Chekhov’s Mistess

Laura Kinsale on “Pay the Writer”

The following is Laura’s response on seeing the Harlan Ellison video I posted yesterday, “Pay the Writer:”

LOL, well, I of course being a cynic—not without reason—love this, though it’s very un-politically-correct these days to say so. Bless Harlan for coming right out with it, expletives and all.

This whole thing about giving stuff away for free…Ellison uses the standard analogy of “would you work for nothing?” Writers gotta eat, and most people do (barely) acknowledge that.

But work is also a soul issue, and so is the money associated with it. People care about their salary for more reasons than just what it can buy. They care because it deeply matters in terms of human worth. The value of time, the value of mind, the value of self. I spend an average of a year, full-time, writing each of my books. I sweat the proverbial blood and tears; I have scars on my forehead from beating it against the screen. I always work intensely to make my writing the best that I can make it. I do not do this for the money. In fact the actual money is counter-productive—nothing produces writer’s block faster than thinking about advances and contracts and deadlines.

Once the book is finished, though, the money and the sense of proprietary ownership in my own work do matter. Just turning it loose, saying, “Here, I wrote this, you can read it if you want”—That is a de facto devaluation of not only the work itself, but of the time and the significant part of myself that I put into it. It says, I put all this time and work into this, but it has no specific value to me or to anyone else. It’s free. It belongs to everyone, and by belonging to everyone, it erases me. This may sound like an ego thing, but it’s deeper—it’s as if the clamor of demand from readers ends up an enslavement of working for them. I don’t exist, the effort I made never existed—it came into being because ten billion monkeys hit keys at random intervals and who do I think I am to charge money for it? Especially when readers need reading material and they have to order online and they don’t get a paycheck till next week and the price of gas has gone up.

Gaiman and many others say the value is that someone will come back and read my other stuff. I guess this is just too cerebral for me. I can grasp it intellectually but it’s too cold a calculation. It’s a sales pitch, a commodity strategy. And my books are not, to me, commodities. Even though as a genre author I am well aware that they must compete in a marketplace, that awareness is never good for my writing. Over in my part of the pond, some very intelligent and lively blogs hold discussions on how much the author=the book in marketing terms, and when I say no, books are not commodities, they are art, people argue with me. At length.

So perhaps that’s why I’m so cynical. I do what do within the slavering maw of commercial consumerism. So I know it pretty well, and it’s scary as h*ll.

Personally, I will not write novels anymore if they have to be supported by advertising. It just breaks the bond between me and the reader. There is a bond, with a print book, with something that is bought and paid for. There’s more than exchange of filthy lucre. There’s an exchange of effort, even if it’s just the effort of lugging a book home from the library. Come to think of it, maybe this is why readers become so irrationally infuriated when a book doesn’t live up to their expectations. It’s an insult to more than their pocketbooks. It’s an insult to =them=, to their self-worth. I the author have asked for their time and their mind, and I failed them.

Conversely, if the reader takes what I wrote for free, they take my time and my mind for free. They get the fun, or fulfillment, or just something to wonder about, and I get zip. This is a deeper violation than just a monetary one. I think it’s the real source of Ellison’s outrage.

Well, it’s late and doubtless this is incoherent. But thank you for the space because actually I think I figured something out for myself here—why it is I am unfitted for writing books for free.

comments

Harlan Ellison is a genius and genius deserves to be remunerated.  Babylon 5 was a much better show because he worked with M.S.

Why should he give up his talent for nothing unless he gets in a charitable mood? Warners wanted his stuff, but not badly enough to give him something in return.  Do they let people see their movies for free? The last time I saw a Warners flick, I bought a ticket.  The video won’t be gratis either. A--holes.

Laura, when will you get a new book out?  I’m starving for your writing. . .I sympathized with the writer’s block, but I’m willing to pay for the tome.  Just get it out there. BTW, you’re one of the few writers, I will always be willing to pay for.  Tell your agent to use that line in selling your stuff if you like.

    –  (04/11  at  07:27 PM)

I came across this from a comment thread I read at “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” about the Harlan Ellison clip. Why I am commenting is this bit from Laura’s response to the clip:

“Conversely, if the reader takes what I wrote for free, they take my time and my mind for free. They get the fun, or fulfillment, or just something to wonder about, and I get zip. This is a deeper violation than just a monetary one.”

Laura said earlier on that she doesn’t write for the money, not immediately, not at that moment. But that later on, she would like to be paid, thank you very much. I respect and understand that. What I don’t understand is how Laura can disclaim the strategy of giving some work out for free so as to generate sales and reader interest as cold blooded and then turn round and complain that she would get zip from giving some work out for free. If she doesn’t like the idea of making some of her work free to read for non-marketing reasons, where does she get off complaining that giving stuff out for free won’t necessarily give her anything?

Also, what about feedback? This is the point I see missing from many rants about giving things away for free. As a budding author that has less interest in getting published in print than in getting published online, the main reason I write, apart from just liking to write in and of itself, is that I want to be read.

From what I’ve read and heard, I’m not alone. Most creators want to share their work with others; this is an added problem that snarls up the already lopsided relationship between creators and publishers. There is *always* going to be a writer around the corner that is willing to give away their work for ‘free’ in return for publishing, exposure, potential feedback or (as Gaiman and others have pointed out) future, paid reader interest. The internet and its plethora of publishing tools that anyone can use just means that that writer *can* publish their own work without necessarily paying for it when they needed to before.

The only real thing that authors who want to write for a living can do in the face of direct, ‘free’ competition, is make the system that works for their competitors work for them.

“Gaiman and many others say the value is that someone will come back and read my other stuff. I guess this is just too cerebral for me. I can grasp it intellectually but it’s too cold a calculation. It’s a sales pitch, a commodity strategy. And my books are not, to me, commodities.”

And herein lies the problem: though some authors and some readers may not view books as commodities, many many readers seem to. Marketing books with free short samples and book giveaways is also a commodity strategy, and it works because books are commodities. Extended free samples of an author’s work-- like say, a book, or half of the book, or a third of the book-- is just a ways further down on that continuum.

Furthermore, as an author and as a reader, I feel that books are commodities. The fact that great books take lots of extra effort to write is only as significant to me as the fact that great computers and great cellphones take lots of extra effort to make. Computers and cellphones are commodities; MP3 players are commodities. And yet, companies like Apple and Sony are making good money off making them to higher standards than other competitors. Just because something is a commodity does not mean that it cannot be beautiful; commodities can be art.

    – E. M. Pink (04/12  at  10:59 AM)

E.M., I probably should have clarified better that I was talking about a comment I’d made in an earlier post that we may be moving toward a system of entirely free content (ie, books, novels, etc) which is supported by ad revenue.  That’s mainly the sort of writing under advertising sponsorship that I don’t personally want to do.

Apple and Sony don’t write novels or provide specific content.  They sell individual items, same as a loaf of bread.  Once you eat the bread or drop the iPod in your iced tea, you have to purchase another one.  Cell phone companies give away phones for free but then they lock you into contracts where you pay them monthly for several years.  Revenue has to come from somewhere.  When content is given away entirely for free, as is typical on the web, the only revenue has to come from advertising sponsors who are selling their own things piggyback on the content. 

As to the sense that giving whole books away for free with the idea that it will bring future revenue to the author being too much of a marketing strategy for me, that’s just my personal feeling; I don’t claim any logic to it.  It’s wrapped up in this vision I have that we are being pushed toward totally free content.  I don’t want to be a free content provider.  That’s just me.  You can do it if you like, and if you are good and people would rather read your stuff than mine, then I’m out of luck.

    –  (04/12  at  02:56 PM)

Well I realized that sounded rather arrogant with the “if you’re good” comment.  Basically I just meant if the audience likes the work and they can get it free, why would they pay?  It would be silly.

    –  (04/12  at  07:12 PM)

Never mind about the “if you’re good"-- I took it to mean what you said in your second comment before you’d even written it

Now, as for the books supported by ad revenue--it depends. They’d have to get the format *right* for me to bother. It all depends on how the ads would be presented. If there was something like the usually quite tasteful Text Link Ads network for authors who felt like publishing their ebooks that way, I don’t think I’d mind at all, especially if the ads were small, or shunted to the side or something. If the books were online, or were ebooks on some device, I’d probably give them a go. Paper books, on the other hand...no. Although I don’t think anyone is suggesting ads for paper books, thank god.

“I don’t want to be a free content provider.  That’s just me.”
I highly doubt most authors want to be free content providers either. I don’t blame them; this is new territory the Internet is blazing out on our behalf, whether we as readers or authors or publishers want it to or not. And new territory is always weird and unknown and tricky to navigate.

One thing I do know, though, is that despite the rabid freeness of 90% of content on the Internet, consumers are still willing to pony up for something if it is more convenient to get hold of it that way. iTunes is easier for me than Limewire, so the only free music I pick up comes from the Myspace pages of artists-- when I can be bothered. eBooks from Fictionwise and Amazon are easier for me than driving out to Half Price or the Library, so I only buy or borrow books offline when I can’t find them online, or if I don’t feel like keeping them. I think a whole lot of stuff may end up being free, or ad-supported, but I also think someone will figure out good ways for creators to get paid directly as well.

One last thing:
“Revenue has to come from somewhere.”
If not from ads, then why not from ebooks? With lower overhead for publishers, and tiny storage costs, there’d even be more money for everyone, even if the price of each book got battered down due to customer expectations. Well, everyone except the printers; but I suppose printers are going to get shafted in the next decade or so no matter what anyone does, unless they somehow become server farms overnight. And going out of print could be more like going into the archives, where people who care can still buy the book without hunting through bookstores.
Oh dear, the bookstores! *sighs* I suppose they’ll have to be part server farm as well…

Thanks for replying to my comment, by the way! This is one thing I can’t fault the Internet for, this explosion of random conversations. Thanks for taking the time…

    – E. M. Pink (04/12  at  08:07 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Laura Kinsale
• Date: March 14, 2008
• Filed Under:
  You're Nobody Until Somebody Loves You: Publishing

• Comments:5
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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