Abstract
It's still possible to make money from writing – as long as you can develop clever and imaginative ways of charging
Two issues ago – that's six months, half a lifetime in the start-up world – I wrote about Byline.com, a crowdfunded journalism website I co-founded last April. At that point, I still didn't know whether or not crowdfunding was going to become the one-shot cure for clickbait, native ads and declining journalistic independence (not to mention declining journalist incomes) that I hoped it would be.
From the lofty vantage point of February 2016, it looks pretty clear that it wasn't. Byline.com has helped plenty of journalists, but I think our role – and destiny – is to be a niche operator, raising cash for investigative projects and campaigning reporters on a job-to-job basis. We're never going to challenge the likes of Vice, and we as founders are never going to make our fortunes from it.
Byline.com continues, of course, but we're now turning our attentions to another group of frustrated wordsmiths. All over the world, there is a subculture of “web fiction”, read by around a hundred million people in the English-speaking world alone, and written by everyone from City lawyers, to housewives, to teenage girls from ultra-religious families (the latter tend to write about the romance forbidden to them in their real lives). Many of these amateurs don't want to be amateurs of course. They dream of working with real publishers, and making a living from their writing. We have raised more than $1 million (about £690,000) from investors to build a business out of trying to make that happen.
It's often said that there is a novel in everyone. The cynic would retort that for most, it should stay there. This is probably true of web fiction as well – since there are no barriers to entry, anyone can write, regardless of ability. But there are plenty of diamonds in the online rough, both in terms of quality and popularity.
It would probably surprise you to learn that there are web fiction writers whose works have been read by millions and yet they work day jobs to make ends meet. One of the authors we recently signed up works as a librarian in Northamptonshire; she would like to not have to do this, but so far her fame in the web fiction subculture has not translated into offline success.
Why don't mainstream publishers pick up on this, you may ask. Occasionally, they have – Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel that is neither well written nor truly kinky (it has been described by none other than Max Mosley as “vanilla”), is one of a handful of web fiction hits to go mainstream. But by and large, what happens online, stays online.
Arguably, the reason for this is the way in which web fiction authors write. Moving pictures take a different form dependent on whether they're developed for the cinema, television or YouTube. The same may well prove to be true for literature. About 90 per cent of web fiction is read on mobiles and tablets, usually by people on the go – supermarket checkout queues and buses are common venues. This lends itself to the bite-sized minichapter, which works well on an iPhone, but not in a physical book.
This results in word counts of around 1,500–2,000 each time, though each instalment tends to pack a big punch. Cliffhangers are shamelessly dangled, hooking readers in, ensuring loyalty to the story. In both respects, the web novel is to the traditional novel what Eastenders or Coronation Street are to the “kitchen sink realism” films of the 1960s. The subject matter is similar, but the length and structure differ vastly.
Also like Eastenders, web fiction chapters come out regularly – writers update their stories between one and three times per week on average. This helps readers to get addicted, making the story a regular part of their life. And as with soap operas, stories can potentially go on forever: there are web novels with chapter counts in the hundreds.
Readers also leave comments below chapters; any writer concerned with popularity takes audience reactions into account and even allows it to influence subsequent chapters. The postmodernist argues that a literary work belongs to the public (as opposed to the author) on release; in web fiction world, it belongs to both, even while it is still being written.
The literary establishment would undoubtedly sneer at all this. The quality novelist is today seen as a near-monastic figure, wilfully isolated from the tacky tastes of the masses and indeed any other potential distraction. Jonathan Franzen, that great present-day exemplar of capital-L Literature, has even stated that “it's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction”.
Were Charles Dickens alive today, he would probably take issue with the likes of Mr Franzen. Dickens – a fiction entrepreneur and, yet, a writer of great literature if ever there was one – brought out several works in weekly instalments and paid keen attention to audience reaction. When sales of Martin Chuzzlewit started flagging, he packed his eponymous hero off to America to revive public interest.
Dickens became so good at knowing what readers wanted that a nearriot erupted in New York when impatient fans could no longer contain their excitement over the fate of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. He was such a believer in serialisation and audience feedback that he later even founded a magazine, Household Words, to showcase instalments of his and other novelists' works.
Web-fiction millionaires
Dickens and contemporaries such as George Eliot and William Thackeray (who also made use of the serial) arguably represent the high point of public engagement with quality literature. Today, the mainstream just has all-in-one-go novels, which are falsely divided into literary fiction, which is read by intellectuals, and genre fiction, which is read by everyone else.
Serialised instalments and the measurement of audience reaction are standard in TV, just as they were in the literature of Dickens' day. Regardless of the snob quotient of any particular reader or writer, there is something for everyone in resurrecting the form as a commercial proposition for written fiction.
Serialised web fiction is more or less an amateur pursuit and there are free sites where readers and writers gather. These operate like social networks, with writers uploading regular story updates and readers devouring, sharing, and commenting on them. At some point though, a popular writer – who probably started by just putting out chapters for fun – starts to think: “I have hundreds of thousands of fans and nothing to show for it. Don't I deserve something for my work? Is there no way I can make a living from this?”
Help is at hand in the form of a business model developed in China and Korea. In the former, a company called Qidian has pioneered the use of per-chapter micropayments. Readers can choose to “unlock” the latest chapter immediately by paying a small amount of money or wait one week to read it. That way, casual fans (who form the bulk of a writer's audience) can still read and the writer maintains their popularity. At the same time, those who are truly hooked and want to know the resolution to that cliffhanger as soon as possible can be “monetized”, in the argot of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
Though per-chapter payments are typically only a few pennies, they can add up if you have a million readers, of whom 5 per cent are hardcore fans. The highest-earning author in China is a web fiction author using this model, and there are a further 10 or so who make the equivalent of more than £1million per year. In Korea – a smaller market – plenty of writers are making six-figure sums.
So far nobody has tried this in the English-speaking world. We'll be the first (that we know of), and by the time you read this article, we'll have already launched. If you're like me – one of those wide-eyed would-be novelists stuck inside the body of a world-weary journalist – why not look us up? We're called Radish (www.radishfiction.com), on the principle that a silly name is a memorable one.
In the long run, Radish will be a showcase for all kinds of writing. But as a new service with numerical targets to hit, we're especially interested in bite-sized, serialised takes on popular genres such as romance, murder mystery, horror, and so on. We'll even be accepting certain types of fan fiction – works that make use of existing characters – provided that they are out of copyright. An updated Sherlock Holmes is welcome, whereas Harry Potter would have to wait a few decades. Even if we can't help journalists make good money from journalism, maybe there's still a way we can be useful.
