Advertisements for Yourself
Our own Alan Jacobs is wondering how writers are going to make a living if content “wants” to be free. Here are some quick thoughts. I warn you, though, Alan: you’re not going to like them.
1. Advertising performance. The experience of going to a concert is very different from the experience of listening to a CD or an mp3. And so far as I know, nobody has said (yet) that concerts “want” to be free. One possible direction for the music industry to go (and it is already going there) is to have distributed music be conceived as an advertisement for live performance. That’s an inversion of the way the movie industry works – big-budget movies are, economically, advertisements for DVDs – but so what? Who said there was only one model?
In any event, writing could go the same way. I wonder how much Malcolm Gladwell earns from writing as opposed to speaking? I’d bet he earns most of his money from speaking. Other writers could follow this model, though rarely on such a grand scale. Of course, this would only work for writers who can also perform, or who write in such a way as is conducive to performance. If this become a significant part of the economic model for writers, it could change the types of personalities who are successful at writing.
2. Luxury branding. Why do legitimate actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow do ads for watches or perfumes? Because the very fact that they are legitimate actresses lends them class, and that class can be monetized by doing such ads. The same is true for writing. Magazines like The Atlantic Monthly lose money. So why do they exist? Because they are the equivalent of luxury brands for writing, and add to the value of the Atlantic Media Group. A variety of talent – not only writing talent, mind you – will also be attracted to a luxury publication like The Atlantic who might not be attracted to a less-prestigious (though more profitable) trade publication. But this talent, once attracted, may be able to be monetized across the group. I imagine the same is true of publishing houses: there are both direct and indirect economic reasons to want to be associated with “legitimate” and “classy” writing, and not just with the dreck that actually pays the bills.
Can individual writers play the same game? It’s possible. Certainly writers who have established themselves as brands can monetize their brands in a variety of ways. But there may be a long-term model of various organs of publishing keeping a stable of writers who might break out into being high-end brands, paying them and losing money on them like a basket of options most of whom won’t ever pay off. And why not give these folks’ writing away for free? If the goal is to maximize the odds that one of them breaks through to a substantial audience, why limit the audience by keeping their writing behind a firewall? Again, though, this corporate branding model will have implications for the nature of serious writing if it becomes standard.
3. Writer as luxury good. Writing may be an ad for a performance by the star writer. Or quality writing may be an exercise in luxury branding for the corporation that keeps the writer in its stable of writers. But the writer him- or herself may be a luxury good, for a patron who wants one around. This used to be the way much of culture worked. We may be going back in that direction.
I just got back from the opening of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (reviews forthcoming soon, I promise). One of the notable things about Stratford is that it depends very little on government largess. Rather, it gets its revenue primarily from ticket sales, and secondarily from concessions and memberships. And over time, the third category – member contributions – has steadily increased as a percentage of overall revenues. As a consequence, at the same time that Stratford is offering discounted tickets to draw new and younger audience members, it is also spending more time and energy thinking about how to please its most generous private contributors. Some time ago they built an exclusive lounge for members only, but it was getting too crowded, so they just built a second, even more exclusive lounge for upper-tier members. And so it goes.
The same model may apply to writers. It used to be standard for writers to seek the patronage of a wealthy aristocrat, whose patronage was valuable both directly (because it paid the bills) and indirectly (because association with the rich and well-born enhanced the writer’s own prestige, and got his work more attention from other worthies). Macaulay Connor says that the days of a writer depending on the favor of a Lady Bountiful have gone out, but they may be coming in again. And it’s not obvious to me that catering to the desires and interests of a wealthy individual is more demeaning or more dangerous to the independence of art than catering to the desires and interests of a corporate patron or a mass audience.
In any event, if one is trying to attract the attention of the wealthy and discerning, it is necessary to get one’s work out there. Which, again, means turning to the best model for distributing one’s work widely and getting it talked about. Which probably means giving it away.
These are only intended to be suggestions. The fact of the matter is that writing is, by and large, unnecessary. Generations got on just fine with nothing more than the Bible, the hymnal, Pilgrim’s Progress and perhaps the complete works of William Shakespeare to read. Some people give away their writing because they are trying to get paid work – but many will give it away because writing and, perhaps more so, being read provide satisfactions in their own right for the writer. So long as that is the case, the economics of the writing life will vastly skew towards the small number who can do specific kinds of writing on which a great deal of money depends – script doctors and sketch comedy writers and so forth.
I was just thinking about the return of patronage as a means of sustaining contemporary artists. The main difference between what may be the new patronage and classic patronage is that artists used to have to work for one patron at a time, and you can imagine the disproportionate effect this could have on the artist’s output. Nowadays, more money and better global communications and mobility means that an artist can have more than one patron, and can shop around to find patrons that will support his vision. The effect, I hope, is one where the patron has less influence over what the artist produces because the artist can better find patrons who wish to leave the artist’s vision unmolested, an improvement over classic patronage.
— Blar · May 30, 04:06 AM · #
Not that you are advocating a return to solo patronage arts, but I think that is a horrible idea. We moved away from that for a reason—mostly art rebels against it and insofar as writing is an art, it won’t stand for it. Writing must be kept public and it must be an affront to the public…but that is neither here nor there.
What I really wanted to say was this:
It seems that a lot of the argument against “information wants to be free” consists of people demanding to know what the world looks like when information is free—as if a failure to propose an adequate vision is proof that the sentiment is wrong.
It isn’t.
We live in a capitalist system that has not once failed to make a commodity of anything it can. You can think that’s awesome, or you can think that’s just plain depressing. I tend to think of it as both, but it’s the way it works. If writing, or songwriting, or poetry, or journalism, becomes free it will drive some writers out. But some writers will figure out a way to make it pay for their apartments and food. That’s the thing about capitalism, especially a well-populated capitalist country filled with literate, well-educated people. They will experiment with a variety of models and not one, but several of them will work and writers will go on as a class. Not all writers, and certainly not all the writers that are around today.
Or hell! Maybe writing will go the way of macrame and people will only do it for trade at flea markets, but I doubt it. Writers tend to be a creative and educated lot. They’ll find a way to answer the challenge. And whatever they do that works, that will be the answer to the challenge of “what does the world look like when writing gets its wish to be free.”
Our inability to figure out exactly how it works does not serve as license to continue placing an artificial price on the writing product.
— Jim · May 30, 04:40 AM · #
It’s interesting that it’s Alan who raised the point, since I have always thought that professors ought to be pretty sanguine about free distribution of books. Or at least that they should be pretty sanguine so far as their self interest is concerned. Perhaps Alan’s own case is different (or perhaps literature does better than philosophy), but my sense is that academics are often hurt poorly served by copyright—their books come out with outrageous prices that dissuade potential buyers. Even the most avid grad student can only buy so many $60 books.
That’s far from an explanation of how an entire economy of free books could be constructed, but I think there is a potential class of authors who might find free books an ok deal.
— Justin · May 30, 05:03 AM · #
Artificial price? Is he asking the government to enact price controls or price supports?
— Reticulator · May 30, 05:28 AM · #
Justin,
If it makes a difference, Prof. Jacob’s books are not the $60 textbooks intended for sale to a captive market you’re imagining. He writes real books for a general audience.
Noah,
Here’s another funding scheme used by a local Shakespeare theater: executive training.
— Matt Frost · May 30, 10:11 AM · #
All of your ideas point to a massive change in the way writing is done. I don’t like that scenario, but it is probably accurate.
— Andrew · May 30, 12:56 PM · #
I would suspect that the model that’s most likely to emerge is something like the “affiliated writer” model. In this model, writers will have to affiliate with some institution – a university, think-tank, magazine, whatever. The institution provides some basic levels of income and the writer adds to the institution’s prestige (which seems to be the coin of at least the modern university). The digitizing (that’s an awful word, sorry) of writing will continue apace, meaning that only some portion of the writing will actually be paid for directly; perhaps what will make up for it will be the indirect flows of contributions that will go to institutions that then support writers. Of course, one problem with that model is that until you’re prestigious enough to warrant the “writer in residence” slot, it’s hard to see how you can make things work. Maybe you’ll have to work for a while as a bank clerk; I hear that worked out ok for some guy named Tom…
— Michael Simpson · May 30, 01:12 PM · #
I’ve had enough to say on this, so I’ll just add (along the lines of what Michael S says) that the arts have never been able to flourish without patronage of one kind or another. The patrons four hundred years ago were Popes and dukes while today they’re universities and arts councils, but the principle is the same. And artists under patronage have to be very careful not to alienate their patrons. . . .
I am manfully going to resist getting into a debate with Noah about what is or is not “necessary,” contenting myself with a quote from Auden: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
— Alan Jacobs · May 30, 01:23 PM · #
Alan: Indeed: “Men have died, from time to time, and the worms have eaten them. But not for love.”
— Noah Millman · May 30, 02:22 PM · #
This seems like a kind of silly discussion. Writers have always got paid by selling their writing. Just because that guy put his book on line and no one bought it doesn’t mean that Steven King is suddenly going to go broke. If you create something people want to read enough, they will pay for it, whether with their cash or their willingness to look at advertisments. If writers at TAS want to get paid they could have ads on the sight and a value for their collective work would be established by the advertisers and they would get a piece of it. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something here.
— cw · May 30, 03:19 PM · #
If an ok freelance writer, or an average novelist, or even an above average novelist did either one of your first two suggestions I am confident they would starve to death. The only people those ideas could work for is people like Chuck Palahniuk who can draw 500+ to a reading or Douglas Coupland who has the ability to turn himself into a brand. But that is more about their style/subjects as writers then anything else. Someone like Michael Ondaatje, who is a great novelist, didn’t draw a 1/4 of what Palahniuk did when each came to my city (yes, I know, “Fight Club” but Ondaatje’s “English Patient” did win an Academy Award)
— Dave · May 30, 05:39 PM · #
Noah, here’s another idea: I just remembered that in the early 18th century, when Alexander Pope decided to translate Homer’s Iliad, he asked for people to fund the project by buying subscriptions, which would get them copies of the book (when it was finished) and the author’s undying gratitude. The subscriptions were quite expensive by the standards of the time, but many people signed up (some buying a dozen or more), and in the end Pope made a ton of money from the subscriptions and later sales — the scholars I’ve read think he made the equivalent in modern currency of around a million bucks, which he used to buy an estate on the Thames. Hmmm. . . .
— Alan Jacobs · May 31, 02:18 PM · #
There’s probably a satirical essay to be written about “If Alexander Pope Had Been a Freetard.” He posts his work on enormous sheets of parchment under a canopy on a London street, with quills available for passersby to edit his translation. Eventually a “community” emerges, enthusiasm grows, and contributors decide that more texts should be added to the list of translated works. Then deadlines are missed amid recriminations and hard feelings, some of the participants stalk off in a huff, and lo, the project is forked.
— Matt Frost · May 31, 02:45 PM · #
Brilliant idea, Matt — except instead of an essay, how about a poem in heroic couplets?
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 2, 07:25 PM · #