QUARANTINE--an epub experiment

                                QUARANTINE
                          a little ebook experiment with a little ebook

   Sometimes you find yourself writing a story that you know you’re going to have trouble publishing in a magazine no matter how well told because it’s too dangerously plausible, besides which it’s way too gross. I enjoy writing in that mode while in the act, and worry about what I’m going to do with the result when the thing is finished.

Curiously enough, while I can’t say that it’s all been quick and easy, sooner or later I’ve always gotten the stories I’ve wanted to see published purchased for magazines or original anthologies, and if I waited long enough for the right karmic moment, it would probably arrive for QUARANTINE too.

But hey, it had bounced from a finger in the face first look to The New Yorker, down the steps of major sf magazines to the penny a word sub basement, and to tell truth about it, I wasn’t surprised.

  After all, QUARANTINE is the story of a terrorist attack on New York using a genetically engineered virus that spreads ambiently and gives the entire population of Manhattan Island, tourists and all, uncontrollable diarrhea.  Worse still, this isn’t surrealism or satire, the biotech is all too plausible, and uh, this is what it would be like, like it or not, folks.

No way around it, shitting is a major determinative factor in QUARANTINE. No doubt that this sort of ruthless non-violent attack would not be a cit-com custard pie, but really rubbing our faces in it.

Be that all as it may, from experience I was certain that there were readers who enjoyed this sort of stuff, and sooner or later the right ass would be placed in the right editorial chair.  But it might be quite a bit later, by which time magazine fiction in any medium might have dwindled beyond the event horizon.

And as you may have noticed if you care about such matters at all, the magazine publication of short fiction in general is more than halfway to the tarpits already.  In the wider world, with the exception of weekly short stories in The New Yorker, there’s already not much left beyond “little magazines” that tend to pay in author’s copies or not at all.  Not that long ago, speculative fiction magazines were the proud last bastion of the Anglophone short story, but there are less than 50 issues a year of such “major” sf magazines left, and “major” these days is less than 30,000 a month, and what is peeking out of the Cretaceous undergrowth are idealistic online magazines yet to evolve dynamically viable business models.

But we are well into the ebook revolution evolution now, and a business model which adapts to it can maybe allow the short story to live long and the authors’ thereof to prosper, after all.

Quien sabe?

I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers.  You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99.  That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store.  And the writer gets 70%.  Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!

So here’s the little experiment:

As in the macrocosm of the novel, so perhaps a cozy microcosm for the short story, a sweet little literary ecological niche.


I’ve put QUARANTINE, a 9000 word novelette on sale as epub original for sale on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/QUARANTINE-ebook/dp/B004RHB5VU/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1299861471&sr=1-19) and Barnes & Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/QUARANTINE/Norman-Spinrad/e/2940012183972/?itm=2&USRI=Norman+Spinrad ), pricing it at $3 even to make the calculations something easy to do in my head.

At $3 an ebook, my cut is is $2.10 a download.  So even 500 sales would net me about $1000, which would already be more than all but a couple three remaining magazines would pay for a story, besides which it can remain available permanently rather than whisked off the stands in 30 days inside a magazine issue.

That’s the business end. A magazine with a circulation of less than 1000 copies is a dead duck, but if a writer sells 1000 copies of a short story for 3 bucks each, it’s $2000, and if you could keep even that level up regularly, it becomes once more possible to make some sort of living writing short fiction exclusively.

 The literary payoff for writers and readers and the relationship between them would be freedom to write whatever you wanted to as long as 1000 people were willing to pay 3 bucks to read it for writers, and freedom of choice for readers.

In the music market these days, listeners are buying more and more individual songs and fewer and fewer albums. So why not short stories?

QUARANTINE would seem to be the perfect experimental guinea pig. Certain to gross out, disgust, and/or outrage a far greater percentage of middle of the bell-shaped curve of a mass audience, but just the sort of thing that arouses pleasure for the very same reason in a certain niche readership.

The question this experiment seeks to answer is how many readers is that?  If this can work for something like QUARANTINE, it can work for all sorts of fiction by all sorts if writers, and if it does, the short story could teleport itself from condition terminal into an unexpected golden age.

Will it?

Quien sabe?

That’s why this is an experiment.