A New York bookshop has launched a campaign to rescue old SF novels. The campaign by Singularity&Co, a new specialist SF bookshop in Brooklyn, comes at the perfect time. Secondhand bookshops – where most fans acquire and develop their habit – are under serious threat, and with them the back catalogue of weird and speculative fiction that they have preserved for so long.

The Save the Sci-Fi campaign aims to bring back in to print one cult SF novel each month and provide it online for free. And if anyone needed proof this is a popular idea, over $52,000 raised through crowdfunding goes some way to providing it.

Save the Sci-Fi isn't the only project attempting to preserve the heritage of science fiction. The excellent SF Gateway, founded by Gollancz books, Britain's oldest and most influential publisher of SF, brings some of the genre's classic texts back in to circulation as ebooks – the covers of which will be familiar to thousands of readers who remember the original Gollancz yellow-jackets. Ebooks and the new Kindle and Apple iBook stores have also provided an opportunity for hundreds of out-of-print authors to find an audience once again. They have also renewed old arguments around creator rights, as writers who signed away ebooks rights for as little as 15% royalties look enviously at indie authors earning 70% on sales through the Kindle platform.

But where Save the Sci-Fi has succeeded is in capturing the energy of fans, and that success gives a fascinating insight in to our new publishing paradigm. Most of us are used to a world where the major decisions in publishing – which books to publish, which writers to bring back in to print, where to spend marketing budgets and so forth – are made by publishers, distributors and booksellers. But increasingly, and more directly than ever before, these decisions are being made by fans. The story of Save the Sci-Fi reveals three pillars of the new publishing paradigm:

Creators: not so long ago the only way for the Singularity&Co team to establish a project like Save the Sci-Fi would be to risk their own money or find a major investor. Crowdfunding allows creators to put ideas directly to fans. And in crowdfunding it is the ideas with the most creativity and passion that tend to win out.

Opinion formers: Save the Sci-Fi has been helped on its way by influential opinion-formers in SF and geek culture including IO9 and Boing Boing. If a writer like Neil Gaiman decides to publicise a creative project or a new writer, it can often make the difference between success and failure.

Fans: ultimately it all comes down to the actions of millions of individual fans. The creators they choose to listen to, to engage with on platforms like Twitter, to support through crowdfunding and in other ways, are the ones who will succeed in getting their work in to the world.

The new publishing paradigm emerging from ebooks, social media and crowdfunding is having a fundamental and, I would argue, overwhelmingly positive impact. Publishers and retailers will always choose work which yields the highest likely profits – work that is cautious, predictable and mundane. Fans will always choose work that excites them – work that is creative, passionate and meaningful. Save the Sci-Fi isn't a project that many major publishers would invest in, but it's a project that fans have voted for with their wallets. And the culture of sci-fi is all the richer for it.