Hi!
How was your Valentines? I spent the first part of mine arguing about the right and wrong way for writers to get paid.
Background
It starts with this post by Deanna Zandt. She's gotten a book deal with no advance and wants to fund writing the book full-time over the summer. She's asking for support from her community of readers, colleagues, and friends. The general idea is: send her a donation, and if she can get enough, she'll work on the book full time. $100 or more gets you a copy of the book with a personal thank-you. Everyone else gets positive karma.
It grows with
this twitter conversation. Many questions and concerns get raised, around both the model and around Deanna's implementation. During that discussion, two other examples of crowdfunding come up. Matt Novak's
Paleo-Future Magazine which is currently accepting funds, and Robin Sloan's
Kickstarter project which has been successfully funded, and published.
Both Matt and Robin chose a range of rewards for donors. Matt's goes from $3 for a thank-you in the magazine, to $15 for a copy, to $2,000 for a 2-page ad. Robin's went from $1 for a PDF copy, to $11 for a physical copy, to $59 for 4 copies of the book shipped internationally along with your name printed as a backer.
Matt and Deanna's system charges you immediately upon donation, Robin used Kickstarter which only charges backers if the minimum funding goal is reached.
Which is all just to say that there are many potential implementations of the crowdfunding model.
Unexpected Objections
During the past three years, I've had a lot of discussions with a lot of creatives, all centred around the same problem: How can we fund our work? This isn't new, it's been going on since the first priests worked out a tithing system to cover the cost of chicken entrails and ziggurats. It feels new, because the Internet has thrown a lot of the conventional ways into disarray and occasionally offered glimpses of a way of doing things that might be better than convention.
A lot is on the table: Holding down an unrelated job, commercial funding, government funding, publisher advances, working-for-hire, inheritance, an academic career, freelancing, theft and graft, patronage, marrying someone rich, winning a lottery, merchandising, royalties, homelessness. To this quiver of arrows, Kickstarter, Indie Gogo, Spot.us and others add micropatronage.
Yesterday's discussion opened my eyes. In my experience, the question has always been about whether it could word. Yesterday was the first time I heard from people who weren't even sure that it should.
Two Threads
It seems like there were two main threads of objection. One was to Deanna's approach in particular, the other was to the very idea of crowdfunding a writing project.
The price of creativity
The main objection to Deanna's implementation was that donors weren't getting much for their money. $100 for a book seems steep and there was no promise of payout for "investors" (a term which Deanna
regrets using - she hadn't intended to evoke venture funding). On the face of it, I agree with these complaints. $100 for a signed book seems like a bad deal to me.
But here's the thing: I don't know. None of us do.
The correct price of goods is very, very hard to determine. It is constrained on one end by the cost of making the good, but on the other end, it's constrained only by the willingness of the customer to pay. It's why Radiohead can release an album and charge
$0 to $80. It's why Starbucks can offer drinks for
$1.40 to $5.00 despite the difference in ingredients being only pennies. It's why Apple can charge a design premium (or is it a stupid-tax?).
Creative work is notoriously difficult to price. Creative work in the age of digital reproduction even more so. There's no lower limit to the cost of providing another copy of a digital good. It's all guesswork at this point and I welcome as many datapoints and experiments as possible. Who knows? Maybe we've all been woefully underpricing ourselves.
Holding ideas hostage
The second objection was to the very idea of asking for money before the project started. People wondered why creators couldn't fund their work themselves through other projects, jobs etc. Here, the attitude toward cultural production became so alien to me that I don't feel like I can paraphrase it fairly. So I'm just going to quote some tweets verbatim:
Sounds like a potential legal minefield. She should get a job & write it in her spare time...
The idea doesn't look that appealing to me. If she has a job, can't she use her spare time, like the rest of us?
Writers should write before they know there's a paycheck coming at the end. Otherwise shows lack of conviction and passion.
We're talking about from the artist's standpoint. I doubt that guy's idea can have been good at all. If he thought it was he would have just bloody written it. It's what writers do.
Pair of tweets starting here:
Books and movies require materials and manpower to produce, a return on investment in these things is acceptable. I can understand needing finance to publish the book, but this should come after the creation of the work. People are paying for a story that doesn't exist yet, and will only come to fruition if a pledge target is met. As an artist, it makes no sense to me. You create for the sake of creating and sharing, money comes later.
Series of tweets starting here:
I'm nervous about grouping these together, because while they sound related to my ears, I'm not sure if the posters would agree (I welcome corrections). Leaving aside the details of each case (Deanna is funding the future writing of a book, Robin was raising funds while writing and self-publishing a book) this attitude toward writing seems to me to be completely insane.
My feeling is if you find a way to get paid for your work full-time: TAKE IT, TAKE IT, TAKE IT.
An aside about videogames
Before I started writing about cyborgs & architects, I co-founded
Capybara Games. When we started, we were unproven, so we worked on two games in our spare time for free. Once they were done, we shopped them around. One was eventually released. The other never saw the light of day. Together, they were good enough to get us the attention of Disney, who paid us to make a cellphone game based on Pixar's Cars.
Once we started full-time game making, it was a constant balancing act between work-for-hire, speculative development, original IP prototyping, and original IP production. Funding these projects was a combination of sweat equity, development fees, tax credits, royalties from other projects, loans, grants, and unpaid overtime. When you run a studio, you've got mouths to feed and bills to pay. This adds up to a monthly burn rate. Keeping the studio running means ensuring that every month you have cash to cover the salaries of your people. At some level, the source of that cash becomes irrelevant.
Here's the thing about money: it's fungible. If I give you $25 and you buy a $25 steak,
we can't say for sure that I bought you a steak. The only thing we can say is that I gave you $25 more than you would have had otherwise. If you give me $200,000 to make a video game, all you can say for sure is that at the end of the day a game got made to your satisfaction (or not) and I got $200,000. Maybe the money came from you, maybe some of your money funded another project. Maybe money from another project funded yours. Maybe we took out a loan, hoping that future income would cover the costs of current work.
Here's the thing about writing: when you are a writer, you become a studio of one. You have a monthly burn rate and some sort of source(s) of cashflow. For your work to be sustainable, cash-flow needs to meet or exceed your income. That's it.
The strength of my convictions
I can't speak for Robin, Matt, or Deanna, but I have far more projects and ideas in the early stages than I have time to execute.
At Capybara, whenever it came time start a new project, we always came up with far more ideas than we could afford to make. We made choices. We picked the ones we liked best, the ones that seemed most do-able, and the ones that seemed most likely to do well. Did we make the most whorish sell-out games we could imagine? No, because that would have been awful. But we didn't ignore commercial considerations either. We wanted to make games that we could be proud of but that other people might like because we wanted the studio to survive.
I don't think there's a moral dimension to this question. I don't think that asking for feedback or money before the work gets started (whether it's from your publisher, your family, strangers on the Internet, or your own bank account) displays a lack of conviction. One way or another, the work has to get funded. Everyone's got a monthly burn rate and cashflow.
Tim's attitude that his decision to arrange his professional life in one way somehow shows more conviction than Robin's alternative arrangement makes no sense to me. Both writers found backers to fund their work. The fact that Tim's backers are unwitting doesn't make a whit of difference.
Writing is work
Andy's argument - that books and movies require manpower to produce, while writing doesn't - makes even less sense to me. (I really, really don't understand this attitude). Writing takes skill, practice, and time. It's inherently speculative work, having more in common with RnD efforts than with the linear payoff of running a print shop or flipping burgers.
When you sit down to produce a work, they only thing we can say for sure is that the quality of the final product will be distantly related to the time and effort put in and that commercial success will be only distantly related to the quality. This is very much like RnD with the many dead ends, scrapped projects, unexpected breakthroughs, and successful (or failed) commercialization attempts.
It's a risky business all around. The nice thing about writing is that it's a relatively cheap risk. One strategy is to bear that risk yourself. This is what Tim and Andy want to do by writing a book to completion before attempting to commercialize it. Another strategy is to share the risk with a corporation. This is the function of publishing houses that provide an advance or production support. The crowdfunding approach chooses a third path: spreading the risk onto willing backers.
When Andy calls asking for funding to cover the writing of a work "
holding your ideas hostage", but sees no problem with locking those same ideas behind a ticket or cover price it boggles my mind. Robin got enough funding to cover the cost of his project and then he
gave his ideas away! One way or another, the cost of the project gets covered. It's just business models! We all hold our ideas hostage at one point or another.
The morality of income
I keep coming close to saying that there is no moral dimension to this discussion at all, but I don't quite think that's true. For instance, I'm generally anti-heroin-sales-to-fund-cultural-production.
Every source of funding carries with it costs and burdens. Artists who accept government funding face one kind of pressure, while artists who accept commercial income face another. Even people with wealthy spouses have to give the occasional back-rub.
Tim's choice to fund his novel through a job means that he's severely limited how many hours a day he can put into writing the novel. He's chosen to cripple his output in order to cover his costs. This isn't a moral choice, it's an investment strategy.
Most creators that I know would gladly give all of their work away for free, if it weren't for the cashflow problem. But there is a cashflow problem and the money comes from somewhere. So they sell copies, or merchandise, or write grant applications, or do work for hire, or take on other jobs. Whatever gets you through the week. In that light, I just can't bring myself to see asking for funding directly from your audience as an especially weak or morally-wanting move.
There are costs and benefits. As Joanne McNeil
pointed out, it's not inherently good that author's are being asked to become their own cheerleaders. There are implementation questions and scaling issues. There are problems around quality and access and fairness of any system of funding. But these are practical questions. What surprised me were the moral questions about whether it was even right for writers to ask to be paid for their labour.
The work has value. One way or another, we gotta get paid.
As Harlan Ellison said, "I sell my soul but at the highest rates, the highest rates."
Pay the writer (strong language warning).