Fortunately, I’m not really into the whole intellectual
property thing; it’s all a bit too capitalism
rules for my taste. I didn’t write my novel to make money out of it; I
wrote it because I wanted to. In short, I wrote it for the pleasure of writing
it. Isn’t that reward enough? And if somebody wants to read it I’m flattered by
their interest and my ego gets a bit of a boost. Furthermore, if somebody
derives pleasure from reading it there are now three layers of icing on the
cake. Why on earth would I want more?
And in the final analysis, a story is just a story is just a
story. The concept of ‘owning’ an idea strikes me as at best questionable, and
maybe even verges on the absurd. Aren’t ideas there to be shared?
4 comments:
I think I would probably still write if no one ever read what I wrote. But there is something satisfying about having an audience, and something almost fantastical about being able to make a living from writing. I've read biographies of 20th-century writers that recount how they were paid $1000 or so for their first short story. The market has changed and now writing is devalued and taken for granted. No one would expect someone to make clothing and give it away for free, or perform a service like cleaning or landscaping or surgery for free, yet writers are expected to write for nothing or nominal amounts. It seems wrong to me, but maybe I'm just jaded from endless rejections.
The post was meant to record my personal reaction to discovering that anybody can read my novel free on the Amazon preview page. I thought about it for a while and realised I didn’t mind. It was a personal view and not intended to be generally prescriptive because there’s a broader discussion on the subject and I was involved in it when I was writing my own short fiction.
I think part of the problem here is that writing used to be regarded as a rarefied pursuit with which only the chosen few engaged. Writers who wrote for publication were almost a breed apart from the common run of humanity, and were endowed with an unusual level of charisma in consequence. Fast forward to the age of ubiquitous higher education, the surge in technology and concomitant decrease in labour-intensive work opportunities, and the coming of the internet, and suddenly everybody thinks they can be involved one way or another in the writing and publishing of fiction. And so the indy press was born and proliferated, and most of the practitioners in that field are simply not big enough to pay ‘proper’ fees. But that’s good enough for most people because they get the ego boost of a by-line. I think I had something like 27 or 28 publication credits for 24 short stories and received no more than around £250 for the lot. What’s more, the mainstream publishers don’t help by becoming obsessed with the free market principle which requires high volume sales, discounts, and so on. I think I once mentioned the editor who said to me as far back as the early 90s after Mrs Thatcher had demolished the Net Book Agreement: ‘We’re not publishers any more, we’re just booksellers now. We can no longer afford to subsidise low volume works however good they are.’
As for the comparison with other trades, it could equally be argued that a speculative builder expects to get paid only once when he sells the house. He doesn’t expect to receive a further fee every time the house changes hands. The same is true of artists who sell their pictures. And this leads to the argument that writers and photographers are unreasonably favoured because the intellectual property principle produces copyright laws to ensure that they continue to ‘own’ the work until death and beyond. It’s a complicated subject which reaches into other areas such as the phenomenon of fan fiction, an issue in which I gather JK Rowling has been conspicuously involved.
Changing world, Mad – an imperfect world in which Trump gets into the White House and people get blown apart in churches. At least I can say that I’ve been a writer of sorts, along with all the other things I’ve been, and that’ll do for me.
Ah, I didn't take your view to be prescriptive - sorry if it came across that way. It's just that the topic provoked a certain train of thought which I have been following a lot lately about the value of work and my future capacity to earn a living as anything other than the academic equivalent of a feudal peasant. I think you are absolutely right about the changing identity of writing - from "rarefied pursuit" to "hey, I text every day, so that makes me a writer, doesn't it?" My dad, who has worked in bookselling/publishing all of his life, would agree (depressingly) with the characterization of the publishing industry you gave. He's told me variations of "It doesn't matter how good a writer you are, it's whether your work will SELL" for years. I feel like I would have done better in an earlier generation when editors took chances on weird stories from writers like Flannery O'Connor and Shirley Jackson (although Jackson did have a blockbuster hit with "The Lottery"). Not that I consider myself the equal of writers of that caliber, but it'd be nice to know that the path was open for me. I feel like the careers for which I have trained (professor, author) are pretty much dead ends these days.
I'm not sure that writers are unreasonably favored - JK Rowling is surely an outlier in the degree to which her work has been leveraged for financial gain. If a writer takes about a year to write a novel, then in order to make a living you'd expect the sale of that novel to cover at least a year's work, which (as I understand) rarely happens (multi-million dollar book deals for celebrities, etc., notwithstanding). I suppose books are more like akin to movies where the producers receive a cut for every ticket sale.
You could also argue that there is a difference between ownership of the material work and its abstract identity as "intellectual property." The author only receives proceeds from the first sale of a (singular) book - if that book is sold to a used book dealer, for example, only the owner is compensated as the one holding the physical property of the book. Similarly, while a person might "own" a painting in the material sense, s/he does not own it as intellectual property - for instance, I don't believe s/he could sell copies of it without the permission of the painter. A house owner couldn't provide the plans to another architectural firm. It's all very complicated and in many ways contradictory.
I need you to come and live next door in order to fully explore the various avenues of complexity. It would be nice to have someone I could trust to be right telling me why I'm wrong occasionally. We could even put the writing field to bed and move over into the music industry. That's the one which most makes me seethe quietly over copyright issues.
And I'm truly sorry that your chosen career paths are falling short of expectations. Good job you didn't choose politics. You're far too rational to go anywhere but an asylum if you had.
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