What conclusions have we come to? Making money via the Internet is hard. (We’ve only just now starting to try some things, so we don’t really have any conclusions there.)

Personal conclusions I’ve come to? As a former gigging band member, I can tell you that gigging constantly can result in burnout. It’s physically taxing to be on the road. Writing constantly doesn’t do that, but doing it as we do at Book View Cafe–for no pay–can be exhausting, especially since we are all also producing work for our traditional publishers. The hard part of our experiment is knowing what types of online activities will actually result in increased visibility for our free content. How to get the most bang for the virtual buck. Gaining that knowledge takes a lot of watching. We, the BVC authors, all been turned into marketers. Authors have been marketers for quite a while, but I think we are now much more intimately involved with that end of the business because statistics are at our fingertips. What happens then is we respond with content when our content gets a response. In other words we’re starting to chase our tails.

The only thing I can say for certain is that although the Internet is touted as leveling the playing field, really what sells is a name. A name is the only surefire way of drawing attention. Even out in the real world a name does not guarantee as much attention as it does on the Internet. Out in the world most people are not readers. On the Internet, everyone is a reader or, rather, a content consumer. Because of this fact those of us without a name are chasing after the branding concept Mr. Hunter mentions above. Is that good for art? Certainly not. Is that good for selling. Of course.

Strikes me that a lot of your questions come back to that. Nit branding as in logos but branding as in who am I / we and why are we doing this online publishing project thingie in the first place. You’ve cited a bunch of good examples above , but all of them are very different business models for pretty different reasons. Some people give things away for free and tuck their business models elsewhere, others erect paywalls, and if the stuff behind them has sufficient appeal and scarcity might do very well, but it all cones down to what you’re aiming to achieve in the first place and what kind of return you consider an indicator of success.

With particular reference to Futurismic if you’d be happy to share some google analytics data with me I could reciprocate with a freebie consult. After all you were going to walk me through that anyway, right, so how about a live case study?

I’m also interested in reading answers to this post. I’m coming at this from the other side–as the creator and writer of an online web fiction serial.

Looking forward to hear what others in the SF community have to say about the patronage concept.

Great post, Paul!

Here are some things I’d really like to find out:

• Will people donate to support a free book? How much? Will they donate more to support an audiobook or a print edition?
• How much work does it take to replicate a professional publisher’s contribution to publicizing and distributing your book?
• How much demand is there for premium editions, and what characteristics make those premium editions more valuable?

This is the kind of thing I hope to explore in the With a Little Help project.

I read “book” as “novel”, given that Cory seemed to be talking predominantly about his successes in that format, but I see now that the project is referred to as a short story collection near the head of the piece. Apologies for any confusion.

Exactly how carefully did you read Cory’s description of his project? It has nothing to do with the publication of a novel.