I’ll be taking the plunge and running my first LARP experience (set in Runes of Gallidon, of course!), as well as speaking at a panel on the 11th about transmedia.

And as if that wasn’t enough, I’ll also have the pleasure of attending Wyrd Con with several members of the Transmedia L.A. Meetup.

If you’re at all interested in LARPing, storytelling, or improvisation, I encourage you to check out Wyrd Con. And if you’re interested in the Gallidon LARP, there are still characters available!

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2010/life-at-the-bleeding-edge-of-collaboration/

This part focuses on Brain Candy, LLC‘s first collaborative commercial entertainment property, Runes of Gallidon. Thanks to Emily and the DBW team for highlighting new models of entertainment creation!

You can read part one of the interview here.

Let me know if you’re heading down. Kali Chung will be reprising her cosplay role of Ruena, a character from Runes of Gallidon, and she’ll be on the main floor most of Friday and Saturday.

Ruena Hits the 2008 Comic-Con Floor

I’ll also be at the convention with my two business partners, Tony and Andy, and we’ll be handing out 12-page sampler books filled with excerpts from fictional works, original art, and two pages from our first comic, Morgan. All the content, of course, is set in the Runes of Gallidon world.

If you can’t make Comic-Con, please continue to check out the Gallidon website. New content gets posted each week!

We’ve had a fun time stepping into the comic area, and we’re excited about seeing the finished product in a few months!

Apologies in advance…

Based on what has been leaked so far and including statements from various countries currently participating in this essentially closed-door negotiation process, it would appear that the U.S. and other countries have grown tired of trying to force their policies through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) after being blocked by developing countries and NGO’s. So, rather than fight it out in WIPO (who, by the way, gave us the (ahem) brilliant DMCA legislation), they’re taking their marbles and going home in a huff to draft their own copyright policy, ACTA.

Just how twisted does your copyright policy have to be for you to sidestep WIPO and form your own private club to get your way…?

The success of Gallidon rests on the interest and participation of the creative community, so we aimed to structure revenue sharing in a way that would be attractive for Artisans.

Since Artisans retain ownership of their Works even after they have been accepted and posted at Runes of Gallidon, the Artisans can still commercially market and sell their Works (our CC+ licensing includes a non-exclusive license from the Artisan to Brain Candy). This means both Artisans and Brain Candy can sell the Artisans’ Works.

So, there were two parts to the revenue question: (a) how much would Brain Candy share with Artisans if Brain Candy sold their Work, and (b) how much would Artisans be expected to give Brain Candy if they sold their own Work?

The other tricky part about this was that we were encouraging the creation of derivative Works, which would – by definition – include copyrighted materials owned by other Artisans. How could we construct a system of revenue sharing that could realistically and consistently deal with a Work that might have over a hundred Ideas from almost as many different Artisans?

We looked at lots of companies operating in the media space, including ones using CC+ licensing structures, to see what was being done about sharing revenue with Artisans. We found several models, and we kicked around a few internally to see how they “felt.”

Many companies were using a variation of sharing net profits (gross revenue – expenses) with Artisans, but it seemed too easy to game the expense numbers a la Hollywood (“Gee, I know you were promised 5 points of the profits, but wouldn’t you know, the movie somehow magically broke even, so there aren’t any profits to actually share with you…”).

Others were using a flat-fee approach, as is typical with work-for-hires and submissions to ezine and webzine fiction sites. The truth was, as a startup, we didn’t have tons of money to dangle in front of the creative community, so we rejected this idea.

We ended up using the following arrangement: 50/50 sharing of gross revenue if Brain Candy sold/licensed a specific Work, and, if the Artisan(s) who created the Work sold/licensed it, we would ask them to give 10% of their gross revenue to Brain Candy.

It was about as black and white (read: easy to understand) as we could make it, and we felt it helped keep things above-board. If Brain Candy decided to offer an Artisan’s novel as a publish-on-demand book, we would pay the setup expense and not deduct that from the share of revenue given to the Artisan. Likewise, we felt a 10% cut of the Artisan’s revenue (if they sold or licensed their own Work) was a reasonable request given that Brain Candy was maintaining and marketing the Runes of Gallidon site and project, which helped bring attention to the Artisan’s Work.

The really difficult decision about how to share revenue from sales/licensing of derivative Works ended up being one of necessity. We decided the only black and white, simple way to handle this was to share revenue on a Work basis, not an Idea basis. For example, John Smith writes a novel with a lead character named Milburn. Jane Davenport loves Milburn, and decides to write a series of short stories detailing Milburn’s history as a young man. Jane’s short stories are hugely successful, and Brain Candy decides to offer them as a collection (say, “The Milburn Chronicles”) available for sale in print. Revenue from sales of “The Milburn Chronicles” would be shared 50/50 with Jane. Only if John’s novel is sold or licensed by Brain Candy, would he receive any revenue sharing.

I will be the first to admit that this isn’t our preferred system, but it was the best we could come up with without creating a leviathan nightmare of paperwork, accounting, and legalese.

We do expect that John will ultimately benefit from his efforts to create Milburn as a result of Jane’s sales. As readers find and fall in love with the Milburn from Jane’s short stories, it’s likely they would find John’s novel as well. Thus, Jane’s sales would help boost awareness of John’s novel.

This kind of self-referencing marketing reinforcement resonated with us, and it felt like the right revenue sharing system given all the other possibilities.

Up Next: A New Post Series
Well, that covers the basics of how the Brain Candy team went about building what ultimately became the online world, Runes of Gallidon. I may post some updates or new developments in the future, but this is the last installment in this series for now. Look for a new post series exploring free content and shared I.P.!

When we switched to fantasy, we knew it would have to be a multiple-word name, and we played around with different ideas. By April of 2008, we had created a good portion of the world, though we were still searching for a name for the character that would become Emperor Gallidon. We also knew runes would play a pivotal part in the world. As it happened, deciding on the name of the emperor and the name of the world began to converge until we knew they were two sides of the same coin.

We spent a few weeks agonizing or ignoring the issue, until one night the name “Gallidon” popped into my head after a particularly depressing brainstorming session between Tony, Andy, and me. A couple of quick searches revealed almost no hits for this word, and the domain was available for registration. What had been a burden weighing on us for weeks was suddenly solved, and the name resonated with all three of us.

I registered gallidon.com and runesofgallidon.com, set up email accounts for us, and reveled in how surreal it was to have this incredibly important piece of the world fall into place. All we had to do now was finish building the world. And a website. And generate content. And market the site…

Up next: Part 8 – Yours, Mine, Ours

Now, this realization was back in mid-2007, and I’ve been happy to see more and more examples of content being offered digitally as a marketing strategy so that the attention garnered from the free content can be monetized by presenting users with traditional offerings (printed books, t-shirts, etc.).

Chris Anderson’s Wired article from early 2008 distilled this idea, and Mike Masnick at Techdirt continues to highlight example after example after example of content producers who understand the changing nature of (digital) content and the implications of those changes on how to monetize the content.

The short answer is that rather than trying to monetize digital content directly (e.g., charge a fee just to view the content online), producers should use the digital content to accrue attention/users, at which point, non-digital goods can be sold to them. Digital content is now advertising/marketing, not a product, and the revenue becomes possible by leveraging an infinite good (the digital content) into a scarce good (the traditional/analog/physical products or services). [see also Cory Doctorow's article about the using the Internet's inherent nature to your advantage rather than viewing it as something to overcome and why he gives away free digital versions of his novels]

In a somewhat counter-intuitive manner, recent attempts and growing data indicate that revenue from scarce goods can actually grow if the infinite goods are literally given away. Several writers and musicians have found that the increased exposure of their content, when given away digitally for free, offsets the loss of sales by having people only consuming the free digital version of their content (Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, for example).

Rather than fight the tidal sea change of free content we saw coming, we decided to try and ride it.

Up next: Part 7 – What’s In a Name?

After a bit of research and Tony’s offer to use a future universe he had already worked out as part of a movie script he’d written, we settled on sci-fi. The initial foundation of the universe had been worked out, and I had a personal interest in sci-fi (I had just finished Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” and “Market Forces” and found that both had thoroughly, deliciously eaten my head).

Tony’s interstellar universe had three main areas: a stable, advanced confederation of systems; a more back-water, unexplored area with little central control; and a highly advanced, somewhat xenophobic technological area that was more of an unknown/blackbox. I liked the idea that users could gravitate to the area of the universe that appealed to them, but we could still keep it all under the same branded universe.

Tony and I set about trying to write some of the initial content to prime the pump as well as flesh out more of the universe’s foundation. We didn’t get far.

Neither of us, despite our liking of sci-fi, found it easy or enjoyable to begin writing content. I had the worst case of writer’s block and was reminded (again) why I hadn’t written anything since my undergraduate days. Furthermore, we had a hard time scoping the universe in a way that could be laid out logically to the creative community without becoming so overwhelming that people would be lost. If it was this hard for me to get our arms around it, how would we easily convey it to the creative community?

We debated changing genres, did some more research, and ultimately decided to switch to a fantasy genre. I’m still embarrassed to admit that writing science fiction was too hard for me at that point in my life. To come close to the better writers would require more research, time, and thinking than I possibly had. Holding down a full-time job and being part of a growing family left little time to accomplish our goal. Plus, neither Tony nor I found that we were enjoying what should have been a fantastically fun task.

Even though my fantasy reading had been essentially non-existent for almost twenty years, I found myself eagerly tackling the challenge of laying out a new world and drafting some flash fiction content. The world creation happened fairly quickly and was a joy. The flash fiction proved a nice way to flex long-ignored writing muscles. The simple act of switching genres unlocked a lot of creative ideas we had, and the fun flooded back into the project.

As we crafted the world, we made the conscious decision to not include elves, dwarves, or orcs. While there would be plenty of magic and monsters, we wanted the inhabitants of the world to be predominantly human in nature. The use of non-human creatures/races can easily become a crutch when writing, and we both thought that we could still have a world big enough for the creative community to explore and populate. Our belief was – and still is – that the writing would be better if it focused on “human” characters and good story telling. We also knew this approach would likely alienate some of the fantasy fans, but we opted to sacrifice mass appeal to what we thought was a stronger, more unique world. We’ve received some criticism about this decision, and time will tell if we’re wrong…

Up next: Part 6 – Free Means Free