I’m at this place where I’m looking for a new job, and also taking
advantage of an upheaval of my plans to reflect and think as I collect
myself in attempt to move forward. Continuing a trend that I started at
the beginning of this year, I’m writing more. You’ve all noticed that
I’m writing more for TealArt, but at the same time my writing load for
school was much higher than it had been in the past, and since the
summer started, I’ve also been writing fiction again, and I’ve taught
a couple of knitting classes for which I’ve written what amounts to a
book chapter on the topic at hand.
I’ve also been paying attention to, and thinking a bit about copyright
and what it means to be a creator in the digital realm. I think I have a
particularly interesting perspective on this, as both a knitter, and
thus someone whose products are very material, and a writer whose work
exists--at the moment--as exclusively digital artifacts, but I suspect
that the worth of these ideas are for you to decide.
Seeing no better place to begin, lets start in the middle: Over the past
few weeks I’ve been tossing around the idea of putting together an
anthology of science fiction with a group of friends whose writing I
quite enjoy. I enjoy editing and typesetting, oddly enough, and I think
that there should be opportunities and avenues for new writers of
science fiction to publish their work. Also, with the advent of really
good print-on-demand options like Lulu, I
figured that it would be easy enough to make a financially viable
publication, that would hopefully be able to seed a volume two.
In short: this would be difficult at best. In order to keep the price of
reasonable (12-15 bucks), the take from the publication is under 2
dollars, and I think more or less, that’s what the authors take for a
book sale is no matter how they publish it. (The advantage is that if
you go with a bigger named press, they can sell more, which gives you
more 2 dollar bits.) Book length works do a little bit better,
mostly because you don’t have to divide the take, and some publishers
can get away with selling books for prices that are frankly absurd.
The larger problem for people who write, is that “selling” pieces of
writing to a consumer, a “reader,” can never generate enough income to
sustain even the sparest of lifestyles. Same, likely with knitting. You
can’t sell knitting for enough money to make it worthwhile (who’d buy
a 1,200 dollar sweater, which frankly would probably still be a steal.)
So writers, knitters, and other creative types: come up with other ways
to generate income: master knitters teach classes, design and dye yarn,
operate yarn businesses, design patterns, and so forth. Writers (by
this I mean, fiction writers and essayists) either make money from
bigger book deals, speaking engagements, and book tours if they’re
“big” enough, or get day jobs of various kinds, if they’re not.
Thus it strikes me that the problem we need to be addressing, is not,
how do we turn the two dollar take you get from writing a book about
knitting, to 3 dollars or 4 dollars, or even 10 dollars (though that
would certainly help), but rather how to expand the “byproduct” income
from teaching and speaking, and even how to create new sorts of such
“auxiliary income.” There isn’t one kind of monolithic “auxiliary,”
for a given kind of creative pursuit, but I if we think about it enough,
I’m sure we can think about the many ways that creative types are able
earn livings while still working on their creative projects.
I think the larger goal is to have the auxiliary gig be something that
feeds the other, more important pursuit while still leaving enough time
and energy to do serious work in what you really want to be doing.
Consider academics, particularly say, academic physicians, whose real
work is research (and writing for the humanities folks and writing), but
whose money comes from seeing patients or teaching classes. Consider
Knitting luminaries like Alice Starmore,
Sharon Miller of Heirloom Lace
who sustain their work by selling yarn and kits for their design.
Similar I have to speculate that schoolhouse
press makes its money, not on their
excellent catalogue of books and patterns, but rather through their
knitting-camp, and selling yarn. Let us also not forget that bands have
always made more money from touring, rather than selling recordings.
This theory, of using something like a design as a way to sell an
auxiliary, I think is really pretty strong: if you tried have your take
from things like patterns, or a podcast, or a blog (etc.) be “enough,”
no one go for it because it would be absurd (cite: 1200-1400+ USD
sweater), but if it’s sort of complex advertising, and you’re willing
to take a cut on profit so that more people see the book/story/pattern
it probably works out. There is of course Tim O’Riley (a
technology/computer book publisher,) whose oft quoted for saying
“obscurity, not privacy” is the biggest problem facing writers today.
Now I’ve used the term “advertising” loosely, because I don’t think
that you need to be terribly proactive about it, in order for it to
work, writing a good story with a tag that says “tycho also gives
workshops on productivity and hypertext creation, and his most recent
book is “…” is probably enough. The key is to be right on top of
whatever the best next auxiliary is.
And before anyone goes of and says “it’s a shame that there isn’t a
middle list, or that it’s a shame designers aren’t paid more, etc.
etc.,” I have to suspect that this is more or less how it’s always
worked. That’s all, thoughts anyone?
Cheers, tycho