Are Writers Powerless to Make a Living in the Digital Age?
publishingperspectives.com
publishingperspectives.com
Well, it's working for Joe Konrath[1], Randall Munroe[2], Felix Salmon[3], and others. They've got very different models, but each has company for theirs. (Not that it's easy to break in, but it's also really hard to break in to traditional publishing.) It's very strange to say that people can't make a living writing on line, while ignoring the folks who are actually doing it.
Worse is this: "If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it’s a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants."
What gives writers clout, at a social level, is that people are reading their stuff, and taking it seriously, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the size of their paycheck. In the tech corner of the world, The GNU Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are both essays that had a huge influence, and not because of how much either author got (belatedly) paid. Or, to be a bit of a homer, for a minute, you can't really judge pg's influence by his royalties on Hackers and Painters. I'm not sure he could live well off the royalty checks --- but I'm pretty sure no one cares.
What is a future like in which most authors of book-length texts need a day job? More like the present than one might think. Most authors need one already.
[1] http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ --- online novelist; paid content
[2] http://xkcd.com --- online cartoonist; free content, paid swag
[3] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ --- the blog is his job
It's like when people talk about technological disruption in the music industry and point to Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails pricing experiments as evidence that everything is going to be OK: it's a positive sign, but it's not really proof of anything. Disruption works to the benefit of some and the detriment of others, but it's still unclear that this balances out in a desirable way. Would literature suffer if authors had to sell t-shirts to survive?
Without some relatively reliable model the future looks like one where everyone who wants to eat has to scramble to find a new business model and pray that it doesn't get devoured by an established player, a mob of pirates, or one of those pesky "disruptive" startups. To the HN crowd, this seems like business as usual. From the perspective of content creators of any kind this looks like a giant content-devouring blob that occasionally ejects a nickel if you utter the right incantations.
Throughout history, writers, painters, artists, have always had a hard time coming by. Even the ones that are very popular now, retrospectively. It was never a "reliable business model" to rely on creative persuits. If money is your sole incentive, it's better to chose something else.
Surely, there are some that get really popular (either because they are talented or get noticed some other way) and can live from the proceeds. Some even get crazily rich (write an Harry Potter). But those are a small miniority.
Technological disruption, or different capitalization models haven't really changed this basic fact.
I don't have anything constructive to add about the number of professional journalists, but I think they belong in this discussion as well as the "trying to sell books" crowd.
An author isn't competing directly with Radio, TV or Cinema, in fact the three are generally seen as complimentary markets. I've barely seen a good/great movie in the past decade that hasn't come from a book. From these films made from books, they explode the sales of the books.
Movies and TV is never going to replace literature, the cost->outcome ratio is far too big for movies than it is for books. I'm a writer, I'm currently working on a novel and I only have to do a couple of hours a night to be doing 1,000 words a day. Supposing I'm hitting only 250 words an hour (about 1/2 of what I usually do and I'm by far from the ideal writing situation that I used to have when I was working as a reviewer; this would easily factor in editing and other work for sale) it would take about 320 hours to write a novel length book would cost me as an author about 3300 dollars (as I'm unlikely to get paid any more than ontario minimum wage if I get a second job), which would more likely be 2500 after taxes.
That's 2500 dollars for a book you could publish. Worst case, self-pub an eBook on Lulu at $0.99 with their 50% royalty rate and you'll only have to sell to 5,000 people to break even. If you actually sold the book, you're likely to see between $2,500 to $5,000 for a first-time advance at a genre imprint, which means break-even or profit from the get go.
Break even for a movie is in the millions of dollars. Survivability for most TV shows is in the millions of viewers.
There's such naivety, yes traditional publishing sales have diminished and hasn't been immediately translated into eBook sales of the same figures (no shit sherlock the books cost a lot less, meaning there'll actually be market for more books for the same dollar value). In the 1940's 60% of the US population went to the cinema weekly. Since the late 1960's it has been steady at 10%. IIRC Nielson reported a 6% decline in TV viewership between 18-34's during the 2010 summer months.
Markets change, which is a fact of the free economy. The written word isn't going to die off because the paperback declines. Video isn't going to die off just because we stop going to the cinema or watching TV.
Just look at webcomics and the dozens of artists who are self-sufficient because of it. Look at Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade, they employ eight people besides themselves because of a webcomic and this is before the traditional medium (comic books) are seeing the kind of declines that newspaper comics are.
That's the case for the news journalists but not for the specialist media which I'd suspect employs rather more. I know I don't buy IT magazines any more because websites do the job better; I can see other fields heading in the same direction, and you're then competing against fan blogs with vastly lower costs.
Meanwhile - the artists continue to shack up ever closer with 'big content' and their IP lawyers... a group toward which all their romantic cliches espoused the most profound hatred.
in depth counterpoint:
http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...
Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I could see your point.
The intellectual class has been permeable for a long time. Even in the very old days, a gifted boy from a humble background could become a man of the cloth, making a good livelihood while pursuing his intellectual interests. Reading and writing was in short supply for most of the Middle Ages, but by Shakespeare's time many boys and girls received a solid basic education, if only "small Latin and less Greek".
The university system of the twentieth century created an academic class that unfortunately became nigh-synonymous with intellectuals. But people like that are paid employees who don't depend on writing for the general public. Lanier must be referring to another kind, the proverbial struggling writers. Maybe I'm blinded, but I certainly don't see how they rely on a general scarcity of knowledge to provide value!
For years television companies paid top dollar for content so that they could create crowds for their advertisers. Because there were very few people capable of even reaching a large crowd (ie: there were large distribution barriers), there was, relative to now, a scarcity of media in this arena.
Provided you got the right distribution, it didn't really matter what you put out there because there were so few people capable of operating at scale (again this goes for all industries, from Hollywood to journos). I did a lot of consulting for Time Warner about 2 years ago, and one of the things I heard their executives say over and over again was "We think there will always be a market for our premium content." They fundamentally failed to understand their business model: they thought it was providing high quality content to build crowds for advertisers, while in fact it had nothing to do with the content (the content was just the means, not the ends). In this sense Google is their prime competition (same ends, far cheaper means), and is absolutely eating their lunch.
The other thing they didn't understand is that people simply don't have the hours in the day anymore. If 10 years ago you watched 10 hours of television a week, it's likely you now spend some portion of that on Facebook, youtube, blogs or some other media outlet that we consider "user generated." This hurt television more than the industry thought it would, again, due to the the fact that they were winning in distribution much more than quality, like they thought, and because as advertising approaches a zero-sum game linearly, the prices grow exponentially. Now that it is easier to capture the long tail cheaply, and to more directly target consumers, what traditional media companies have offered (the distribution mechanism) is no longer valuable. As a content filter, the publishing houses have always been crap, they just didn't know it.
The industry optimized years ago for this inability to hit the long tail: the information provided is extremely abstracted in order to provide mass appeal. Taking NYTimes as an example, general news source dominance led them again to optimize for what they THOUGHT was quality winning: they hired the best journos they could find, instead of industry experts with writing skills. When blogs allowed these industry experts to easily distribute their own work, the middle man was removed. Now these companies are so big and have optimized everything from their recruiting processes to their syndication for this model: high quality journos, high quality content. They are too big, and it's become very difficult for them to pivot.
This phenomenon is easily transferrable to almost all media industries, and is the general "cheapening" (I would call market-readjustment) of the value of media. It turns out people have more specific taste than the media industry gave them credit for (or was able to serve), and now that these specific tastes are easily served, the general, abstracted versions of these media have lost tremendous value.
Hope that makes sense, /rant.
That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselves on crap and have no remaining appetite to savor delicacies. But that might just be my provincial and elitist 20th century point of view. Anyway, we seem to basically agree.
Actually, in the age of the Internet and Google, special insight is precisely the scarce product amongst all of the unfiltered information.
Someone should do a "rotten tomatoes" for prognostication and taste making. Prediction markets may already fit this.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that bloggers have known about the Koch brothers for many years. The reason this guy had to wait until the New Yorker wrote about them might be that this guy doesn't read anything that isn't in the New Yorker.
EDIT: Changed the wording a bit. As Daffy Duck used to say: "pronoun trouble".
The pseudonym was because, if her cancer ever went into remission, she wanted to be able to get a job, and she thought it might be a handicap to have (quite rightly) savaged just about every major company in the industry. The announcement of her death was the first most of her readers had ever seen her name --- Doris Dungey.
EDIT: Counterpoint to Lanier, that is. Sorry 'bout that.
I think this sort of pushback was inevitable when the digital publishing revolution people talked about for decades finally happened.
My sister started a blog and after 3 years was making $200k/year. Not saying every blog or every topic will make this much, but it's certainly possible to make a good living as a blogger.
I like the idea of using a blog to build up a following which you then sell some more organised a long form content to in book/ebook form, similar to 37 signals although best results would be to not just recycle the blog content.
I'm going for the latter with my own blog, and I try to encourage it when possible.
Although it's a bit "dated" (2005), I think the implications explored in Epic 2015 are pretty interesting insofar as the traditional writer -> editor -> publisher model is going.
This might be a nice idea, but aren't Apple and Amazon directly competing right now? How is it that they are both holding a monopoly on ebooks? People like choice, if there really were one massive distribution system I would worry that it would become the new monopoly.
Lest we forget, many great authors (Dostoyevsky and Dickens) published their novels in serial form.
Writers don't define civil society. Get off your high horse and start writing content people like. Look how much money 37 Signals makes from writing.
Otherwise, broadly, first-cut, essentially the whole pile from Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, ..., Dickens, James, to the present and their goals, techniques, values, and traditions are dead economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally -- kaput.
Why? Still in simple terms, they never made it into the 20th century with its standards of information safety and efficacy from mathematics, physical science, medical science, engineering, medicine, and law of the early 20th century. E.g., for learning about people, f'get about Shakespeare, ..., and just read clinical psychology. Or, don't read 'writer' Henry James and read his brother psychologist William James instead.
The 'writers' didn't have to know much and, instead, wrote 'art' as in the 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion'. For the reader, it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people.
So, 'literature' is now for light entertainment. No one would try to do anything serious -- design an airplane, drug, computer system, bridge -- using the techniques of literature.
In the recent past, for media, the content was still from "the medium is the message". So, could pass out content, one size fits millions. Such content had to be of such broad interest and, thus, so superficial that it could be from a 'writer' who actually didn't know much about the subject.
Commonly a reader who actually knows something about subject X when reading work of a newsie about X sees right away that the newsie understands next to nothing about X and gets a lot wrong.
Now in great contrast, for each narrow topic, there are many experts who, as on Wikipedia, HN, Stack Overflow, eGullet, various blogs and fora, can, just for fun, write material of much higher quality for free and do.
So there are over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati and some unknown, large number of long tail Web sites so that the focused content is far beyond the old, one size fits millions.
Yes, 'literature' is gathering dust on the library shelves and otherwise nearly dead. We are losing nothing of any value. It should have died over 100 years ago. RIP.
And we are losing something dangerous that has profoundly hurt our democracy for over 150 years: We're losing the work of the newsies who just gush their emotions and otherwise distort and manipulate to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, and pretend that they are contributing to an 'informed electorate'. They've been building a massively, deliberately un/misinformed electorate with consequences -- the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the 1929 market crash, the Great Depression and, thus, WWII, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, the Great Recession, and more. I will leave details as an exercise. Hint: The Civil War started before Lincoln even took office and from essentially only the deliberately deceptive, inflammatory work of the newsies.
There's an important word about 'fiction': It ain't true. Then, even if in some case by accident it is true, there's no evidence, certainly no proof. It's junk best left on the scrapheap of history from long, ignorant, efforts in the struggle to build civilization.
The newsies have been among the most dangerous, destructive, and contemptible people in our democracy.
Yes, art is not "useful information" if you're regarding useful information as something you get out of a published mathematics paper.
And what is a "newsie"? I didn't understand the section about "newsies" since it's unclear what those are, or what they have to do with literature.
This line especially
> it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people.
makes it seem as if you don't understand the concept of "art", and want everything to be super literal and technical and devoid of any emotion. I can't imagine why.
Now society is changing, much of that function is replaced by "scientific literature." Fewer reasonable people go into the wild world of tabloid journalism, punditry and politics. There's competition now, pop science can fill those niches. It's entertaining enough while being more informative.
Writers overall are closer to the punditry end of the spectrum. They express themselves first and get the details later. Scientists get the details first. Their culture is becoming dominant through technology, through extreme real world effects. Writers as a culture will either catch up or become irrelevant. The frameworks of thought they tend to use are obsoleting.
The real problem writers face is not whether a new medium will make them less powerful, it's whether their profession should have power in its current form. People will pay for information that has a measurable effect on society, without which it falls apart. They will pirate what doesn't.
I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature.
I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmanioff.
I ask because I'm a programmer who's trying to develop an understanding and interest in all the "art" and "culture" that I've previously ignored. This includes learning the history and theory of things such as painting, music, and literature. If there's some easy failure of literature that I'm overlooking I'd like to know about it.
For the art part, we're supposed to get something from the text, story, content, etc. But there is little there but the content from the words; I take those words at something like face value; then I consider the content from those words and nearly never like it. Or, I like classical music a lot, but the words in English literature are a poor substitute. Although parts of English literature try to have 'musical words', to me the music is wildly inferior, So, I can't like English literature as music. So, I see nothing there to like.
Next, I see a lot to object to: I see people getting into trouble from doing foolish things, To me, that's not good in any sense.
Next, English literature was pushed down my throat when I wanted to study math, physics, music, etc.
Next, the claims that Shakespeare is so 'great' are to me basically lies. The claim is not at all self eviden, and no serious attempt is made to make such a case. So, English literature looks like a self-perpetuating academic flim-flam that wastes the time of students as warm bodies to give employment for people pushing the flim-flam,
Maybe 300 years ago English literature was comparatively good, other things considered. Maybe it was pursued by the rich in England so now taught so that the rich won't have a 'special advantage'. I believe that it is long past time just to stuff it.
A serious review of how to write a movie script would be more welcome.
http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-word...
Isn't classical music just a bunch of people playing a boring melody on strings and then you read the program guide and it tells you it's meant to symbolize a meadow with a river running through it?
Language of Music.
There is a 'language' in music. Actually you must know a lot of the language quite well. You learned the language if only because of the hours or so a day you have been exposed to music via TV, radio, movies, and more. By hearing the music in this language, you have picked up the language.
In simple terms, the language has some sounds that correspond to and somehow express emotions. That is, for each common emotion, there are some sounds that express it. For the common emotions, people know some corresponding sounds very well.
To get started with the language, play something just one note at a time on just the white keys on a piano. Start on C, play some other notes, and end on C. Then what you will hear is that some emotional experience starts, continues, evolves, and develops, and then ends.
Why do you hear this? Because starting on C and playing just on the white keys you will hear that the music is just in the key of C major. You know the key of C major very well, will know that the music is all in C major, and will recognize when the music gets back to C and seems to end. Indeed, in much early music, it gets back to C too often and sounds boring and then, from hitting C too often, irritating. That is, each time the music hits C it seems to stop; so, each few notes the music seems to stop, and that's about as much fun as a car that goes down a road but stops each few feet. Why did the music return to C so often? Because the composer was not very good and couldn't think of anything better to do.
So, start on C, go through this and that, and end on C. Due to the language you have learned, the return to C sounds like the music 'resolves'.
Then for the goes through this and that, if get away from the white keys, then things sound different. Why? Because your ear has been very well trained to hear leaving C major. Leaving C major can add variety to the this and that in the middle. So, when you get back to C, the resolution feels stronger.
For more in the language, playing more than one note at a time is 'polyphony' and offers a stronger beginning than just C itself, more variety during the this and that, and stronger resolution as we end. You have already learned these things as you learned the language.
The variety of polyphony is large and permits sounds that are fairly clearly like anger, frustration, happiness, tension, anticipation, and, of course, resolution.
E.g., if play two notes together that are close in frequency, then the sound is harsh and strident. So, the sound can represent anger, tension, or danger. You won't miss this part of the language for even an instant.
E.g., for anticipation, the note one lower than C is B, and it is in frequency close to C, that is, only a semi-tone lower. When the music plays B, you anticipate, correctly from the thousands of hours of music you have heard, that next the music will play C and 'resolve'. If the composer does not play C next, then he can delay the 'resolution' and keep you 'hanging' and strongly continue the this and that part. Actually, you know this very well. So here is some musical language you understand for 'anticipation'.
Then for Exercise 1 in Composition 101 to create some extended musical experience, start with something with a little tension, add this and that with a lot of tension, anticipation, etc., and then resolve and end.
There's some advertising music that does this effectively in just 21 notes: To be more explicit, as you play on the white keys, starting at C and going up (in frequency, to the right) you will play D, E, F, G, A, B, C -- easy enough to remember.
Well the first seven notes are C, D, E, C, D, B, C. I will put after each note the number of beats:
C 1, D 1, E 3, C 1, D 3, B 1, C 3.
Wonder of wonder, for some music trying to sell soap or some such to millions of TV viewers, it starts on C, uses just four notes, and ends on C. We're talking really simple musical language here: Anyone who doesn't know that much musical language won't have money enough to buy the soap anyway!
Then next seven notes are
D 1, E 1, F 3, G 1, E 3. F 1, D 3
So, these seven notes are much the same as the first seven except start just one note higher, on D instead of C. So, starting higher, there sense is that something has progressed. Since these seven notes do not end on C, the music seems not to be over and the viewer is left hanging, that is, listening for more, just as the advertiser wants.
The last seven notes are just the same as the first seven and end on C just as the ad ends thus resolving the music.
There is a little more: In the first and last seven notes,
C 1, D 1, E 3, C 1, D 3, B 1, C 3.
the first two notes are short and, thus, rise quickly; this is as if something was starting and helps get the attention of the viewer. The next three notes sound like a sigh and make the viewer comforted and more relaxed. The last two notes return to C with a nice resolution, especially since the B lets the viewer anticipate the C and, thus, follow along. All in just seven notes.
Hearing this you wouldn't miss the musical language.
A good musician with even just a violin, can add other elements of musical language, you readily recognize, with loudness, vibrato, brightness, harshness (press harder with the bow and play closer to the bridge), urgency (play faster and start notes suddenly instead of gradually), etc. Net, a good violinist can use musical language elements you already know well and, thus, be very 'expressive'.
For larger collections of instruments, can get much more in variety that can represent other emotions. Some of these representations are widely and clearly understood, and some, say, from some new music, are not. So, yes, there is a musical language, and some of it is widely understood and some is not.
In the end, in my view, classical, non-programmatic music is not so difficult to describe: The musician has an emotional experience that goes through various cases of this and that. So, he writes some music that roughly represents that.
If the music is 'good', then it is 'general' (sometimes people say 'universal'), that is, does well representing more emotional experiences than just the one the musician had and for many listeners seems to represent an emotional experience they have had, likely different experiences for different listeners.
One of the better approaches to reaching many listeners is to represent a person's yearning, typically for emotional security, and then struggle against obstacles with lots of variety during the struggle and finally resolution or victory. That is, everyone want emotional security, and nearly everyone has had struggles and pursued them with energy, frustration, anticipation, success, setbacks, etc.
My favorite example of such music is the solo violin piece the Bach 'Chaconne'.
The Appeal of Art and Music.
There is a fact about people and art: If people see some of their stronger emotions about some of their experiences displayed in front of them, then they like it, maybe because it confirms to them that they are not alone in such emotions. E.g., it can be that all 1000 people in the concert hall have had similar emotions.
People can also like music that displays emotions about experiences they have not had but would like to.
In movies, the effect is more particular: The music can combine with the film to suggest the intended emotion and, thus, make it easier for a viewer to 'get' what more specific emotional experience is intended to be communicated. E.g., in 'Star Wars', the 'Imperial March' clearly represents some power obsessed, brutal, militarism; a viewer can get that message from the music right away although just from the story it takes longer! That's part of why John Williams got paid the big bucks!
Tough to listen to the Brahms 'Lullaby' and not get the feeling of a mother's love for her child: There is a lot of gentle stroking and comforting sighing in that music! Similarly for 'Silent Night' which I caught on to well at about the age of three.
Tough to listen to the beginning of Beethoven's 5th symphony and not get that 'there's heavy stuff going down'. Lots of people have experienced heavy stuff.
Tough to listen to the Beethoven 6th symphony and not feel something like seeing a pastoral scene, say, a meadow with a stream flowing through it if only because this is programmatic music complete with bird calls.
So, programmatic music is a two edged sword: First, due to the program, it is easier to understand. Second, due again to the program, it is less general so that listeners who have not had, or don't want to have, the experience of the program won't like the music.
I know; I know; you had music lessons in the fourth grade, and the teacher told you none of this. Sorry 'bout that!
Literary Art.
For literary art, for me it is too specific: For the situations and corresponding emotions being presented, mostly I have not been in such a situation and even when I have very much both my thinking and emotions were very different.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions about Shakespeare! Teachers for six years, four in high school and two more in college, not counting the drooling Shakespeare fans for decades on PBS, told me that he had such great insight into people, e.g., manipulation, duplicity, self-deception, gullibility, ambition, collusion, loyalty, disloyalty, conspiracy, etc. Good to know that actually he didn't know anything at all about clinical psychology; that's just what I always believed!
So, finally you dusted him off: There's nothing there at all!
In my unique world of subtle hints, clues, creative ambiguity, hidden references (all that good literary stuff), a 'newsie' is someone who writes for a newspaper or other news service. Now, now: In not being willing to 'understand' 'newsie', you are insisting on being thoroughly literal. You must have had a heck of a time with nearly everything in English literature! Since in literature we are supposed to play with words, the meaning of 'newsie' should be clear enough!
Actually 'newsie' was from 'The Maltese Falcon' where the Bogart character said that a "crippled newsie" took a gun from the thug and he, the Bogart character, made the newsie give the gun back! There the newsie was likely someone selling newspapers! A big Shakespeare fan like you should be able, along with many millions of movie fans, to understand the vocabulary in an old Bogart movie! I'm open to still better insults for the target set, hopefully something really contemptible.
I like a good movie, but I know that it doesn't mean anything.
I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature. The teachers kept leaning back in their chairs, gazing at the ceiling, transporting themselves to old maid English literature teacher nirvana, and going all ecstatic about how "great", "the greatest writer who ever lived", he was, etc. May I have the airsick bag, please, right away? Oops, I guess in this classroom they are all gone; BYOB.
I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. I like it enough that at a late age, with too little talent, got a violin, took lessons, and made it through Bach E major Preludio and most of the Bach Chaconne, especially the center D major section. I still needed to practice parts of the Beethoven and Brahms concerti and the Massenet 'Meditation' from Thais.
To me some really nice music is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE
So, that's the Charles Laughton character, or me, lusting after the young Maureen O'Hara character!