epershand | Established: I am an asshole

Crossposts: http://darkest-light.livejournal.com/277448.html

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Established: I am an asshole

So, I was just reading Karen Healey's post and Saundra Mitchell's post about the Sarah Reese Brennan fan twitter assholery.

Some jerk downloaded Brennan's book illegally and then had the gall TO TWEET TO HER telling her she'd done so. Man, what a jerk.

Good thing I've never done something like that. #OhWait #DoesItHelpIfIUsedTheHashtag #reluctantPirate

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I've never illegally downloaded a book that was still in print, although I do wish there was a way for me to buy digital copies of all the books I lurk after in used bookstores. I do, however, illegally download music and TV, and I tend to (a) be pretty upfront about it and (b) refer to it jocularly as "illegally downloading."

I am well aware that I am not every pirate, and that my story is neither unique or universal, but here are a few stories of mine.

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I'll start this off my mentioning that I buy a large amount of TV and music. Wow do I. Wow is the iTunes Music Store bad for my wallet (fortunately I budget for it, because I know how much music I like to buy). Seriously, if I hear a random song that I like somewhere, I will go to the iTMS and buy the entire album. And then maybe another album by that artist.

But I don't always know what I want to buy, and that's a challenge. So also I download music. For the most part, this is on a pretty small scale--fanmixes are the major way I hear about new, completely random music these days.

Worse than downloading, I also UPLOAD fanmixes. I am a DISTRIBUTOR of music that is not mine to distribute.

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A few years ago I used to be a part of this music site. There was this teenage girl who would just post multiple albums a week, and pretty much whatever she posted, I'd download from her. In return for all the free music, people like me would send her cartons of cigarettes, which she couldn't buy legally because she was underage. How skeezy does that sound? Skeezy, right?

The vast majority of the bands whose music I got from there didn't make one red cent off of the fact that I downloaded their albums. The ones I found there and liked, though?

I buy their albums. I go see them in concert. I promote them to my friends and talk them into buying their albums. I put a song of theirs on a fanmix, letting at least a few hundred people at a time know how awesome they are (while simultaneously perpetuating the cycle of extra-legal music distribution).

To be fair, I am one out of thousands of people who used to follow this girl before she got shut down. I have no idea how many of her other regular followers wound up purchasing music as a result. I have no idea how many people who download my fanmixes purchase music by any of the artists as a result.

But of all the albums I downloaded for free from that site, how many would I have purchased without it? Exactly zero. I wouldn't even have known who the artists were.

I was really sad when that site went down. It was a major blow to my ability to acquire new hipster cred, let me tell you.

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Another thing. Broadway music. I like Broadway music a lot. I don't see a lot of stage productions, because I'm not in New York, but I do buy cast albums. Also, I'm a singer, so I buy sheet music.

So, Christmas of '09 my sister gave me a USB drive with The Last Five Years on it. She hadn't purchased it, she'd gotten a copy from a friend who had purchased it. At least I think he purchased it? And man, was that an incredible musical. It ripped open my chest and dragged my heart out kicking and screaming.

And it made me love the composer, and it made me hate the fucking composer, because how dare he write what he wrote in that fucking musical. Except I kinda sorta loved him. Resentfully. Fucker.

(My level of emotion about that fucking man and his fucking music is such that I cannot even have internal dialogs about him without them becoming profanity-laden. More profanity-laden than usual, I mean.)

So, I wanted to subsidize Brown in at least SOME way for all the torment and heartbreak and anger he'd given me. And I wanted to be able to sing some of his music. So I bought the sheet music for the musical.

A few months later Jason Fucking Robert Fucking Brown got into a well-publicized fight with a teenager over distributing digital copies of his sheet music.

In which he was very self-righteous about his rights to earn money every time someone sang one of his songs. In which he made similar arguments to the ones Healey and Mitchell and Brennan made last week. But mostly?

In which he looked like a gigantic fucking asshole.

(Pro-tip: if your goal is to make you, the famous rich middle-aged white guy, the hero and your interlocutor, the teenage starving artist, the villain, please make at least an attempt to get her name right. Or at least refrain from mocking her for correcting you.)

Last week, I was looking for pieces to audition for my chorus's upcoming anti-Valentines cabaret, and I went to the library and checked out Songs For a New World.

"Fuck you, Jason Robert Brown," I thought. "I'm not buying any more of your fucking sheet music. I'm getting it from the motherfucking library, so there."

But then I auditioned a piece from The Last Five Years anyway. Fucker.

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Anyway, what all this is meant to say is, a sea change has happened in the way people are producing and consuming media, and with the way they're interacting with the traditional gatekeepers of the media world. I realize that the old way things worked afforded you a living and that the new way doesn't. But the new way is here, and it's here to stay, and I don't want to be an asshole, but every time I hear someone shouting about how we should just go back to the old way? My main emotion is pity, not sympathy.

Like it or not, the way that you, author, interact with your intellectual property and the people who are consuming it is going to have a very strong impact on my willingness to consume it.

Cory Doctorow's fiction bores me to tears, but I keep valiantly talking myself into reading his books because I like his politics. Despite the way I feel about his works, I'm going to try very hard never again to send a cent in the direction of Jason Robert Brown.

And, to be fair to those of us on the consumption side of the line, things are confusing out there. I've been at concerts given by artists who say "Please don't buy my CD. Please download it illegally, I am trying to get away from my recording company." (I think we all know who that was.) Cory Doctorow is telling us that he makes more money by virtue of giving his work away for free. We've read Courtney Love on recording contracts. We've read Wil Wheaton on self-publishing.

I don't know what the next world of publishing looks like, but I can tell you this. Yelling at people like lucyham isn't going to get you there, and it's not going to keep you where you are either.

And I can also tell you this: when you say that the figures of people who downloaded your book would have put you on the NY Times bestseller list if they'd been sales, I've got to call bullshit. First of all, the vast majority of the people who downloaded your book were not people who would have bought it if it hadn't been online. They are people who wouldn't have known that your book existed. Second, you should probably take a look at the illegal download figures for the books that ARE on the NY Times bestseller list before you start making that sort of claim.

Maybe I'm just another one of the self-justifying piracy advocates who just wants everything for free, but I don't THINK I am. Because I value you strongly, author. I value the work you do, I live and breath it. I also value musicians, and the work that they do. And I value publishing houses, and the way they guide me to find good books. (I particularly value publishing houses like Baen, whose policy of handing out large number of free e-books, and whose high quality writers, have pretty much ensured that I'm going to buy my third copy of Cryoburn when it comes out in paperback.)

When I say that the old business model has failed and you need to find a new one, it's not because I don't respect the living the old one gave you. I liked that business model too, in a lot of ways--it gave me a regular supply of books that have been professionally copyrighted and marketed, with rather nice cover art, and let me line the walls of my house with them.

But, and I am only telling you this because I love you and what you do, you need to find a new way to make an income on your writing. Because I love you, author of printed books. But I also love the authors of my favorite webcomics. They give me their work for free, and let me read it when I feel like it without going to a bookstore first. And I subsidize them by buying merch and the occasional printed edition. I love my favorite radio personalities, so I give money during every This American Life fundraising drive and buy all the audiobooks by them that I can.

The way I find new authors to read, and new artists to support? Is almost entirely through the internet, and the things I can get from it for free. From authors blogs, from authors twitters, from recommendations on my friends' blogs and twitters.

This is pretty good for me, but in a lot of ways it sucks, it sucks MASSIVELY. Because, author, I really want you to be able to devote yourselves full-time to writing, and not have to take on the subsidiary tasks of being your own editor, publisher, marketer, social media guru in order to get an online following high enough you have sufficient True Fans to support you. OK Go's model is succeeding brilliantly, but I don't want to require that you be OK Go in order to succeed.

But I can't fix that, and neither can you.

ETA: This post is beginning to get a fair amount of attention, and I am on my way to work right now. I intend to respond to comments, but it's going to have to wait until this evening at the earliest. Thanks for your understanding!

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Yeah, the solution to being trapped inside a changing system/distribution model is not to scream at people who are on the frontline of the curve. It's to figure out how to move with the model. I, likewise, am not a fan of Cory Doctorow's fiction, but he is modeling a successful way to distribute work within the new framework. So, for that matter, is Trent Reznor! One interesting thing I note about both cases is the considerable power and following both men have, which I suspect goes a long way in terms of adapting to the model.

I know as a freelancer I'm definitely struggling with a tiny corner of this much larger issue, in the fact that it's increasingly easy for publications to get content free/at low cost, making it less appealing to hire people like me and pay them actual money. Do I adapt to that by yelling at people who give work away? Uh...no. I find a way to work within that framework and to provide a compelling argument for the value of paid journalism.

I think, re:Ok Go, etc, that we are starting to see more a shift here, with people building up big online fandom and turning that into a more concrete earnings model. One thing I love about this is the bypassing of the traditional gatekeepers; while record companies/publishers/studios/etc. do serve a function, sometimes they suppress good work and I like to see people subverting this model.

Yeah, most of the people who are having a lot of success with the new model are the people who have lingering power left over from the old model--Trent Reznor, Wil Wheaton, Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, etc. And they're now seeing that the model where they do all their marketing online and don't have to give up a share of their profits to a distributor is bringing them a lot more money than they had in the old system.

But there's a degree to which you have to be aggressive and pushy about meeting people in the new system that just doesn't work for a lot of people. The old system of traditional gatekeepers has a huge number of problems, but it's also really good at what it does--seeking out talent, nurturing it, and marketing it. Some artists don't need that, but some do, and the group that does is almost certainly larger than the group that thinks they do. I would love to see this part of the gatekeeper system continue, but I just don't know if the financial incentives are in place to let it survive without giving it the massive power it currently exerts in trade for those functions.

Yeah, that, as someone who is horrid at self promotion, is something that worries me too. I think also when you dedicate a lot of time to self promotion and you have to spend tons of time engaging with fans, etc. it makes less time to do creative work, which results in less total output. I know when I'm trying to meet social demands it I get stressed out and work less and produce work of poorer quality...there's got to be a balance point somewhere.

I think also, you know, the gatekeeper system DOES have a valid function in terms of sorting wheat from chaff. It sometimes tosses out good wheat in the process, but totally unregulated distribution of content results in a HUGE signal to noise ratio, making it really hard for work of good quality to stand out and get attention. (People say 'oh, but the good work will filter to the top' and that is to some extent true, but it requires a lot of floating in scum first.)

I actually think that you're an excellent example of someone who successfully uses social media for self-promotion in a *classy* way. From what I can tell, you produce a huge amount of work and give it away for free in the form of of blogging, tumblr, twitter, etc. You aren't promoting meloukhia the individual in an obnoxious way, but you're definitely getting your name out and recognized in a way that is converting into paid work.

I keep trying to figure out what a good gatekeeper system would look like without the publishing industry, and the closest thing I can come up with is the equivalent of fan fiction recommendations. I kind of shudder to think of what would happen with all the universe's slush if there wasn't an industry dedicated to returning it to authors.

I think there's an interesting situation going on with how people use social media right now in terms of promotion because for some people it's about promoting a personality, like say meloukhia The Personality, whereas for other people it's more about promoting work in general and trying to build a career based on work, rather than just on 'I am awesome and you all should love me.' I think that personality thing can backfire in a lot of ugly ways. (And of course in the 'social justice' community there's all kinds of entangled stuff going on that opens up an entirely new can of worms, like 'should people be paid for writing about lived experiences that aren't theirs when there are writers with those experiences available who aren't getting work because it's possible to turn to 'safe' people to write about those experiences?')

Checking out things like the original fiction category on Feedbooks gives me a VERY good idea of what happens when slush piles are allowed to gain sentience. It's baaaaad.

YES. ALL OF THIS TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. I keep thinking of this one lecture which Stephen Fry did, in which he patiently explained that people who are capable of paying for stuff tend to pay for stuff that they care about. And it's absolutely true. I don't buy less stuff because I can download. I buy more stuff, because I care about more stuff.
Re. Cory Doctorow, I adore both his writing and his politics. And because of both of those things, I have physical, paid-for copies of two of his books on the shelf right above my head and another one which I physically bought for my younger brother.

Re.meloukhia's comment on bypassing record labels-- YES. We have this one class in school where musicians and producers and radio guys and record execs come do guest lectures on their part of the industry. And one of the people I remember most was the CEO of a Canadian music retailing company who explained, in great detail, exactly the degree of fucked most small-fry popular musicians get when they accept a traditional record deal. I'll sum up his half hour-long explanation with: so fucked. People get record deals and think they're going to be the next big thing and end up broker than they were before. So while it's true that not every artist should be obligated to be Ok Go, many might prefer to be!

Huh, I would love to see that lecture by Fry. I will have to go seek it out, because it sounds fascinating. It is totally true--if you get me excited about your work, AND if you give me a lot of your work for free, I will pretty much do all I can to pay money for as much of your work as I can. If I really like your work, and I don't get a bunch of it for free, I tend to assume that other buyers are making up the difference and I don't have to care as much.

Ooooh, your class sounds fascinating. A lot of my thoughts about the values of record companies actually shifted a bit while I was watching LotMS--I had no idea that one of the functions of a record label was to sit down a band and teach them to be better at their craft. (HOWARD BENSON FTW). Maybe losing this functionality would be sad for the industry, but maybe it would promote more artists who already perfected the craft part of their work before they got signed.

*like*

INDEED. And then of course there's the fact that musical artists don't really get much money from music sales anyway, so it's not like you're actually robbing them of their living or anything if you download music.

Yeah. This post is in this weird middle ground between talking about music and talking about fiction, so I tried not to jump into any industry-specific issues.

One of the interesting things that the Saundra Mitchell post jumps into is the consequences for the author from the publishing company if their books don't sell well, which is the way in which music downloading does affect the livelihood of musicians. If you're selling fewer books/albums, then the publishing house/record label isn't going to give you as big an advance next time, and they're not going to spend as much time marketing you, and you'll lose out on any number of opportunities that you would have had if all the illegal downloads had been sales.

But that matters a lot more in a world where one artist is all sales, and another artist is all downloads. I think it's a lot likelier that the sales:downloads ratio is relatively uniform across the board. From the author's perspective, I see how all those downloads look like lost sales, but they really aren't.

Here I have some data to give: it isn't totally uniform. Bestsellers and so forth get illegally downloaded more, of course - there's just more demand for them across the board. But it isn't all to scale. I was told by someone at my publishing house 'You get illegally downloaded like a bestseller!' and wow, it's hard to think that by blogging/tweeting/whatever one is doing on the internet, which you hope will help your book, you're attracting more people to hurt you. Especially as I like the internet!

I agree with (and admire) this whole post. At the same time, as a toiler in the fields of the publishing industry, I know (and I think you know, but didn't quite say) that technology changes quickly and people's models of technology change slowly, and in the middle there is Fear. And very very few people act intelligently when they are living in Fear.

I am about to go click your link and look into OKGo, which I don't know.

Oh yes, you are significantly closer to the front lines of this particular issue than just about anyone else I know, and I can only assume that you have a much better idea of both its magnitude, and of the validity of my assumptions about its distribution. I have a bad tendency to forget that book piracy even exists because it's so much less mainstream than piracy of other media.

And you're absolutely right, every one of the reactions I'm responding to in this post is coming out of a place of abject Fear. I just... wish that the authors involved realized that? I'm not particularly good at being empathetic with fear--my response is always to say something along the lines of "ok, I get that you're afraid, but what do we do now to SOLVE THE PROBLEM?" Which doesn't necessarily help anyone move beyond fear when they're this deep in it.

Oh, I so know that reaction of "What do we do now to SOLVE THE PROBLEM?"

*shuts up before she says something egregiously age-ist*

Having shut up (*grin*) I'd be happy to talk more about my front-line view of the problem either here or in person, if you want. Meanwhile, I'll just mention the author I work with who believes the site that claims 180,000 illegal downloads of his book (which is on a relatively popular business topic but is in no way a blockbuster). I have several times had to bite my fingers to keep from saying, "Sweetheart, there aren't 180,000 people in the world who are interested in your book."

I think you're doing a couple of things here that are possibly problematic:

1) Reading authors being pissed at people downloading their books as authors trying to effect a solution by so doing.

2) Equating sampling music-to-buy-maybe through fanmixes with downloading entire books via torrents.

Okay, so the first thing is, we aren't necessarily trying to change anything or effect a solution in epublishing and piracy. Sometimes we're just mad!

Authors - traditionally published authors, I should say - are in a pretty awful position here. We're caught between our readers, or potential readers, and our publishers. As I said in the original post, every author wants their books available everywhere in every format, but for most of us who want to make a living at it, that is not up to us. It's up to our publishers. Most of whom are moving on this, but slowly, as big bodies of people tend to do. And then our readers blame us for any access problems and expect us to effect change, because getting in touch with a person who has a personal presence online is a lot easier than moving a corporation.

Sometimes we get mad about that. Sometimes, when people tell us that they downloaded our book, we want to express our hurt and rage. I'm having a lot of trouble seeing denunciations of "screaming" as anything other than a tone argument.

As for the second - writers, at least the kind who live online, tend to have a lot of freebies. You *can* sample my books, and Sarah's. The first two chapters of my work are up online at both publishers' sites, and I've included a lot of supplementary material at my own site. I've also contributed to non-profit efforts like the December Lights Project - with a free short story. And, being a ficcer from way back, I totally support fan uses of my originary material.

There's enough of my stuff freely available online for people to figure out whether they want to read my stuff, is what I'm saying. Samples! Take one! Tell your friends!

Authors can't hold concerts. We can't supply you with awesome merchandise like a Wonderella bobblehead doll. There is almost no way for you to support an author except by buying their books, and that is the only way we are able to remain viably publishable. (Yes, Cory makes it work. Cory has the skillset and passion to do so, and as I recall he was fairly flush when he started.)

There's something else about this argument which isn't totally connected to what you've said here, but it does concern me a lot: If the only people who can become writers are the people who can successfully edit, produce and market books without the assistance of publishers, then the only people who can become writers will be very privileged people - even more so than our current model. Quite apart from matters of personality, they will be people with sufficient time and money to do a lot of things for themselves currently handled by others. That rules out a lot of single parents, anyone who has a day job, and obviously is even more heavily slanted against people more likely to be from less privileged economic backgrounds.

I find that disturbing.

Here via link-hopping, and I'm ducking the main topic of discussion completely to pursue this tangent:

We can't supply you with awesome merchandise like a Wonderella bobblehead doll.

Do most fiction publishing contracts in fact prohibit the author from making and marketing her own merch? If so, that seems like a horrible waste! Because I think quite a lot of people would buy t-shirts for their favorite cult novels (just like for their favorite indie bands), but I don't see publishers having the slightest interest in producing them.

Oh, let me rephrase! I am not aware of any such contract. But most of us got into the writing game because we are writers, and make writey products. Many people also pursue other crafts - I am myself an excellent baker!

But webcomic people are by nature designy, arty people, and thus already tend to possess the skillsets necessary to put together designy, arty product to sell. Not that the effort of producing and marketing stuff isn't still effort that takes time from their art, but for most writers even getting good enough at design to make merch worth purchasing would be another whole thing that would timesuck from what we actually do best.

The general rule is that it takes 5 years to achieve competency at something, and 10 years to achieve mastery. Which is about right - I've been writing since I could, but I started *seriously* writing when I left high school, and sold my first novel seven years later. Some people take longer, some a bit less. I also devoted some of that time to blog writing, pop culture critique, volunteer work, and the aforementioned baking, all of which I'm pretty good at by now (as well as, you know, dayjob).

But I didn't put any time into learning how to put together awesome merch, and the thought of having to add that to my to-learn pile on top of, apparently, learning how to edit, copy-edit, design, market, and distribute my own books makes me want to crawl under my duvet forever.

Man if some of my favorite authors put up merchandise, even just a Cafe Press site, I would buy it.

Tone argument? Really? :-/ Writers are not an oppressed group. Appropriating social justice terms is not the way to go here.

Shit, you're right. I was thinking of the way it's female authors expressing their feelings here, and the way women get slammed with "screaming", but in the context of this discussion we're talking "all authors", and my use of tone argument is entirely inappropriate.

I apologise forthwith, to you and everyone else.

"I buy their albums. I go see them in concert. I promote them to my friends and talk them into buying their albums. I put a song of theirs on a fanmix, letting at least a few hundred people at a time know how awesome they are (while simultaneously perpetuating the cycle of extra-legal music distribution)."

I keep seeing this argument pop up, and while I'm very much in favor of cheap electronic distribution, this argument has some rather gaping holes in it.

Here are some ways bands make money:
-- people pay money to buy their albums.
-- people pay money to attend their concerts.
-- people pay money to buy their T-shirts.
-- people pay money to perform their songs in public.

Here are some ways authors make money:
-- people pay money to buy their books.

That's pretty much it.

Every revenue stream an author has depends, at some point, on people paying to read the stories they've written. An author has one kind of product. If you're a band, I can see it being a lot easier to transform one revenue stream into a loss leader and seeing it drive up revenue in other ways. But for a lot of authors, being blithely told that they have to come up with another way to make money is like having their one support knocked out from under them and being told they'd better find another way to hold themselves up.

I'm not saying there aren't going to be brutal changes in the market. What I am saying is that I'm not surprised that a lot of authors are, frankly, really pissed. I expect I would be, if changes in the marketplace were threatening my ability to put cash in the bank and food on the table.

Actually, no. Royalties are not the only way writers make money.

I discussed the issue of Making a Living as a Writer with several of my professors in grad school (I earned an MA in English/Creative Writing). These were all moderately high to exceedingly high literary authors, and they all told me that they made much more money doing residencies, appearing at writers conferences, doing guest lectures/readings at colleges, and teaching grad students than they ever had from their PEN/Faulkner award-winning fiction. There's a literary-fiction circuit where people can turn their art into commerce.

Since most of my publications have been out of that rarefied atmosphere, I haven't gotten onto the circuit. But even the others who write how-to sex books (where I've made most of my money) teach seminars on How to Write Erotica and How to Do Bondage Safely, and when I was writing about metaphysics I was paid to appear at several psychic-fair events and also made money doing individual readings.

I get furious when people illegally download my work, because it is in fact commercially available as ebooks. I have a website where people can read my blog (free samples!) and also click a simple link to get to most of my ebooks.

My books will never hit the bestseller lists, though they stay gratifyingly high on Amazon's selling lists. I couldn't survive on royalties alone -- though if I got more involved with presentations and teaching I could do a lot better. (I am working on this.) Nevertheless, as a writer in a niche market, I do have ways I can make money other than direct sale of my work.

I'm not surprised to learn that your professors were making more money from their other gigs than from literary fiction! I 'd expect that despite the other items they had lined up, the vast majority of that revenue stream came from the steady teaching gig. Which, if you're a writer not fortunate enough to land such, means you're gonna need a full-time job.

I know what it's like to have different revenue streams; I have a few of my own. One thing I've learned as the nation's most disorganized small businessman/consultant is that you need either dependable, repeatable business or intermittent business that earns you a truckload of money each time. (Cory Doctorow has, you'll note, begun appealing to people with deep-ass pockets by coming out with incredibly fancy versions of his books. Doctorow has the good fortune to be tapped into a well-heeled hipster geek market with the disposable cash to pay ridiculous sums for copies, however nice, of his books. More power to him.)

The problem with the other revenue streams you cite (beyond the part-time gig) is that they don't bring in enough, they're not repeatable enough, and they all require toil by the author, and no one else. How many literary festivals can a writer attend? How much money can they make off each? Worse, they all involve considerable individual effort on the part of the author, because the author has to schlep to all of these and provide service, individually and in person. The goal of money-making is to maximize your ways of making money, but the ways writers have to make money tend to all take away from writing time. And they don't pay as much as teaching college.

Really good post about a tough problem. The situation does suck in a lot of ways.

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Established: I am an asshole

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