Josh Costello has adapted my novel Little Brother for stage in San Francisco (this is new adaptation, unrelated to the production that ran in Chicago a few years back). The show opens in January, 2012, and he’s just gone into production; he’s keeping running notes of his progress at a blog called LITTLE BROTHER LIVE.

My latest Locus column, “No Endorsement,” talks about how print-on-demand, 3D printers, and other technologies that make products available when people want them change the economics of fannish activity, fan art, and homemade merchandise. I propose a “”No Endorsement” badge that fans could use that indicates, “The creator of the work from which is this derived hasn’t reviewed or approved this; but s/he is still getting a piece of the action.”

Here’s how that could work: tens, hundreds or thousands of fans with interesting ideas for commercially adapting my works could create as many products as they could imagine and offer them for sale through i.Materialise or Shapeways. There’s no cost – apart from time – associated with this step. No one has to guess how many of these products the market will demand and produce and warehouse them in anticipation of demand. Each product bears the ‘‘no endorsement’’ mark, which tells you, the buyer, that I haven’t reviewed or approved of the product, and if it’s tasteless or stupid or ugly, it’s no reflection of my own ideas. This relieves me of the duty to bless or damn the enthusiastic creations of my fans.

But it also cuts me in for a piece of the action should a fan hit on a win. If your action figure hits the jackpot and generates lots of orders, I get paid, too. At any time, we have the option of renegotiating the deal: ‘‘You’re selling so many of these things, why don’t we knock my take back to ten percent and see if we can’t get more customers in the door?’’ Setting the initial royalty high creates an incentive to come to me for a better deal for really successful projects.

No Endorsement

My latest Publishers Weekly column, “Heuristics,” documents the success I’ve had with a pay-what-you-like donation model for my With a Little Help DIY short story collection, and looks at how it might be applied to other books:

But it’s the success of the donations program that has me thinking hardest—specifically, about the value proposition of the donations. Could donations form the basis of a new retail channel for e-books? Perhaps a widget that commercially published authors could embed in their own Web sites and social media pages based around this pitch: “Buy my e-book on a pay-what-you-like basis, and I’ll split the take 50–50 with my publisher, still a much better take than I’d get from your e-book purchases on Amazon, Nook, or iBooks.”

Why not? Commercial entertainment conglomerates understand that “pay creators, it’s the right thing to do” is a better pitch than “pay multinational entertainment conglomerates, they deserve your money.” This is why so many antipiracy ads focus on creators, not on corporate profits. Authors who collect directly from readers have a commercially valuable moral high ground, and figuring out how to incorporate the special relationship between creators and their audiences into a business model has the potential to rebalance the current relationship with the existing online retail channels.

It’s not unprecedented—pay-what-you-like programs like the Humble Indie Bundle (video games) and Radiohead’s In Rainbows and Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I–IV (music) have been runaway successes. The pitch from these projects, “pay the creator you love,” is a message that clearly resonates with my readers, some of whom have donated as much as $200. And this can help with the “pig-in-a-poke” problem. Without locked-in channels or DRM-laden works, authors and publishers can put together new titles in a single package to cross-promote their works—new writers could be bundled with established ones, for example. The Humble Indie Bundle has been very successful with this strategy. Readers could even nominate some of their payment for charity—say PEN, a library friends organization, a literacy trust, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or ACLU.

With A Little Help: Heuristics