Here is another idea. How about tokenizing the authors on Hive? Each could have his or her own token which represents a certain portion of the earnings. This could all be written into a contract with the percentage being allocated as backing for the author token. Then, people could set up funds based upon different authors which would allow for people to buy into.
I come in here from left field, as we already have the badge and to tokenize it under a smart contract would be dream.
Only trouble is that we would need somebody with your experience to do it.