Having shed doubt on publisher's royalty statements, Kristine Katheryn Rusch is now going after contracts - both agents and publishers - with some scary don't-ever-sign-this clauses. Included on her list are some that I've come to hear of as 'standard practise', which makes this post of hers just as worrying and thought provoking as the last lot. The Passive Guy, self-desribed as a "reformed lawyer", makes some excellent points about things to stick to with agency and publishing contracts. It's looking like the time for authors to think hard about what agents and publishers are really offering, and what they're really taking.

The publishing world is currently struggling for alternate business models. The old one just doesn't work anymore - it relies on last year's figures for what's hot right now, but the product it creates in response to that won't come out until next year. It creates twice as much product as it intends to sell, with half of it being destroyed, and smiles and nods to every retailer who sends its stock back after two months, accepting that product as a failure. It has no tangile market research, no strategry other than the gut feeling of its workers. This was already stumbling back when they still had a monopoly. Now that they don't, it's crumbling.

But what other models can we have, other than the Hocking-hopefuls release-it-online-and-hope, or the million and one self-pubbed authors flooding the scene? Michael Shatzkin has some interesting thoughts on a subscription model for ebooks. While the concept initially seems pretty alien to the current way we see books - pay a monthly fee to be able to read any book from a 'pool', and the profits (after the administrator's cut) are divided amongst the contributors in proportion to how frequently their particular contributions were read. Shatzkin identifies many different forms of subscription, teiring by popularity, dividing by genre or groups of author, or topic (and there are some further interesting points made in the comments).

I wonder if we could take the thought further, though, and consider the idea from an individual author's point of view. Obviously, this is not for the George R. R. Martins of the world, who spend a long time on their books, but authors who write quickly, or write mainly short stories or novellas could benefit from selling a subscription to their work. (They may even be able to manage it in the kindle store as a literal magazine - I haven't checked that). Readers sign up and receive their latest story, novella, whatever for a monthly fee. The author has a more continuous income and the ability to build a loyal following for other works, readers don't have to hunt for the new stories of an author they enjoy.

Obviously, many of the current models for indie publishers aren't set up to handle this (yet), but there are ways around that if you're prepared to do a little thought-work and research, and I think it'd certainly be an interesting experiment to try.

Would you subscribe to an author this way, instead of buying books individually? What would your price-to-frequency ratio be - what would you be prepared to pay, and what would you expect in return?