Fairness Regained, a RAT STEW column by Old 815, written for THE RELUCTANT FAMULUS edited by Tom Sadler
A literary journal just bragged that it liked to publish new literary voices and asked me to subscribe. “Publish some of my fiction and we can talk,” I replied.
Increasingly I am uninterested in furthering exploitation for the phony promise of possible consideration. It’s been cancer forever and is fatal now for what passes as publishing these days. Markets that do not pay are destroying markets that still try to pay. Trouble is, those aren’t able to make a living either. Why buy a magazine if you can get the story for free online? Why buy a book when you can download it for free from any number of sources?
Same thing happened to music. Why buy a CD when you can download the music for free? When you can hear it free on You Tube or Pandora or elsewhere?
Writers need to start respecting their work more and insisting upon being treated decently. Of course, there are always eager neophytes willing to bend, fold, or mutilate themselves for pretend attention, so that’s not likely to amount to shit, is it? So what do we do? Take matters into our own hands? Does every consideration lead there today? This is not about money per se but if you don’t even grasp that you’ve just wasted time reading all this.
It is about controlling our work and destiny.
Some say no pay for any artist or creator is inevitable. What is their point when they say this? Lay back and enjoy the rape? What do they imagine will exempt them from what is happening, and what “market” do they imagine they can “exploit” if no one is willing to pay for anything in the arts?
We must take back our right to intellectual property, our right to remain independent in our work, and our right to determine what our work is about. Those troll growls from the would-be predators mean nothing unless our fire goes out.
Reaching a huge audience without making a living from it is useless. It means writers cannot be self-supporting by their writing, and that means they are financially and psychologically dependent. Enslavement results and a death of culture. Philip Roth and Scott Turow, arguably on opposite sides of a spectrum, both warned of this in recent essays, as have many others. Kurt Vonnegut thought in terms of FDR-style public works socialism where writers would be paid to write simply to keep them employed. Cory Doctorow embraces freeware, and has many good points. Some speak of finding a patron as they did in Medieval times.
Regardless which tack one takes, making a living now depends not on the work but on units, and since the work is no longer tied solidly to a physical unit, units now mean merchandise RELATED to the work. Same as has happened in music, generally; groups hold concerts, then peddle tee shirts, frisbees, and CDs in the lobby to make a living. Neil Gaiman’s wife Amanda Fucking Palmer did a hugely successful Kickstart fund raising to record her latest album. She also has written that she now asks audiences for donations during concerts and via her website, where one can download her work for free but where one is encouraged to pay what you think it’s worth to you via Pay Pal.
Is this illusion of freedom actually a corporate trap?
This question arises when one looks at writers deciding to put out their work via Amazon, in Kindle format. The .mobi suffix is Amazon’s corporate hook. It links you to their publishing schemes, and some of them have set heads on fire with egregious greed and unconscionable arrogance. Oh, but Amazon has such a ready audience, they say. So many eager buyers. Where else can one reach so many for free and make the lion’s share of the profits?
100% of nothing is not better than 20% of something, the smug established traditional publisher writers sneer.
The eager beavers of self publishing in the mean time retort that they can self publish now without shame and receive 100% of the returns. This is true but look at the overhead costs, extra work involved, and so on. You’ve gone from being a writer to being a writer, editor, and publisher. A book a year seems barely do-able, doesn’t it?
There is the kickstarter concept, too, as I mentioned. How many would pay me to publish my novel? How many people lined up to read my work amounts to a viable audience? How could I sustain that group? It’d be a one-off event each time I had a novel to publish, wouldn’t it? Would I have to do serial publication with cliffhangers in every segment? Would I have to do series novels? Also, at what amount does one peg the threshold? “I’ll publish my novel once I get $20,000 and everyone who gives me at least five bucks gets an ecopy?” Yeah, that’s gonna work. ROFL. And even if it would, once I release it, it’s open season for piracy.
As Cory Doctorow has said, you WISH you were being pirated, because that equates with a huge audience. Which YOU then can exploit. Gee, sounds so fuckin’ easy. Yet it’s an illusion. There may be an audience for free shit but what percentage of that group would and will pay for the same stuff? And how much will they pay?
Stephen King tried this a few years ago. He published a book in serial form and scaled payments so that, by the end, you ended up paying about the cost of a standard hardcover. It began with a dollar and gradually increased to like five dollars. Never was any one payment much.
He pulled the experiment before the book was entirely published. At the time he blamed people who had downloaded without paying. Said he was behind the curve and was not making enough to justify it.
Years later he copped to the flat truth: His publisher forced him to stop because in truth he was making more money from that experiment than he’d made off his last several novels combined. He’d gone directly to his audience and his publisher threatened to cut him off and sue him if he kept going.
Too bad he didn’t flip them off at the time and become the first publisher-free writer. He could have done it. He still could. Any of the big names could because they have the audience. Even if only a percentage of their readers pay, it will end up being far more than the grudging pittance trad publishers pay.
In the past, publishers sold books. Physical things. This is the per unit model. In digital publishing, there is no unit. Nothing can be controlled. Before, if I bought a book and liked it, I could lend it. To one person at a time. If I were nuts, I could photocopy each page and make copies, but that would be absurd because it’s way cheaper and less trouble simply to buy other copies. So the unit was what protected against unwarranted proliferation. That no longer applies.
Is reading the work of a writer without paying for the privilege fair? As Robert A. Heinlein once famously asked: Do you get free plumbing, electrical work, or brick-laying? Vonnegut discussed this too, as have many other writers. If you do not expect free mechanical work or plumbing or doctoring or lawyering or any other profession, how come you expect free work from the arts?
You may ask if all that is written has to be paid. Of course not. One pays to access another’s work. No writer is ever paid for even a fraction of what is written. They are not paid by the hour but only for access to the completed work. They should not be paid for the development of craft or the time spent in refining a work, other than in how much they may be able to command in a fair market. They damned well should be paid for the tiny sliver of what they write that others publish and read, though. The key aspect is the point of access.
You should have to pay to open the door and step into their work. Access fee.
We need a model whereby writers can publish and earn a fair living from their work based on readership. Line up to see the Amazing Exotic Rare and Bizarre Egress, as P. T. Barnum might have put it.
Writers want justice, fairness, and a level playing field. Instead, all we have is universal corruption at this stage. A model is needed to allow fairness to be regained.
DRM is not the answer. That was primitive and clumsy and bound to fail, as it immediately did. We have managed to develop technology that despises anything proprietary without keeping up with this fact on any other social level, and the social implications are eating us alive.
Fair play won’t work. Too many feel entitled to free works of art. They jump the turnstiles and have taken the doors off their hinges. They stampede in and out of each artist’s work with impunity and any attempt to bar the door only sees the crowds pour in through windows, skylights, and heating duct vents.
This metaphor is imprecise and misleading because it implies there is privacy. There once was. Once, the theater of each work of art was behind opaque walls, contained in a theater or gallery or auditorium, and protected by society.
Today, digital reality has made us into mimes. Our privacy is the invisible box we say it is, and works only if others agree to play along. And they are in no mood. We are all naked in a mime box now, or our work is.
Privacy has shaken out as the root issue, hasn’t it? Surprising, isn’t it?
Shouldn’t be. When you open a book you hear someone’s thoughts speak from his or her head to yours, silently. It is an alchemy of communication like no other, and respecting its privacy, paying for the privilege of opening that door, is what keeps the voices speaking in a cultural conversation. What use is a diary if it has no lock and cannot be hidden? What good is a work of art if the artist cannot decide its public destiny in order to make a fair return on public interest?
Perhaps society is already changed past what this essay considered. Privacy is often called dead. Entire generations are baffled by the very notion of owning or paying for works of art. Maybe we’ve entered a collective consciousness. Much discussion of physics and cosmology leading to what appears to be computer code puts us in a simulation, an information model. The Matrix, in short.
And if we’re a collective consciousness now, there are no more illusions of individuality. So privacy is a moot issue anyhow. All is One, No Separation, as the Zen put it. Ouroborous just swallowed its own tail, and it is ours. If there are no individuals, there can be no privacy, can there? So, no admission fee models would work; nothing is excluded from anyone.
But those are speculations for another space/time.
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