So, here’s the deal.
Fireside Magazine, Year Two has a Kickstarter.
It’s almost over.
And it’s not funded.
Now, I’ll admit right now — I’m a selfish jerk. If it gets funded, I get to write a 12-part serial I’m calling The Forever Endeavor about a guy who gets a button he can push that will take him ten minutes back in time. It’s about regret. And warring with yourself. And making mistakes by fixing mistakes. It’ll be funny and fucked up and sad and weird and —
And I’m probably not going to get to write it.
Nor will I get the benefit of reading short stories by such awesome authors as Lilith Saintcrow, Delilah Dawson, Karina Cooper, Ken Liu.
Because it doesn’t look like it’s going to fund.
That breaks my heart. First because — WAAAAAH I WANNA WRITE THAT STORY AND READ THOSE OTHER STORIES. But also because Brian White has created a magazine that actually gives a huuuuuge fuck about its authors. It pays its authors above the standard professional rate, a rate that is itself rather rare among magazines both in print and online. Fireside fails here, you probably won’t see it again (or so I’m guessing).
And that’s a mighty big goddamn shame.
So, I’ll ask you: if this is something you dig, please spread the word first and foremost. And maybe consider contributing a couple-few bucks. Or robbing a liquor store WHATEVER MAN I DON’T CARE JUST GET IT DONE.
Ahem.
We’re not in the dark yet.
But the clock is ticking.
Great editor. Great magazine. Killer art. Awesome authors. (And somehow, they let me in the door, but don’t hold that against them.) I ask you one more time? Are you in?
Then click on over and check it out.
terribleminds says:
I should also note that there is now an additional 10 open rewards for autographed copies of BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD in the Fireside Kickstarter!
March 4, 2013 — 6:24 AM
Kate says:
Was this you ‘asking’??? Ok, well it worked, I have pledged, tweeted, Facebooked and ‘Stumbled’, it won;t let me ‘Pinterest’ because there is no image or something, but I’ve put it everywhere I can. Fingers crossed!!!
March 4, 2013 — 7:00 AM
Bill Coffin says:
That you will not get a chance to write The Forever Endeavor will not stem from Fireside’s failed kickstarter. It will stem from you deciding not to write The Forever Endeavor. While writing professionally indeed depends on finding the right market for the right story, if Fireside is the one and only market that ever could have existed for The Forever Endeavor, then you are indeed over a barrel if the Kickstarter fails. You are also pursing an incredibly niche project that warrants a closer audit of your own creative ROI.
It’s great that you’re getting the word out on Fireside. But guilting your audience with the tales of stories that would be written if only people paid you in advance for them is somewhere between unprofessionalism and extortion. Please don’t do that.
March 4, 2013 — 12:16 PM
terribleminds says:
Don’t be that guy, Bill.
You either want to support the magazine and the stories that will come with it, or you don’t. I’m fine with it either way. But me writing a 12-part not-quite-novel-length serial was a unique opportunity to try something a little risky empowered by a great magazine and a great editor and friend I wanted to work with.
Crowdfunding isn’t extortion. It’s a deal everybody knows going in and nobody has to commit if they don’t want to. The only pressure is: it exists if it gets funded, it fails to exist if it doesn’t. That’s not extortion, that’s just the cost of doing business.
— Chuck
March 4, 2013 — 1:32 PM
bimmergeek says:
It seems like this post contradicts what you’ve written voluminously about before: just write your fucking stories. Why would you predicate your writing on whether a platform survives or not. I sat at my computer just now blink-blinking at this post thinking, What the fuck?
Seriously. Write the story and I’ll buy it on Amazon. How hard is that?
March 5, 2013 — 1:11 PM
terribleminds says:
It contradicts nothing. I am, even now, writing my fucking stories. I write all the time. I have five *entire novels* coming out this year. I don’t intend to ask for permission to write — but as noted in a separate comment, this story is the product of a singular opportunity, which is a magazine I love run by a dude I think is awesome, allowing me to showcase what is ostensibly a risky property.
I appreciate that you’ll buy it, but that doesn’t actually guarantee me a living wage.
Fireside does, provided it takes off. It’s leveraging the guarantee of multiple iterations of audience investment versus the promise of one. Hence, “crowd” funding.
I’m not sure what’s confusing about that, exactly?
— c.
March 5, 2013 — 1:40 PM
fredhicks says:
So, you’ll guarantee Chuck an equivalent income for writing those stories — equivalent to the rate Fireside would pay him — in this scenario, right? Because if you can’t guarantee equivalent revenue from the sales-volume on Amazon, your answer’s self-evident.
Chuck’s going to write something pretty much every day this year. Projects like Fireside help him decide *what* that something is. Without full funding for something he — I imagine correctly — classifies as an “experiment”, there is no pay-his-mortgage motive in pursuing something like that.
March 5, 2013 — 1:42 PM
terribleminds says:
And Fred nails it, again.
#doublehighfive
— c.
March 5, 2013 — 1:53 PM
Christopher Wilde says:
Is pitching a producer unprofessional or extortion? The Kickstarter method is just conflating the producer/consumer role into the old-school patron role.
George Ferris ran around telling everyone how great the ferris wheel for the Chicago World’s Fair would be for over a year before someone paid him, and they didn’t know if it would work or kill everyone aboard until it started spinning. If he couldn’t raise the money, he wouldn’t have built the spindly monstrosity. It’s not that different. The focus has changed, sure (though I’d say it has, in a way, reverted rather than become something new), but the process is essentially the same.
I may be more inclined to buy in, coming from a gothy background… Goth bands have never really benefitted from the big music machine, they survived from stop to stop, crashing on fan’s floors and eating (or not) off that night’s merch profits. It’s a harder life sure, but it’s actually closer to what writers like Twain and Poe did than the life Stephen King has lived.
March 4, 2013 — 1:56 PM
petewoodworth says:
Second on the writing support here. When you’re writing professionally, full-time – and holy crap is that difficult! – your time and your creative output is extremely valuable. When you have a lovely wife and a small child to think of as well, it becomes positively golden. Writers in that situation simply can’t afford to “noodle around” and write simply for pleasure as much as other writers might, because a story that you’re not getting paid for is taking time away from projects that are paying you (or seeking out same).
If the Kickstarter doesn’t get funded, you could still write the story – but it’s going to move to the very back of the line behind all the paying work on your calendar, which could mean it gets put off for months or longer. And you’d rather it didn’t, not to mention you’d rather the magazine kept going, so you’re asking for support to make that happen. I dig.
March 4, 2013 — 3:16 PM
Bill Coffin says:
To address the comments in response to my earlier post, let me state right off that as a freelance writer for the gaming industry, I used to engage in a very similar process to what we have here. I would think of a project I’d want to write, contact a prospective publisher and pitch it. If they said yes, I’d write it. If they said no, I probably wouldn’t. I would accept it and move on to the next business opportunity. A writer who would proceed to address the fan base and complain about how they would be reading this wonderful piece of content if only the publisher would fund it…that writer would be seen as acting unprofessionally.
Now, this is the era of Kickstarter, so I accept that the risk proposition of commercial writing is changing. That’s fine. But what we have here with Chuck’s initial post isn’t even a direct plea to the audience of “fund me (indirectly) or else you won’t get this awesome content,” but rather, “fund me so I can create this content.” There is a certain self-centeredness to Chuck’s plea that is off-putting. Maybe it is just poorly worded marketing – by enthusing over how much he loves his own proto-content, he is meant to convince his fans that they will like it just as much as he will, when and if it is actually written. But I’m not getting that. I’m getting a “I wanna write this, and I wanna get paid so somebody pay me.” The audience does not pay so the writer can write. The audience pays so the audience can read. And in Chuck’s post, I get the feeling that he cares more about how much enjoyment he will get from writing “The Forever Endeavor” (e.g., “WAAAAAH I WANNA WRITE THAT STORY”) than about how much the audience will get from reading it. That, more than anything, is what troubled me by his post.
On the subject of crowdsourcing in general and why I think it’s a little weird to apply it to low-cost efforts such as writing projects: historically, the risk balance in artistic efforts was that the artist assumes all risk which is really time, more than anything else. It’s not like you’re laying out hard material costs. You’re banging away at a keyboard, and your time is valuable. But if you write at night, after your day job, and you don’t get published, you are not suffering the same loss as if you raised an animal, butchered it and then failed to sell the meat. So while I appreciate how Kickstarter is trying to shift the risk to the audience, that still doesn’t address the fact that it is a risk that doesn’t necessarily need to be shifted.
Were this Fireside Magazine making a very similar plea, rather than Chuck, even to the point of “WAAAAH WE WANT TO PUBLISH THESE AWESOME STORIES,” that would be a bit different. Magazines are very costly enterprises even when they are successful, to say nothing of the enormous risk of actually launching a new publication.* I know because I currently run several magazines. So the risk-spreading effect of crowdsourcing makes a lot of sense. When it comes to a writer being a writer, though…not so much. Yes, we need rent and clothes and food, and you know what? We can all get day jobs to cover those costs while we write at night or on the train into the city. It’s not that hard.
* (I am assuming Fireside means to be a hard copy publication; if it means to be purely digital, then its costs and its risk diminish considerably, though they are still substantial.)
March 4, 2013 — 3:31 PM
fredhicks says:
It’s not considered unprofessional to use social media to try to get your publisher some help. The very fact that Chuck *can* do this, and effectively at that, makes him more attractive to a publisher in this day & age, not less.
I say this as one of Chuck’s publishers. There’s a reason I went to him to anchor our kickstarter for a fiction line. The fact that he’d make posts like this one was a part of the math I did there.
Your objections appear to be out of touch with the social media reality of today.
March 4, 2013 — 3:38 PM
terribleminds says:
#highfive
March 4, 2013 — 3:45 PM
Bill Coffin says:
I don’t think its silly at all to use social media to engage the audience, Fred. It’s great that Chuck is using this forum to drum up support for his fiction, the fiction of his colleagues and this publishing project. I think it’s not very professional to whine to the audience that one can’t write what they want to write without funding, though. That’s not social marketing. That’s self-pity, especially coming from a full-time writer.
As for this campaign or crowdfunding in general, I have problems with neither, Chuck. Frankly, this seems like a pretty cool and compelling project, and the fiction you have planned for it seems likewise. But the language you used to pitch all this is off-putting. It’s about you first, the fiction second and the publication third. That just seems a bit reversed to me, especially if the point of this is to be promoting the magazine’s kickstarter.
March 4, 2013 — 4:23 PM
terribleminds says:
“I think it’s not very professional to whine to the audience that one can’t write what they want to write without funding, though. That’s not social marketing. That’s self-pity, especially coming from a full-time writer.”
The tone of this blog was notably facetious and overblown, as is the tone of my blog most days. My original Fireside post, found here, was more moderate in its tone and this time around I thought something a little more… amped up might be called for given the pressures of the ticking clock.
Not that I have any cause to explain myself to you, since you saw fit to insult me and distract from this great project.
So, now, go away. Shoo, Bill Coffin, shoo.
Please don’t let the digital door hit your avatar in the ass on the way out.
— c.
March 4, 2013 — 6:36 PM
fredhicks says:
Man, Bill, I really don’t get you.
March 4, 2013 — 4:26 PM
terribleminds says:
I might suggest that you actually inform yourself of the Kickstarter campaign in question before assuming anything. Fireside is no longer a print publication and is in fact purely digital. Getting educated about the thing you’re talking about would be a good first step.
And, for the record, I am presently a full-time writer. It is my “day job,” and the way I cover my costs is by — drum roll please — getting paid to write.
I want to live in a world where writers can do that instead of having to go get day jobs. Or, rather, I want to keep living in that world, because it’s pretty fucking awesome already.
Again: don’t like crowdfunding? Don’t like this campaign? Don’t back it. Not tricky.
— c.
March 4, 2013 — 3:44 PM
Scott Katinger says:
Having read this blog for some time I understood Chuck’s tone just fine. Is there some self-serving in there? Sure, why not? Success in this Kickstarter gets him writing something he’s excited about writing, gets the fan base who read Terribleminds excited to fund it and generally makes anyone on this forum excited about crowd sourced material in general.
I can applaud anyone who embraces the traditional publishing market, but I have to wonder how many of your good ideas languish in your notes somewhere because a publisher said ‘no’. If you were a little more self-serving and less subservient to the traditional publishers wouldn’t that be worth it to have those ideas come to fruition? Wouldn’t generating interest in your reading public be worth it if you got to fully develop something that great idea someone else passed on?
Crowd sourcing, by definition, is self-serving. You seek your target market to offer up cold cash to make your dream real. You generate excitement for that which excites you. You sell your desires to those who would value it equally. I don’t think you call that extortion…you call it promotion. To use your butcher’s analogy, a smart rancher wouldn’t fully invest in a meat animal’s husbandry if he didn’t know there was a market for it. He’d invest his time, his passion and some of his livelihood in generating the market and (hopefully) initial investment to get the ball rolling.
March 4, 2013 — 4:27 PM
Hillary says:
Yeah, screw artists for wanting to ensure they get paid for the work they do before they do it. Stupid artists. Needing to pay electric bills.
March 4, 2013 — 1:39 PM
fredhicks says:
I wonder if the word “Magazine” is hurting it. But fiction is a rough road on Kickstarter, still.
March 4, 2013 — 1:45 PM
terribleminds says:
Yeah, maybe? Also possible that there’ve been a few iterations carried forth on Kickstarter so far — all good and ideally all loved by readers but Kickstarter fatigue may be setting in.
Hopefully this manages to cross the threshold!
Thanks for the signal boost, Fred.
— c.
March 4, 2013 — 1:50 PM
Jeff says:
Why is it that Bill hears “If you don’t support this, I’m taking my ball and going home!” and I hear “If you support this, then I’ll have a shiny new ball made of rainbows to share with you” ?
March 4, 2013 — 1:49 PM
Erica says:
I tried to kick some money in, but it won’t take my actual amazon.com pw. Is there another way to pledge money via kickstarter?
March 4, 2013 — 2:37 PM
Brian White says:
Hi Erica, a few people have had this problem today; one had to try several times and switch browsers. I’ve asked Amazon if they can look into the issue; I hope it is resolved soon.
March 4, 2013 — 4:38 PM
Erica says:
Thanks! I use firefox. I’ll try switching browsers.
March 4, 2013 — 11:00 PM
Erica says:
Nope–doesn’t work on google chrome either. I even went and logged into amazon.com, and the password is fine. But for some reason, the kickstarter amazon pay site doesn’t think the amazon pw I’ve had for years is not a valid amazon.com pw. Frustrating.
March 4, 2013 — 11:07 PM
betsydornbusch says:
I’ve run a magazine for years with two partners. We fund it out of our own pockets (not very well, but we also don’t keep rights for very long). It’s our way of giving back (time, exposure, editing, and great stories!) to the industry we love. But I admire people who will take it to the next step and try to fund something so that it pays real rates. We’ve always wished we could pay more!
March 4, 2013 — 3:14 PM
Cat York says:
I’m a backer as of today and I’ve got Tweetdeck posts timed to keep the rally going. Cheers and good luck!
March 4, 2013 — 5:14 PM
delilah says:
BACK THE KICKSTARTER FOR FIRESIDE, OR THIS BUNNY* GETS IT.
*it’s a bludbunny**
**which means it wants to eat you***
***you look tasty****
****you should probably back the Kickstarter*****
*****no, that wasn’t a threat. Here. Hold the bunny.
March 4, 2013 — 9:31 PM
Mitocondrias says:
Now, I’m a backer. Good luck to you all!
March 4, 2013 — 10:44 PM
Lynna Landstreet says:
Aaaaand…. Looks like it’s funded! Yay!
March 5, 2013 — 9:06 PM
DrAllecon says:
This is great news. I only heard about the magazine today, but I’m glad I saw your post in time to contribute, and eagerly await my first (digital) issues. That and your books. This serial of yours sounds great, too.
March 5, 2013 — 10:37 PM
Karen McCulley says:
Looking forward to reading your stories and getting the Year 2 issues as a backer. Thanks for posting the link; my son turned me onto to Kickstarter this past year.
March 6, 2013 — 12:03 AM
Karen McCulley says:
Going to read the Year 1 issues as well.
March 6, 2013 — 12:05 AM
shannon says:
I am Proud to be a kickstart backer for this
March 6, 2013 — 8:37 AM