Suddenly, it came to me: In literature, and at
least as far as the writings of living authors go, there is no such thing as
free content. (Just as there is no such thing as free love: in the end--if not in the beginning--someone always pays.)
Free content is a wonderful thing: democracy in the information marketplace, equal access, money is not a standard or a barrier to sampling the Great Debate, the best minds. I have done it myself, I access it all the time: from Google, from Tumblr, and from the New York Times delivered to my inbox, thankfully, because I couldn't have afforded to pay for it--and as a result, the American view dominates my mind, as no Russian, British, or Indian paper is delivered to my inbox. (And presently, I count myself among the ranks of the poor: one who checks the price column on a menu, even in the cheapest restaurants, before checking what item relates to that price.)
And this is the overwhelming state of things. Except, that for independent authors, the model is built on a Ponzi scheme in which there are a few winners, and quite losers. And like all Ponzi schemes, it will end. (And that for independent literary authors, like myself, there was no gain to be had at all, right from the beginning.)
Well, you as an individual may obtain literary
content for free. It is technically possible for you to download 30,000 books
for free on your Kindle, if your Kindle could hold that many, and possibly
300,000 if you enlisted ten high-capacity Kindles for the job. (How many of those books have quality, heart and soul, originality? That's another matter.)
Free to you and me, of course, but someone paid for the author’s time and
effort, his food, rent, and basic bills, medical bills, electricity, Internet
time, and computer time during that period. Either the authors did it themselves,
using their savings from past earnings, or a spouse, a friend, a parent, or
other relative supported them (with the result of their hard work), or they
paid for it by selling their furniture and valuables—yes, writers who are
passionate and desperate will sell their all, and then borrow from friends and anyone who will
lend them, just to complete their work and present it, to give their baby a chance at life.
An article in The Guardian says that half of all independently published authors earn less than $500 a year. (the link to the article is provided at the end of this blog post.) And that literary fiction writers (I write both literary fiction and literary nonfiction) earn 20% of the average (which would mean $50 a year?)! (Just to let you know that 16 different editors of commercial publishing houses have made 16 independent decisions to buy my books and publish them--mostly in the past--so I am not just an independently published author; however, my recent book advances from commercial publishing houses have been small.)
As for commercial portals that provide you free
content: huffingtonpost, for example. Either they are living off the free
content provided by others, who must work on the promise that exposure in the
online magazine will get them the fame and recognition (and ultimately, the
money) they deserve (a kind of cheap trick, if you ask me--everyone pointing to someone else who will pay the final bill). Or they are getting
paid through advertisements that are displayed on their site. Or both. Or an
investor is putting in time and money into a labor of love: the money he earned
or inherited.
But (to take an extreme hypothetical instance that is not too far from my truth) consider an independent author who has no medical
insurance, no safety net, who is deep in debt, and who has no assets except a
laptop, four changes of clothes, and a few books, who spends 6 months of unpaid
work on producing a 120-page book (literary writing can take time, it is not mechanical, like writing a James Bond novel--it must sometimes await true feeling and passion), and gives 1,000 copies away free while selling 10 copies for
$3.99, thus making a net royalty of 2 dollars a copy: in other words, earning 20
dollars for 6, 9, or 12 months of work. Yes, even this happens. A welll-written romance, paranormal romance, zombie, or erotic romance book, even an independently published one, can sell from hundreds to tens of thousands of copies of a book in a month. (Even if the book is priced at 99 cents, at ten thousand copies sold, the author makes more than a good living.
But guess how many copies The Revised Kama Sutra, which has my most glowing reviews, sold in March? One copy. Literary readers have lots of choice, including the classics, and rarely buy any but a currently hyped literary author. So charging anything than $2.99 for a book, however short, is simply impossible. For a full novel, a price of $7.99 is fair.
And yet, we do it--because true writers are obsessed, and will not listen to anyone who say they ought to try something else. So how has the literary author managed to present his work free to a
thousand persons? Because he is willing to lend his labor, time, and
money to the readers (I am reminded of the Monty Python bookshop skit with Ethel the
Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying, in which the frustrated bookstore owner not only pays for the book himself, but reads the book to the customer who finally admits, "But I can't read!")--readers who will only
download free content, and sacrifice his present security in the hope that some
time in future, these 1,000 readers will change their minds and will buy
other books of his that are not free, and that he will overcome his
loss, and repay his loan.
I am still glad to be a writer rather than a high bureaucrat. But, having burned many bridges, and in the absence of
a major publishing advance for an existing book or a book in progress (which I
still hope for), I have now for a few years been forced to e-publish (yes, I'm an e-slave). My upfront
investment is minimal: whereas a professional cover may cost $70 to $150, if I create my own cover, I may manage with as little as
$10 for an image, and use Photoshop to insert the titles. But my labor
investment, even for a book of 20 pages, is quite huge, apart from the writing
itself (and forget the years of education and experience that went into making me a writer). First the book must be formatted and given the appearance of a book.
Then, it is not enough to upload a book. You have to write an attractive blurb,
and then spend hours on various social networking sites trying to tell people
that your book exists, and that it is worth their attention despite a million
other books also being available.
After all this work, you find that, in 2012 and
2013, you are dependent on giving away free books even to let people know that
you exist. Because Amazon, with a combination of brilliant strategy, great consumer service, and aggressive action (such as encouraging exclusive deals with publishers/independents), has become the overwhelmingly dominant force in
e-book publishing, and if you are not selling books through them, you would be
lucky to sell on other portals. Amazon started a program to encourage authors
to give their books away free, and now, authors compete with each other to give
away their books—in effect, their money and time—just to get the reader’s
attention, because it is hard to compete with free.
It works for some (for a few lucky persons, it works magnificently, much like a lottery with different levels of prizes). It works for genres where there
are hundreds of thousands of ravenous readers. Romance, erotica, suspense,
thrillers, paranormal, fantasy are a few examples in which avid readers buy and
read three or four books a week, and these are also readers who will give a
chance to anyone--they tend not to be snobbish, and are open to discovering new writers; once hooked, they tend to follow that author.
Not literary readers, though. Literary readers often
buy books only after they have been endorsed by a major publisher or magazine.
On the whole, they do not pay for non-mainstream, non-hyped writers. When you read the first work in a suspense, thriller, or romance series free, you may feel compelled to pay for the rest: you may become "addicted." Persons who read the first book of the "Fifty Shades of Grey" series usually tend to read the second and third. Whereas, with literary content, you can read a free piece by one writer, then move on to the next free piece by a different writer, and so on.
This is the discovery I have made after two years
of having placed all my eggs in the e-publishing basket. Had I realized what was to come, I would never have invested this time and this money in it: I have yet
to receive a 10 percent return on my time and labor, even at minimum wage
rates.
This is why, though I feel pressured to join the
givers of free content (yes, I have done it for a few books, given away a few thousand, often to people who don't appreciate them, and downloaded them just because they were free), I have finally
come to the decision that it must either stop or be drastically reduced, or take place only in individual cases (a personal gift to individual readers who cannot afford to pay, and who can send me a message and ask me for a coupon). And that, while I am not against well-to-do authors giving away free content out of generosity and from a humanitarian impulse towards readers who cannot afford to pay for it, it does seem odd when authors who are living from week to week give away (nay, are forced to, because the publishing game has changed) free content to those whose lives are very comfortable, and do not lack for basic security; at the very least, I must
make a few of my readers and friends aware that “free content” is a myth. That
there is no such thing as free, or that there is no free content without some
hidden person, sugar daddy, investor, or self-sacrificing or desperate author footing the
bill.
It is not as if people in the richest 20 nations of the West, who form
the majority of owners of Kindles and iPads and buyers of e-books, and
who earn an average of $50,000 a year (the owners of iPads possibly
earning $70,000 and up) mind paying $3 or $5 or even $8 for a few hours
of entertainment, education, stimulation, and thought-provoking reading.
After all, it is the information revolution that supports the high
lifestyles of many of them. But when big publishers and major authors join the race to the bottom,
and less ballyhooed authors compete to give their books away for free,
the temptation is
not to pay for what you formerly did not mind paying for. After all, the supply of gadgets and gizmos is endless. In the long run, this model cannot work.
A final thought: Why not just read free content like this fascinating piece on duck penises:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/25/yes-we-should-study-duck-penises.html --which I enjoyed reading, as I enjoy reading
The New Yorker? Because, I think, we need the lonely voices of resistance to conformity, to the Establishment (which supports its own, and is often incestuous, an old boys club, as
The New Yorker is, to an extent); we need writers who are contrarians, who think like no one else, and who (for example Nietzsche and Emily Dickinson) are either incapable of doubling up as self-salesmen and/or sold few or no books in their lifetimes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/24/self-published-author-earnings
