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On Sun, 9 Apr 1995, Linda Henneman wrote:

> I've just started a paid-subscription, strictly online, monthly
> newsletter. Out of the blue one of the people I sent a sample issue to
> asked if I would consider selling him the reproduction rights for him to
> offer it in a hard-copy version. This was so totally unexpected that it
> just blew me away. I don't plan on doing that as my newsletter uses a
> mailing list to serve as the "readers' suggestions" section of it and I
> think it would be incomplete and not as useful w/o that.

Several of the Big 6 (Dow Jones, Reuters, Quotron,...) electronic 
publishers deal with different flavors of redistribution.  There are some 
simple formulae for calculating the "fair value".

Let's say that it costs $100/month to deliver a dedicated feed to one 
user, assuming you have 10 "Contributing Editors" who are being paid 
royalties for their contributions.  You could charge him a flat fee of
$300 and assume he will make a few "strategic copies".  You might 
encrouage the distributor to commit to 20 customers at $20/month, with 
the understanding that he those users will make a few customers.

If you really want to be aggressive, you can invite him to build his 
distribution up to 200 customers and you will charge him only $3/user/month.
The internet is a big network, you can encourage him to build a 
circulation of 1000 users (e-mail, fax, ...) for a mere $1/user/month.  
If he's really aggressive and can get you 12,000 paying users at 
$1/user/year, you have just made 10 times your original cost of distribution.

Suppose all he did was collect the money and send you a check.  He can 
charge the user an additional $1/user/year and make a tidy payback.  On 
the internet, it would be very easy to get 100,000 users to pay their $2.

> However, if he would perhaps be willing to just publish excerpts from it
> as part of another publication, I would certainly be open to that. I'm new
> to writing and publishing so haven't a clue how to handle this. I have
> _The Copyright Handbook_ by Nolo Press and will be poring through that but
> wonder if any of you can give me advice. I think if this person is willing
The most critical factor in on-line publishing is attribution.  When a 
source is quoted frequently with proper attribution, it becomes a 
reference which can be used in disputes.  The funny thing about on-line 
information is that most people love being able to quote a reliable 
source to have the last and authoritative word.

> to accept the excerpt offer that would be great as it would mean more
> publicity for my fledging newsletter. I have no idea what to charge him
> for this as I'm only just starting to acquire subscribers so don't know
> the worth of the info plus don't know what forms, etc. would need to be
> signed to grant permission to publish my copyrighted material. 
You would need to prepend the copyright to each article submitted.  You 
can let the redistributor do it, but you must be certain that full 
attribution is given.  The result will be subscriptions.

> At this point just the idea of some free publicity sounds good but would 
> like to think the info is of some worth and reimbursement of some sort in 
> order. He wanted to call me in California from Canada later today but I 
> sent him a message to wait for a bit while I thought about it. Any and 
> all advice will be greatly appreciated. TIA, Linda
Sell to him in bulk, on a non-exclusive basis (you want to be able to 
support multiple redistributors).  Look for redistributors who can 
establish your presence in private corporate networks, sub-nets, and 
frequently visited servers.


> Linda Henneman
> Author and Publisher

	Rex Ballard
	On-Line Distributor


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Mon Apr 10 18:39:44 1995
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