Daily Rant: Pay the Artist
I should be working on either The Legacy of the Dragon Bone Flute or Book Four of Tears of Rage, but I feel compelled instead to speak once again on something that’s been bugging me for a while and has kind of come to a head recently. This could be considered a follow up to a self-serving blog post I wrote a while back I: A Call to Arms, but the tone of this isn’t so much looking for people to support artists but more of a calling to task of people who exploit us, whether they acknowledge the exploitation or not.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook may have noticed that I’ve changed my profile picture a couple of time over the last few days. For those who just follow my blog, if you head over to my Twitter or Facebook accounts, this is what you’ll see:
This image originates over the Hollywood film industry paying the visual effect companies next to nothing, and reaping huge success at the box office while these companies are forced to lay off many of the workers and artists who created the stunning films that dominate Hollywood’s top grossing films list. This recently culminated in the VFX company Rhythm and Hues getting snubbed at the Oscars for the work they did on Life of Pi by director Ang Lee. In a nutshell, Ang Lee did not thank the effects studio in his speech for winning best director, and despite Life of Pi winning a slew of Oscars, including best director and best visual effect, AND raking in a metric crapton of money, Rhythm and Hues is forced into bankruptcy.
Here’s a few articles about the situation:
io9
Hitfix
The Big Social Picture
VFX Soldier
I think this stems from a larger issue in our society, and I’m going to approach it from a writer’s perspective, but I think that it applies to all creative endeavors in our media saturated society. The bottom line is, in this what should be considered the golden age for artists, when we can truly take control of our own destiny with all the tools for getting our work out in front of people who will enjoy it, the people who are enjoying it we don’t really want to pay artists for their work.
Here are two quotes from a 3 star review of First Chosen, book one of my Tears of Rage Sequence:
“Price for the price it could of been longer…” and “I would recommend this book to those who read the genre however the shortness of this first book and it’s price would have me recommend other books before it.”
First Chosen is roughly 60,000 words. When I released it, I’d priced it at $2.99. For much of 2012, I’d priced it at $.99. So, the reviewer got it for, at most a penny under $3. I know people who pay double that on a drink from Starbucks. Hell, that’s less than a gallon of gas, and three times less than the cost of a full-price movie (four times as much in some places).
A writer friend of mine recently posted this to his Facebook account:
“Got a note from a fan who loved my books but won’t pay the ‘greedy bastards’ (publishers) anything more than $2.99 for the ebook versions. Huh.”
Now, this writer is an internationally-acclaimed and bestselling writer and his books range from $7.99 to $13.49 in English language ebooks, with the most common price being $9.99. His work is first rate, and his books reach a word count in the hundreds of thousands. If you don’t reread his books multiple times, you just aren’t going to get the whole story. That’s hours and hours of entertainment less than dinner and a movie, a few drinks at a bar with your pals, or any number of other entertainments that last a fraction of the time it would take to enjoy one of these novels.
At my storytelling shows, I’ve had people come up to me who I’ve known for years and years and years and ask me if they can have a free signed copy of one of my books, and then they seem to get all disgruntled when I say, “No.”
“But wait,” you may be asking yourself if you’ve followed me for a while, “don’t you give away your ebooks for free on Amazon every once in a while?” As a matter of fact, I do. Just like publishing houses sometimes give out complimentary copies at conventions and book fairs to generate buzz. However, that is on my terms and my choice of when and how I market those free days. A practice which will soon be coming to a close, as Amazon is making it hard and harder to use those promotional days to gain any real outreach.
The point is, that people seem to think that the entertainment we artists provide isn’t worth giving us enough to earn any kind of a decent living.
And here’s the point that most people don’t seem to get: you’re not just paying you money just for that one book, comic, song, video, performance, etc. You’re paying for the all time, years and decades, that the artist spent honing his or her craft. The hours and hours of constant crap we slogged through producing to get to the point where we managed to create something other people found worthy of their leisure time. Hell, even if we’re talking about just the work in question, say First Chosen for example, if you get that book for $2.99 in ebook format, you’re paying .00005 cents a word.
I could rant on further, but I think this image I see pop up on Facebook from time to time. It’s about musicians, but again, I think it can apply to any artistic endeavor.
I hope and pray that attitudes change, and that we can somehow as a society come together and celebrate innovation in the arts, across all mediums. As I said earlier in this rant, this should be a golden age for artists across the board. We have more tools and means at our disposal to get our work out to the public. The problem is, so much of the public, either individuals or corporations, don’t want to meet us in the middle. With that mindset, eventually, we all lose.
/endrant
