By Authors Alliance Co-Founder Tom Leonard
Last year Authors Alliance turned to a cartoon monkey, MailChimp, to handle our email. The chimp had more to offer than we realized, and through them we gained an unexpected view of fame, ca 2015, and the hidden virtue of sharing stuff for free.
At year’s end MailChimp was celebrated with the breakthrough podcast it sponsored, Serial, true crime journalism from public radio. Both chimp and reporters were embedded in the online chatter of fans (more than 5 million listeners) and the Saturday Night Live parody (more than 12 million viewers).
The adage that “time, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success” could have been the New Year’s toast for both the writers and the software entrepreneurs. Serial built on more than a decade of skills developed on public radio, especially This American Life. If you search your email In box for “MailChimp,” you will find that institutions you trust have quietly turned to MailChimp in recent years.
This is stimulating history for Authors Alliance because it is another reminder that good writing and inspired ways of sharing work can be, in the long run, the way to standout. Serious writers deserve all that the market will provide as they reach their first audience, readers we may all hope will be renewed for years. But when that audience yields no real commercial benefit to author or publisher, it is time to embrace the MailChimp idea of “freemium.”
This new patois of software and media companies ought to be a word we all learn in 2015. One variety of “Freemium” offers free access, after the costs of producing the product have been recouped.
Serial is in the freemium family but its business plans, though very promising, are not settled yet. MailChimp seems to have written the book on how patient work (taking as long as an author might) produces a time to share. Ben Chestnut, MailChimp’s CEO, has posted this recollection:
For eight years, our company never thought about freemium. We didn’t even know the concept existed. For eight loooong years, we were focused on nothing but growing profits. If you had brought up the concept of “freemium” with us during those eight years, we probably would’ve looked at you like you were eff’ing insane, then went back to work. In fact, when we launched MailChimp in 2001, we didn’t even have a free trial option.
Sharing what you have produced for free is not a sign of inferior work, just the reverse. MailChimp produced such excellent software and services that the company was set up to reap the reputational advantages of offering significant content and tools to the public for free.
Chimps play tricks and Chestnut has been honest about his: “We don’t think of our free users as pesky, bandwidth-hogging ‘freeloaders’ that we have to monetize in some way. We love them just as much as the people who pay us money. Because we have the data that shows they will pay us money.”
The Authors Alliance translation is: the attention and stimulation you will get from readers are coin you will never see if your works live only on our library shelves.