prefer my life in the caves of the datacenter supporting the salesforce through keeping things running. But it makes sense to me, that if its easier for me to find something, that's the item I'm more likely to buy. And people who own Kindles will be on the Amazon site. A lot.
Look, if you're something like a Clarksworld, or a Strange Horizons, or Fantasy Magazine, you might want to think about how you could make a go of it. Heck, if you're an online zine, consider doing it as a Blog subscription. Especially if you are currently giving away the fiction for free now. I mean, why not? Blogs run at $1-2 a month. Okay, so as a blog, maybe you don't stand out to the same degree that you do as a "magazine". There's 374 blogs available, so you might not get as much coverage there. And I don't know what the revenue split is. (I'm sure heavily in their favor.) But odds are good there'll be a half a million of these things out there by year's end. That's a darn large user base to tap into. Get 1/100th of those, 5,000 subscribers to your magazine or blog? Let's see: that's anywhere from $5,000-$15,000 a month in raw sales. Even if you only get, say a 0 take: $18,000-$54,000 a year? I think that'd help pay those authors. And the internet bills. Maybe even a little for the staff too? Yeah, I think that's at least worth looking into. (Now, to play my own devil's advocate: If you all ready get people to donate....perhaps you lose out. Especially if people start to figure that since the cost of the magazine is X, but previously had donated X Y yearly....they might start to just donate X, since they figure that's the cost. Or, they may just switch from their normal donation to the subscription method, and then you'd lose out. See, this is why I stay in the caves, and fix servers. Business models and ideas make my head hurt. A lot.)
arachnejericho's blog there are 240,000 sold. The article she cites goes further to mention an expectation that there could be between another 500,000 and 750,000 units sold in the next four quarters. So let's look at the numbers? Somewhere between 3/4 and a million users. People wonder why I keep saying: get your SF & F magazines out there for the unit? There's currently (Well, as of two days ago when I last checked) only 16 magazines available. At all. The only two SF&F magazines available are Asimov's and Analog. But think about this: right now they make up one eighth of the options for customers under the heading Magazines. (If you throw in Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's you find that genre magazines make up 1/4 of the currently available options!) Look, maybe not everyone is going to want to subscribe to magazines on their Kindle. And you can make things available other ways, such as F&SF has as noted here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog/2008/07/29/fsf-and-kindle/ by Gordon Van Gelder. Now, I'm hardly privy to the details that Amazon is willing to negotiate with publishers. People who want to go out of their way to obtain something for their Kindle will. So, dedicated fans of F&SF won't likely have a problem grabbing their copies off Fictionwise, and loading them up to their devices. Still, I can't help but think that right now, is an opportune moment for the SF & F markets to get in on the ground floor of something. Being one of the few choices available for new users of the device has got to make your odds of picking up random subscriptions better. I mean, imagine being one of only 16 magazines on a newstand. Don't you think that Asimov's is seeing some kind of uptick in sales being there? (Yeah, that's idle speculation.) When a friend of mine used to work for Ebsco subscription services, he told me that their whole concept, sales-pitch, etc, was based on the idea that somewhere around 4% of everyone who sees an add for something, will buy it. The more people you get your item in front of, the more people you'll get to buy. I have no clue how accurate that is. I'm about as far from a sales type person you'll find. I prefer my life in the caves of the datacenter supporting the salesforce through keeping things running. But it makes sense to me, that if its easier for me to find something, that's the item I'm more likely to buy. And people who own Kindles will be on the Amazon site. A lot.
Look, if you're something like a Clarksworld, or a Strange Horizons, or Fantasy Magazine, you might want to think about how you could make a go of it. Heck, if you're an online zine, consider doing it as a Blog subscription. Especially if you are currently giving away the fiction for free now. I mean, why not? Blogs run at $1-2 a month. Okay, so as a blog, maybe you don't stand out to the same degree that you do as a "magazine". There's 374 blogs available, so you might not get as much coverage there. And I don't know what the revenue split is. (I'm sure heavily in their favor.) But odds are good there'll be a half a million of these things out there by year's end. That's a darn large user base to tap into. Get 1/100th of those, 5,000 subscribers to your magazine or blog? Let's see: that's anywhere from $5,000-$15,000 a month in raw sales. Even if you only get, say a 0 take: $18,000-$54,000 a year? I think that'd help pay those authors. And the internet bills. Maybe even a little for the staff too? Yeah, I think that's at least worth looking into. (Now, to play my own devil's advocate: If you all ready get people to donate....perhaps you lose out. Especially if people start to figure that since the cost of the magazine is X, but previously had donated X Y yearly....they might start to just donate X, since they figure that's the cost. Or, they may just switch from their normal donation to the subscription method, and then you'd lose out. See, this is why I stay in the caves, and fix servers. Business models and ideas make my head hurt. A lot.)
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From:
no subject
The terms of syndicating something on Amazon Kindle can be a little frightening---not in terms of the money or fees or even rights, but in terms of how much you have to go through. Even if it's just a blog (I've gone and looked). There's a certain amount of legalese that is necessary for spinning up a blog or magazine on the Kindle, in a way that just selling a used book on Amazon isn't.
Still, if a magazine is serious, they will go through the legalese and sign up for this stuff (if Asimov's could do it, I don't see why F&SF could not, unless they're bleeding far worse in the water than all the other SF/F paper mags). Just like serious sellers that sell on the Amazon platform beyond the "sell your copy here!" need to go through legalese and set-up, but after that they are set.
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I'm sure there's a fair amount of legalese. That's why it "seems" like a no-brainer, but probably isn't. Even still, all that aside, I have to think that it's worth the effort to expore the option seriously. Especially for the small press magazines. You know what, let's say that only 1/1000th of Kindle owners give a magazine a try. That's still 500 subscribers. Now, for a magazine like Asimov's or F&SF, that probably isn't much of a change. To a small press, that might be significant.
And I'll also return to the fact that magazine options are few for the Kindle right now. So, ALL options stand out. Being yet another magazine on the web, or yet another magazine on the newstand? Not particularly notable. Being one of less than 20 in a unique marketplace? Yeah, that's going to get you noticed. Now will that alone mean people will jump out any buy? Probably not, but it sure puts the odds in your favor if you are an early adopter.
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Kindle and the other e-book devices represent a very large number of potential readers and we’d be crazy to ignore them. I believe that the same and more can be said for audio via the huge number of mp3 devices on the market. This is one of the main reasons we’ve started offering audio content. As far as I’m concerned, magazines need to embrace the platforms where readers exist and can’t afford to take a long-term viewpoint that focuses on only one.
By the way, the blog subscription model also requires that the magazines have RSS feeds. Clarkesworld and Fantasy do, but only feed out the summaries instead of full content. Knowing the architecture behind those two sites, I can say that it would be easy for both to switch over to full content feeds. Strange Horizons, however, doesn’t offer feeds for their fiction, so adopting this model would likely be a lot more work for them.
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Of course, I don't have the option to read Asimov's stuff for free online right now, so how does that compare to models like yours? Not certain.
I keep hearing the idea that there's not yet an electronic device that hits the tipping point for ebooks to really take off. I heard that as recently during the panel at Readercon about electronic books, piracy or promotion. I get the sense that people don't know enough about these devices, or just how popular they are becoming. And when I see the available magazine options for purchase so small, I can't help but think that if some more genre magazines get a jump on this, they can take advantage of that built in market in a way you might not have the same ability to do either later when more people jump in, or even through offering your own alternative route.
Then again, maybe I'm completely overestimating the chances that this stuff would make any useful impact for you publishers.
I don't know if there's much I can do to help your efforts, but if there is, I'd be happy to give it a try.
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I'd agree with them. Ebook readers haven't reached the tipping point. Most people don't have them and it's still a novelty to see one. It can't be assumed that a new book will be available for a reader and if it is, not always for your particular device. Those are not signs of mainstream acceptance. Yes, better than prior years, but in many ways, it's still a frontier town. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it's the best place to be.
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The barrier to entry is still high, but its coming down, and I suspect that it will be even lower by christmas. Yet, if Amazon can sell almost a quarter of a million units in the first nine months, of which for the first five(ish) they were under serious fulfillment issues (IE, from order to delivery time average wait was approaching 6 weeks, and I know that delayed some, and discouraged others from purchasing) that tells me that the market is there, and rather strong, and growing.
I guess it's frustrating, because often I keep hearing a lot of the same old arguments: No one wants to look at a screen all day, they aren't comfortable on the eyes, etc, when I hear these things come up. And the new generation of devices, Kindle and the new Sony, and the iRexx, all have wonderful screens that don't wear on the eyes. They don't suffer from glare, and all sorts of other problems that the older generation suffered. It's as if the people making these arguments are saying that just because we have not yet seen something that hits iPod numbers, you have to dismiss out of hand the whole market sphere, which strikes me as strange, because people just don't remember that the iPod didn't come out and then suddenly there were a billion of the things out in the world. (In fact, there aren't a billion of them out there yet.)
Myabe I'm wrong. But my gut tells me we are on the real cusp here, and that the technology is there to make this generation of ebooks into what happened with the iPod.
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I'm a bit suspicious about Amazon not wanting to give hard numbers on their sales. Obviously, it's better for them to keep the mystery and hype the success of selling out the initial batch. Under-produce to create demand and status. Wouldn't be the first company (cough, Apple, cough) to do that. To expect iPod success of any reader in the near future, if ever, would be crazy. It doesn't need those numbers (or position as a status symbol) to be considered mainstream.
Those screens are based on e-paper technology. I first saw prototypes over ten years ago at an academic technology conference and have been waiting for these (essentially) first generation devices to come out. I can say with confidence that the best is yet to come. Ignore the "screen all day" people. Time will bring them around.
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And yeah, I think that what kid's get in school, is what they'll be comfortable with. I'm of the generation that had computers growing up. (On the early front of that) and on that strength alone, frankly, I got my career. It's comfort and familiarity. I see it when I compare myself to the folks I work with who didn't grow up with computers. (Even some who are a bit younger than me.) So, I now wonder if the real ticket isn't higher education, but younger. Grammar school? Middle school? Certainly by high school. A kid could have everything they need in one book. Sure, it also has lots of room for abuse. I mean, it would have been even easier for me to be reading Dragonflight during class, if I hadn't had to sneak it under the lip of my desk. But I think the potential there, is to really get kids before they develop that nostalgia for the physical paper book.
But Amazon is thinking they don't even need that. That they can get us converted as a straight market force. And so far, I think they just might succeed. If you look at the numbers, so far, they are matching the iPod's early level of success. (If the source is as reliable as claimed.) That's pretty effective.