The magazine “Fantasy & Science Fiction,” which has been around for over 60 years, is trying out a new way to sell copies: it’s going to start giving away the nonfiction sections, plus one fiction story, from each issue for free through the Kindle Store, while offering a paid subscription (at $1/month) for the full issue. In some ways, this is sort of like using the Kindle Store as an email list marketing tool—get users to sign up for the free stuff, then remind them regularly that there’s new content for sale.

But another analogue may be the freemium business model that popular services like Dropbox and Evernote are employing, sometimes (as with Evernote) to great success.

So will the freemium approach work with a genre fiction magazine? We’ll have to wait and see, but it’s an interesting way to use the Kindle delivery platform and user base to drive sales.

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