Remix: Write—an idea
Think about remixes. Sure, there are some lazy, bad ones that just add that uhm ts uhm ts uhm ts beneath a famous song and call it done, but the best ones are something different. They take the ideas, sounds, and textures of a great song and create something new (and sometimes better). Really great covers are the same way. Some are just tributes, but some take what's there and build on it to create a new song that can stand independently.
This can happen with stories too.
The uhm ts version of this is something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which takes something recognizable and adds something modern underneath it, but a story remix has the potential to be so much more. That's where Remix:Write comes in.
How It Works
Each Remix competition starts with a story. (Ideally, these stories would be provided by famous—or at least known—authors, though in the beginning we could start with good stories from the public domain if we had to.)
The challenge is this: in a week, "remix" the original story. What does that mean? It means take the elements of the original story that inspire you and use them to create your own story, one that pays homage to the original, but is fully yours. (There are a number of ways to judge that "homage." We could ask the writes to include a brief statement outlining which elements from the story they used and how; we could establish a set of specific story elements such a s place, character, plot, form, etc. and mandate that stories identifiably include one of those elements; and so forth).
Constraint is one of the best resources any artist can have in his or her quest for creativity. In this contest, your constraint is the creativity of others.
Your story will be judged initially by a panel, who will select the top five stories. The top five will be judged by the original author (unless he or she is dead; then we'll have to figure something else out), who will decide the winner. The top three winners will win cash prizes and all five winners chosen by the panel will be published (see below).
(This is the basic competition, but I think we can expand it, which gives us some options for monetization, see below.)
But the competition's not over yet.
Once the winner's announced, that story becomes the original in a new round. (Again, there are a few ways to go here: we can have each new round be it's own contest with its own entrance fee, or have one entrance fee cover the full range of the contest. There are plusses and minuses on each side of this. Ultimately, however, each round has to include cash prizes. Another issue here is the judging. Because of the publishing options described below, I think it makes the most sense to have the original author continue to be the judge, but that may be a strain on him or her, so we'd have to work that out.)
This process continues for six rounds until 30 stories from the creative soil of the original story. These are published in anthology, which includes the author's original story and his or her name (probably as editor).
How We Make Money
A contest like this offers a couple of options for monetization:
Entry fees. This is the most obvious, but we'd need to use these for prizes, running the competition, etc., especially at the beginning.
Books sales. I figure we can wrap each round into it's own ebook and then publish the final anthology both as an ebook and a printed book.
Ad sales: This is always an option on any site.
Notes
If we can pull this off, the real value of this competition is the involvement of a known author. I think the draw of both interacting with (and remixing) the author, having him or her judge some stories, and enjoying the possibility of being published in an anthology with his or her name on it are real draws. The contest can work without a named author, but I think we'd want to push for that as quickly as possible.
There's value to the original author, too, as they basically write one story and then get all of this content built around them that draw attention to them.
Again, if we could pull it off, it'd be great to push for really rapid contests, maybe having more than one going at a time. For example, if the Benjamin Wayne competition is starting in the first week of January, we could plan on having the second round of that competition start in the first week of March (giving us plenty of time to judge). In between, we can start the Ben Cameron competition the third week of January, the Cameron Malcher competition the first week of February, and the Icaurs Graeme competition the third week of February. That way, we'd have four competitions going throughout the year, with lots of ebooks to sell. This may be too ambitious, but it would be cool, and obviously, we'd have to figure out the exactly details of that.
The strength of a model like that is that we would have plenty of options for revenue because the contest it producing more content. Also, if we were sponsoring contests every two weeks (or every week!), I think we could keep the entry fees pretty low (5$ anyone?), which I think would encourage more participation. (Pay just 5$ to remix Stephen King! Or, 5$ for a chance to have Stephen King read your story! Or, 5$ for a chance to have your story published in an anthology with Stephen King!)
It also gives writers a chance to stay involved and keep writing regularly, which is something that's annoying with the NYC Midnight contest.
Depending on how many people are involved, we may have to break rounds into heats, a la NYC Midnight. That would require some thinking.
In terms of judging, this again obviously depends on how many people we can get involved, but I think the best way is to do double or (ideally) triple blind judging prior to the author judging.
It's possible we could offer publication of everyone's stories on our site, adding some value and adding strength to the ad sales model.
We'd have to figure out the money, but I think it's also possible that we could entice and compensate named authors by offering them a percentage in all book sales. At first, it probably wouldn't be a ton, but maybe enough to justify the small amount of their time we'd need (even if they judged each rounds, that's only 30 stories over the course of the year). We'd probably have to expect to pay them initially for the the original story, but we could maybe find a way out of that. Maybe we're just cool enough that they'll want to do it for free.
As always, I think the biggest issue is actually attracting writers (some of whom hopefully are decent).
We could use any kind of author, giving us lots of options. If someone's not into horror, for example, they can just remix a Stephen King story into a romance.
Of course, I'm presenting the full-fledged version of this, but I think we could totally start with a pared down version using public domain stories, the promise of publication, and just regular-old us judging. and then grow into the full thing.