This week I was asked why one of my stories was locked behind a paywall, so I wanted to report on the progress of my income-generating experiments, and explore the ethical considerations of these different options.

Pondering becoming @Medium member: I want to read more @RichDecibels – wondering if he knows his writing is now stuck behind a paywall? :-/ (BTW I already fund the media I want to see by routinely financially supporting LOTS of great projects see https://t.co/cO6pX2cH5k) pic.twitter.com/Dp3iECnwW0

— Josef Davies-Coates (@jdaviescoates) May 23, 2018

In the year since writing that post, I’ve written another 15,000 words of my mostly-finished first book, published on LeanPub as a work-in-progress-for-sale. I’ve published another 20,000 words in 21 articles, receiving 40,000 pageviews on Medium. In addition to Medium, I usually publish on my website for convenient reproduction, and on Scuttlebutt to guarantee permanent storage in the commons (Scuttlebutt is the peer-to-peer future of the Internet that I’m most excited about). I use creative commons licensing to encourage syndication of my stories, so I’m delighted when I’m republished on blogs like C4SS or P2P Foundation.

Experiment #1: Patreon

My ideal goal with Patreon is to eventually crowdsource a stable living wage from voluntary recurring donations. When someone makes a recurring pledge on my Patreon I take that to mean something like, “I think your writing is important, here’s a few dollars a month to encourage you to keep going”. This community of support feels to me like an ever-present low-pressure sense of responsibility to keep publishing. So far, I really love this. Every single new patron is extremely encouraging for me.

I feel like I am in relationship with these people in a much deeper way than say, a passing reader or commenter. I don’t feel like I have to give my patrons anything more than gratitude, so I don’t have to lock any of my stories behind a paywall. I have the option to give patrons early-access to new stories, or to give them free access to a book that I’m selling elsewhere.

Results so far

I signed up in May 2017. Most of my stories end with a link to my Patreon page, but I haven’t promoted it any more than that. Over the year, I’ve gained 44 patrons, and lost 5. Currently this earns me US$196/month. Patreon takes 5% for their service, and about another 5% is lost to transaction fees (boo PayPal). Total income for the year, after fees and VAT, before paying income tax: $1566.94. This is a lot less than a full salary, but also a lot more than spare change.

Ethical considerations

This represents the “gift economy” solution to the writers’ dilemma: my writing is a gift to the world, and some of my readers gift me some money in gratitude. This gives me nice warm feelings and makes me feel like I’ve outsmarted capitalism.

To earn a full salary from Patreon, I would need many more supporters, requiring a marketing effort that starts to feel like begging. The gift economy is lovely in theory, especially because there’s no coercion: contributions are voluntary, and there is no punishment for readers who choose to not contribute. But when I interrogate these dynamics at a deeper level, I’m less satisifed.

In my point of view, social capital is subject to the same accumulative and alienating dynamics as financial capital. It’s even more dangerous in some senses, as the transactions are impossible to track, so it is much harder to redistribute accumulations of wealth.

Personally I redistribute 10% of my income to other Patreon creators who I think are doing more important and less fundable work than me: street poet David Merritt and anarchist authors William Gillis and Emmi Bevensee. At least this is a gesture to remind myself that the social capitalist is no more woke than the financial capitalist.

Frankly, as a producer, the clean transaction of buyer and seller just feels better to me. It feels good to produce something of value and have that value acknowledged by somebody purchasing it.

Experiment #2: Medium Partner Program

I happily signed up to pay $5/month for Medium membership as soon as it became an option.

As a reader, I want to support a sustainable and ethical citizen media ecosystem. You know the expression who pays the piper calls the tune? That explains in a nutshell why I prefer participating in a business model where the customers are readers, not advertisers. Reader-supported publishing incentivises high quality writing; advertising-supported media incentivises high quality data mining and manipulation.

In addition to being a paying Medium reader, I recently joined the Medium Partner Program, which means I am now on both sides of the Medium marketplace. With this scheme, when I write stories I can choose to mark them as members-only, or leave them free for all. This creates a semi-permeable paywall: readers who are paying the Medium membership fee have unlimited access to members-only stories; free users can read up to 3 of these stories per month. In return, I get paid based on the level of reader engagement with each story.

Results so far

I’ve only just joined the program and published 2 stories. The payout algorithm considers page views, readers and fans. I was surprised at the low level of engagement with my first locked post. In the first month it got 140 views, 59% reader completion, 11 fans. I would have expected maybe 5 times that amount if I had published a similar story without the paywall. So I was disappointed with the small audience, but then I was pleasantly surprised by the high payout: $4.27 for the first month. Considering I regularly write stories that get 10-50 times more engagement than this one, that’s a promising sign that the paywall could deliver a reasonable chunk of revenue if I use it for my really high quality stories that have a big audience and a long shelf-life. Estimating audience size is an inexact science so I intend to publish a few more locked stories to get more data.

Ethical considerations

The main obstacle to me embracing the Medium Partner Program is the audience perception. Simply: people don’t like paywalls. In particular, a significant portion of the people I write for have values that are explicitly against anything that looks like an enclosure of the commons. My people are advocates of free culture/ creative commons/ platform coops/ social enterprise/ and decentralisation. Some of them have a knee-jerk reaction against Medium because it doesn’t tick those boxes.

I’m happy to debate on this topic, but for what its worth, so long as Medium respects my right to license my own content, I feel pretty stable on my moral high horse. I could choose to release some of my work to a paying audience first, if that proves to be a viable funding model, but all my writing will maintain its commons license. I expressly don’t put limits on reproductions or derivatives of my articles, because I want to encourage distribution and engagement.

As a writer, I feel like I’m renting audience-discovery services from Medium. When I publish on Medium, most of the audience-discovery is done by algorithms, augmented by human curators. When I publish on C4SS or P2P Foundation, the audience-discovery is done entirely by humans, painstakingly cultivating a community of readers and writers. There are pros and cons to each method, but either way there’s valuable work being done which I think is worth paying for.

Experiment #3: LeanPub

I’ve spent most of the summer in Aotearoa New Zealand writing a short practical book about decentralised organising. I write using Markdown, which is a text formatting syntax designed for portability. As I completed the first draft, I started researching the technicalities of publishing: how will I convert these text files on my computer into an ebook in various formats?

My research lead me to LeanPub, which at first was interesting to me purely as a technical solution. You can write in Markdown on your computer, use Git or Dropbox to sync the files to LeanPub, and with one click generate html, pdf, epub and mobi formats.

The “lean” in “LeanPub” comes from “lean manufacturing” or “lean startup”, i.e. an approach to product development combining rapid iterations and ample user feedback. So LeanPub has created a marketplace for selling in-progress ebooks. I came for the publishing toolchain, stayed for the marketplace.

Results so far

I published the first version of the book when it was about 75% complete. LeanPub allows variable pricing, so I set the minimum price at $4.99, with a suggested price of $14.99. I gave free access to all my Patreon supporters, and sent out one Tweet to announce the publication.

I published my book! Now I just need to finish it…https://t.co/Hh83QNHd5w

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) April 20, 2018

I was quite stunned with the positive response from such a small amount of publicity: 21 purchases in the first month, totalling $302.36 in total revenue, 80% of which comes to me.

The best part is the audience interaction. Readers are invited to join this Loomio discussion group to give feedback. I’ve already had detailed, page-by-page feedback from two readers, which is immensely valuable. They’ve pointed out weak or awkward parts, and provided a tonne of encouragement that this work is worth doing. I’ve got a really clear list of homework to do next time I get into writing mode.

While my articles are published with no rights reserved, for now at least the book is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. That means anyone can reproduce or modify the work, if they meet 3 conditions:

• BY = they must credit me as the author
• NC = non-commercial (they’re not doing it for profit)
• SA = share-alike (derivative works must use the same license)

I’ve chosen this as an interim measure, to keep my options open while I figure out the best balance between free and paid sharing.

Ethical considerations

Because this is a straightforward commercial transaction, it’s pretty easy to analyse the ethics of this approach. On the plus side, buyers can freely choose to pay at least $4.99 if they want to read my work. On the down side, this excludes people who don’t have money.

I don’t want to exclude people who are broke, but I also don’t want to make it overly easy for freeloaders either. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll ride this balance yet. I could tell people to contact me if they want a free copy, or just drop the minimum price to $0 after some period of time. I’m not totally certain of my choice to use CC-BY-NC-SA, so perhaps I’ll switch to CC0 (no rights reserved) too.

Next steps

So, the trickle of income from Patreon feels nice, but I don’t want to self-promote more than I already am. Medium’s paywall is a promising income stream, but I risk losing the audience I care most about. So far it feels like publishing on LeanPub hits the sweet spot between revenue and ethics. So I’m considering that my next experiment could be to package up my existing blog posts into a kind of “best of” ebook that people can buy if they want to support my writing.

Reading back through this post, I’m not feeling certain about any of the ethical choices. I’m publishing this in the hope that some of you clever loving people challenge my thinking and enhance my ethics. I’d also love to hear from other authors who feel like they’ve solved the dilemma between the paywall and the commons.

p.s. this story is licensed with no rights reserved, available for reproduction on my website

Photo by mrhandley

The post Paywalls vs Creative Commons: Experiments with Patreon, Medium and LeanPub appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Let me tell my own story about two experiments in commons-based book publishing.  The first involves Patterns of Commoning, the new anthology that Silke Helfrich and I co-edited and published two months ago, with the crucial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The second experiment involves the Spanish translation for my 2014 book Think Like a Commoner. 

Whereas the German version of Patterns of Commoning was published with transcript-Verlag, a publisher we consider a strong partner in spreading the word on the commons, for the English version, we decided to bypass commercial publishers.  We realized that none of them would be interested – or that they would want to assert too much control at too high of a price.

We learned these lessons when we tried to find a publisher for our 2013 anthology, The Wealth of the Commons.  About a dozen publishers rejected our pitches.  They said things like:  “It’s an anthology, and anthologies don’t sell.”  “It doesn’t have any name-brand authors.”  “It’s too international in focus.”  “What’s the commons?  No one knows about that.” 

It became clear that the business models of publishers – even the niche political presses that share our values – were not prepared to support a well-edited, path-breaking volume on the commons.

In general, conventional book publishing has trouble taking risks with new ideas, authors and subject matter because it has very small economic margins to play with.  One reason is that commercial book distributors in the US – the companies that warehouse books and send them to various retailers – take 60% of the cover price, with little of the risk. They are the expensive middlemen who control the distribution infrastructure. Their cut leaves about 40% of the cover price or less for the publisher, author and retailer to split.

This arrangement means that book prices have to be artificially higher, relative to actual production costs, to cover all the costs of so many players:  editors, marketers, publicists, distributors, retailers.

So how did we bypass this costly apparatus and assert control of the publishing process?  How did we produce an affordable, highly shareable 400-page book? By looking to our international community of commoners.

We did a private crowdfunding outreach to solicit orders for advance bulk orders — $10/copy in increments of ten.  This raised enough money to finance about half of the cost of the print run of 2,000 copies. Silke and I personally paid for the rest of the print run, which we expect to recoup after selling a few hundred copies. We were able to reclaim control over what happens with our book and avoid the strict limitations imposed by conventional publishing business models.

We built on the logic of commoning:  First, build community (which took years of work), then support each other.  This is both more efficient and socially satisfying than relying on highly consolidated corporate markets that require ever-escalating prices, control and sales.

We had had a great experience in publishing The Wealth of the Commons in 2012 via Levellers Press, a regional press that took a chance on our book. Levellers was started a few years ago by its parent company, Collective Copies, a worker-owned, movement-friendly photocopy business in Amherst, Massachusetts, US.

So when it came time to publish Patterns of Commoning, we could have published with Levellers, but decided this time to go with Levellers’ self-publishing arm, Off the Common Books.  The big difference was that we, as authors/editors, put up the money ourselves to print and distribute the books.  Off the Common Books then sells and ships the books for a modest per-book fee.

Publishing Patterns of Commoning ourselves has been a wonderful liberation from the costly, unresponsive machinery of traditional publishing.  Even though our book is not available through most bricks-and-mortar bookstores, that’s okay; very few books are.  Patterns of Commoning can be bought directly through the Off the Common Books website  – our preferred source – or through Amazon (not preferred, but it’s hard to reach general book buyers otherwise).

Because our overhead costs are so low, we were able to keep the price of our book at $15 – much lower than a conventional publisher would charge – while pocketing higher revenues than typical publishing deals (a scant 7-10% of the cover price).  We can break even sooner, and enjoy fewer risks and costs because we have a smaller press run.

The Power of Commoning Over Marketing

Then there is marketing.  The authors of books usually end up doing most of the marketing because they know their reader-community better than most publishers.  Authors are motivated to reach out to readers, but US publishers entering a publishing season often have “more important” titles to promote than one’s own book.  “Lesser titles” are often left to fend for themselves.

When I published a book (with coauthor Burns Weston) with the esteemed Cambridge University Press, several people cycled through the job of marketing my book in the course of only two years.  The Press initially charged $85 for the hardback copy (now $55) because it apparently sees university libraries as its primary market for hardcover sales. When it was time to publish a cheaper ($35) paperback, the Press refused to correct the typos (“too expensive”) or even include an errata sheet.

Self-publishing in collaboration with our commons network let us avoid all of these problems.  We have been able to rely on our own network of commoners, Web visibility and word-of-mouth recommendations – avoiding the expensive and mediocre outreach and promotion that many publishers do.  We have also been able to use a Creative Commons license (in our case, a CC BY-SA 4.0 license), which authorizes foreign translations for free and lets us post the entire book online. (Chapters will be posted in the next month or two.)   We value impact and connection over profit.

Of course, as non-academics, Silke and I don’t need to worry about the perceived prestige of a publisher.  Our careers are not dependent upon getting published with the most respected academic presses, which may also be expensive, averse to Creative Commons licenses, and focused on traditional marketing approaches.

I’ve published more than ten books with ten publishers in my career, and I’ve never had a happier publishing experience than with Levellers/Off the Common Books.  Steve Strimer, the publisher, is a wonderful guy who understands the commons and is creative and flexible in trying out new ideas.  The press can do print-on-demand, small-scale print runs for books, which means that its overhead costs are small, allowing it to turn a profit after selling only 200 to 300 copies of a book.  Steve takes pride in saying that he is one of the only for-profit US publishers of poetry, one of the most notoriously unprofitable genres of writing there is.  (Levellers’ poetry imprint is Hedgerow Books.) http://hedgerowbooks.net

I do think this commons-based model represents a superior commercial model for movement-oriented books so long as you have sufficient inhouse editorial and production know-how.  You can make your own choices about editorial content, control your own marketing, reap more of the revenues from sales, and use a Creative Commons license.  You don’t have to forfeit so much to a publisher and the commercial distribution apparatus.  In our case, it was crucial to have a partner like Off the Common Books, an author-friendly, movement-oriented cooperative.

I think the next step for commons-oriented publishing is to invent new sorts of cooperative book distribution systems so that small presses can avoid the crippling fees charged by the conventional book distributors.  A modest editorial and production infrastructure for a press could accomplish a great deal for very little money. (For those who read German: my colleague Silke Helfrich elaborated a bit on that idea and calls for a Commons Publishing or a Publishing Commons.)

Another Cooperative Publishing Experiment, in Spain

Let me quickly mention a second commons-based book publishing experiment now underway.  This project revolves around the Spanish translation for my 2014 book, Think Like a Commoner.  The book is licensed under a CC BY-SA license, which means that translators can do a translation for free.  So far, there are translations in French, Italian, Polish and Korean – with a Chinese one in progress.

Last year, a consortium of commons-oriented groups in Madrid organized by Guerrilla Translation – Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel – decided that they wanted to translate Think Like a Commoner as a collaborative project.  The consortium includes the Medialab-Prado, free software publisher Traficantes de Sueños, the commons crowdfunding website Goteo and the translation team of Georgina Reparado, Susa Oñate and Lara San Mamés.

This group, coordinated by Guerrilla Translation’s Xana Libânio, is mounting a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the translation, campaign management, and book editing and design.  Contributors can choose from among numerous rewards, including copies of the book.

What’s especially imaginative is how the Spanish translation project is engaging with publishers in Latin America to print, distribute, promote and sell the book in their various countries – Tinta Limón in Argentina, La Libre in Perú, SurSiendo in México.  Publishers will print a set number of copies for the initial crowdfund distribution, but will then be free to print and sell additional copies for their respective countries.

I am grateful to the Madrid team that has undertaken this project, and impressed by the creative structures and cooperation that they have devised.  It makes me wonder if the time is right to start a standing press on commons and movement concerns.  That would surely require more resources and reliable revenue streams, but it is certainly worth exploring.  The economics of conventional publishing is delivering less and less value to authors and readers even as book prices go higher.  Meanwhile, important new books never get published in the first place because they are deemed unmarketable.

We have a chapter in Patterns of Commoning that describes some of the more notable commons-based publishing innovations out there.  Besides open access scholarly publishing, there is Oya magazine in Germany, Shareable in the US, Pillku in Latin America, among others.  Maybe it’s time for a commons-based publishing summit.

Originally published in bollier.org

Lead image: “Peoples Library Occupy Wall Street 2011 Shankbone” by David Shankbone, David Shankbone – Flickr: Peoples Library Occupy Wall Street 2011 Shankbone. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons –

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