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Comment by davezatch | Hacker News Reader

Techdirt often does case studies of people in various creative industries that have made this kind of thing work. See for example: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20101026/0...

Musicians, authors, filmmakers, artists, whatever. Lots of creative people are able to leverage a dedicated fan base into a livable, if not insanely lucrative, salary.

The key is to provide something scarce. Since books, music, etc. are digital, they no longer are scare, but you can offer things like a day in the studio with the band, or for an author it could be advanced drafts, a $1000 dollar option to get your name as a character in a new book, signed special editions, you name it.

It may not get you to the top of the NYT Bestseller List, but if done with an eye toward your core fans, you can absolutely make a living on your art.

There is a whole list of them at: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/

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So the model is to be that people good at making art should not make money for making art. They should make money from ancillary things? That doesn't seem like a very good way to things.

If programmers were paid that we we would get no pay for writing good working code. To get paid we'd have to man the support lines and would be paid based on the feedback we get from the people calling for help. Anyone here willing to ask their employer to switch to that model?

That's more or less the way IBM, HP, EDS, Infosys, Wipro, SAP, Keane, Red Hat, and Pivotal work. As I understand it, they all get paid some for selling software, but they get paid a lot more for performing professional services — a lot of which are pretty closely analogous to manning the support lines.

The old statistic was that about 95% of programmers were working on company-internal projects, which means they don't get paid royalties for their code, because there are none. Instead they get paid, at least in theory, for satisfying their company-internal clients — whether that involves writing good working code, writing nonworking code, or answering support calls.

It doesn't necessarily mean that your job becomes marketing instead of art, but even just a bit of connecting with your fans can make a huge difference.

And this is more focused on creative fields, because they have been so widely 'disrupted' by technology. I can download a book from a torrent site, but I can't download a programmer's time at working on a problem (though I could of course download OSS code, but that's a whole other thing).

So books used to make a lot of money (for very few people), now they don't make as much money, but the positive thing is that more people can get in on the action, because the costs of distribution are so much lower. And in this author's case, she's basically ranting about how fans of her books aren't paying her, when she could spend that energy much more effectively by somehow connecting with and cultivating that fanbase. If they like her stuff, they'll probably pay her for something, if not a physical book.

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