What We’re Supposed to Do Now
Have you heard? In September, our “competitors” in the ebook retail game, Am*zon, closed their e-subscription service, Newsstand, and have replaced it with a blanket subscription that is trying to be a Netflix for ebooks. This has been disastrous for indie publishers. Galaxy’s Edge shut down before Newsstand was even officially over. Fantasy Magazine has closed. Apex has had to fundraise or contract. Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and now The Dark have reported massive losses and imminent belt-tightening. Some new venues like Sunday Morning Transport and The Deadlands have sprung up, experimenting with different publishing models, and that’s promising! But overall it feels like a bloodbath, especially since on top of this we’ve got the collapse of social media to contend with.
Weightless isn’t going anywhere. In fact we’ve seen a significant boost, for which I thank you all, on my own behalf and that of all these indie publishers above working their asses off to survive. 
But I feel pretty slimy about it. I didn’t ask for this. But I can’t say I didn’t see the writing on the wall.
As in so many other fields, the evil corporation rendered previous marketplaces and forms of distribution obsolete through brutally exploitative business practices on all kinds of fronts where we couldn’t see them in the name of putting unprecedented convenience at everyone’s fingertips. Now that we’re hooked, it is withdrawing the conveniences that weren’t profitable enough to justify the massive overexpenditure of resources necessary to achieve them. Ebooks are what they are because of Am*zon. Weightless is what it is because of them. We scrape out an existence in the beast’s shadow. We opened in 2010 during the ebook boom, exactly and only to provide an alternative to those bastards. 
But we could never do what they do. Now that they’ve pulled out of an area of the field we happen, with luck, spit and axle grease, to be almost as good at on nothing like the same scale—providing recurring serial content by independent creators—Weightless is seeing an unexpected windfall. But that windfall corresponds to an embarrassingly tiny fraction of the lost revenue Am*zon considered not worth competing for. Early in our existence, we kept wondering when the beast would be alerted to our presence, like Sauron noticing the Shire for the first time, and send its hordes to wipe us out. But we never had the Ring, to overextend that metaphor.
In order to replace this service and the revenue Newsstand meant to markets like Apex, Uncanny, The Dark, Clarkesworld and many others, 
we would need to provide a replacement massive, global marketplace everybody is looking at on a daily basis for their every basic need. Weightless is one person, me, a bunch of code I wrote, some chained together open source software and hosting packages.
Expansion seems the obvious answer. What if we added an additional shoestring or two? Obviously, there is an enormous pie with one tiny sliver taken out of it just sitting there. It’s going to spoil if somebody doesn’t build a pie server big enough to take advantage. By which I mean a lot of people faced with the choice between going to a little extra effort to care about and support the venues that were providing their great speculative short fiction and poetry and just not bothering to read that stuff anymore will absolutely do the easier thing.
The thing is, I have not got the time or resources to add any more shoestrings. You can’t make shoestrings out of nothing. And there’s the question of whether the model Am*zon created is actually viable without the massive hidden expenditure of resources and exploitation of labor that was behind Newsstand all the time and is still behind Am*zon. I’m not building another beast. Absolutely not.
But is there something smaller and kinder that could work? Unfortunately, I fear I am not qualified to guess. If I were to, say, take out a loan for enough money to pay two full time salaried programmers what they have been led to expect by a predatory, exploitative industry, with benefits, in order to expand Weightless, to build that bigass pie server, would that debt pay for itself? Or would I, in a year or two years 
or whenever the loan sharks caught up with me, come to the same conclusion the beast has already reached, that the artificially inflated marketplace they created doesn’t actually have any capacity to sustain?
Neither I nor anyone I’ve consulted have thus far been willing to take that risk.
But maybe you’re better informed about this than I. Maybe you’re magic! If you are, please leave a comment below?
If, like me, you are not magic: would you please consider subscribing to some or all of these wonderful and struggling magazines?
Thank you!
—Michael