OK, it's time...Soft Skull launches a subscription model...
Having been thinking about this for a while, and with the help of some prodding from AK Press and Clear Cut Press and One Story and Tin House and such (both directly and by example), we've decided to launch a Soft Skull subscription. It'll be category-specific and we'll start with poetry: all the poetry Soft Skull will publish in 2006, with a couple backlist bonus tracks to spur folks into action. (As the spiel goes on the site: "A new way to buy Soft Skull books, with subscriptions to follow in Fiction, Pop Culture, Graphic Novels, and Queer Studies...")
Here's what folks will get (for $50):
Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man by James Cummins and Devid Lehman, illustrated by Archie Rand
Deviant Propulsion by CAConrad
Eunoia by Christian Bök
Saints of Hysteria, edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad
How to Make a Life As A Poet by Gary Mex Glazner
Supermodel by David Breskin
AND, and a limited time bonus, Tremble & Shine by Todd Colby AND God Save My Queen by Daniel Nester!!!
Should you wish to actually order this, click here.
Basically, I suspect this part of the future of independent publishing—in large part because I'm almost certain that as eBook sales pick up in the coming years, a subscription model is by far the most plausible means of delivery. So I figure we should start getting used to it by setting something pretty basic up for the print books, forcing us to proceed slowly along the learning curve.
I wouldn't be me if I didn't have some shot-in-the-dark prognostications as to this, of course, but I'll humbly frame them as questions:
1. Will keeping track of these subscriptions be a nightmare, as if we were trying to run a magazine on top of a publisher? By extension, will our interns hate me?
2. Will people necessarily come to Soft Skull for a subscription, or rather (since I'm pretty sure the answer is a partial yes) what other subscriptions might there be? Obviously retailers might be intersted: could Amazon.com, could Powells.com do something like this?
3. More plausibly even than retailers would be something like the LitBlogCoop...you but a subcription for the four winners, or the 20 finalists?
4. Assuming other parties who are not the publishers but retaling or otherwise filtering how would one negotiate the discounts?
5. For that matter, how will publishers and authors allocate those revenues?
In effect, I have to believe, with the fulfillment aspect of eBooks being relatively straightforward as Digital Rights Management software becomes more turnkey, anyone can become a vendor...
Anyway, will report back to the Soft Skull Blog readers as we develop things here.