May 28, 2014
In Which I Invent Numbers
Last night I read Hugh Howey’s take on the whole Amazon vs Hachette thing. I don’t know why. I knew it would make me mad, and it did. Howey is, by all accounts, a super nice guy who is always available for emerging writers to pick his brain. He supports the community and tries his damnedest to make sure creators are not getting screwed. So I had to think that, rather than trying to shill for The Man, he must just be incredibly stupid and ignorant. I was up half the night seething bitterly about how many customers I would face tomorrow who felt entitled to have temper tantrums at the cash register because we/publishers are unfairly getting rich off their backs, and why can’t we all just discount books like that great Saviour of the People, Amazon???
Except Howey isn’t stupid and he knows how publishing works. So what was up with his backward-ass approach to explaining how publishers arrive at their prices?
Then it hit me. Howey is thinking like a self publisher. He thinks Hachette is a self publisher.
When you self publish, the money you spend up front to produce the book is a gamble. It’s the cost of having a dream fulfilled, or of getting your foot in the door. It’s a “long term investment”, betting on the day, five books down the road, when you really start to take off. Nine times out of ten, you never see that money again.
A publisher does not gamble any more than it has to. It looks at its costs – editors, designers, publicists, customer service reps, distributors, warehouses, printers, lawyers, mistakes, everything – and works out exactly how many books they need to sell at what cost in order to make it back. Some years a book hits big, and in those years, somebody makes bank. But most of the time, they pay their employees and produce books.
Howey’s assertion that Hachette “get[s] the full wholesale price of $8.99,” only makes sense if you think Hachette is a guy, like Howey. When a self-publisher sells a book, they use that money to pay back the loan they made to themselves during that book’s production – a cost that Howey seems to be counting after profits, the same way one might buy groceries or pay the hydro bill. Publishers do this the other way around. The wholesale cost of the book pays for the cost to produce the book. You only look at profits after everyone has been paid.
If a self-publisher never makes their money back, they may decline to self-publish again. If they were publishers, this would be called “going out of business”. Hachette isn’t super-keen to do this.
But let’s back up a bit. Let’s talk about Hachette’s “crazy” ebook prices, now that we understand that they are not gambling the same way a self-publisher might.
What does it cost to make a book? What % is the author really getting?
Here’s a simplified break down of the cost to self publish. Back-of-the-napkin stuff.
Book cover – $150 – $200 (this is cheap. CHEAP. You can do it for less, and we will be able to tell.)
Editing services – $400 (this is also cheap, but this is what I will charge you for an 80,000 word novel)
ISBN/expanded distribution – $99 (this is to get an ISBN you can use outside of Amazon)
Copyright registration – $85 (your work is automatically copyrighted, but many people choose to register for ease of legal protection. Many.)
Layout & Design – $150
Kirkus Review (this is a handy stand in for “publicity costs”)- $425
A website – $600
TOTAL – ~ $1900
This was done on the cheap. You could do it even cheaper, true, but you will pay instead with your time, sanity, and quality of product. So, your mileage may vary, but this is a handy number.
The million dollar question is, how many copies will you sell? Truly, nobody knows. Here are some things I do know:
90% of books registered with BookNet Canada only sell one copy. One. Copy.
Tobias Buckell dissected some Smashwords data last year that shows the vast, vast majority of titles sell fewer than 100 copies.
The best-selling anthology I have ever contributed to has sold 141 copies.
Award-winning YA author Arthur Slade reports selling an average of 635 books per title over a whole year, but this is 4780 copies of one best-seller and an average of 175 books for each other title.
But, that said, I know a lot of first-time self published authors of romance & teen books that come off Wattpad with “fan bases” of 5k+ followers. They expect to sell 500 copies in the first few months, and they do that or better. So if you have an established author presence and a book with a known audience, 500 is a good number to shoot for.
Let’s say you’ll sell 500 copies because I am being very generous.
You price your ebook at $5.99 because that’s what Hugh Howey did. You sold 500 copies. That’s nearly $3000.
Amazon takes 30% ($900)
The IRS takes 30% ($630)
You made $1470. Congrats!
Wait, sorry. I mean you are still short $430.
What about Hachette? How does this break down for them? Let’s look at one subsidiary, Orbit books.
I don’t know how many employees Orbit has, but let’s say you only need the ones that cover the same services the self-publisher paid out for themselves – even though they also need laywers, customer service reps, account managers and so on. Orbit publishes roughly 60 books a year, so we will assume a book gets 1/60th of their services (though in reality, things aren’t this fair – still, short hand). Salaries extrapolated from the bottom end of Indeed.com’s salary estimator.
Cover designer – $48,000/60 = $800
Editor – $47,000/60 = $784
ISBN = $5.75 (you can buy them in blocks for much less than they sell individually)
Copyright registration – $85
Layout & Design/Typography – $58,000/60 = $967
Publicity – $44,000/60 = $734
Printing – $3.90/book x 500 copies = $1950
Author Advance – $5000
Website – $0 (the publisher probably won’t do this for you!)
TOTAL – $10,325
Well, we printed 500 print copies. Let’s say we will sell these in addition to 500 ebooks, because I’m going to pretend I don’t know full well that plenty of big-5 titles only sell 150 copies, period. Let’s say Orbit has high hopes for you, and you will sell 1000 books.
If Orbit sold them for Howey’s $5.99, they’d have $5,990. Amazon would take 30% = $1790. I can’t guess at Orbit’s tax rate, but let’s be generous and say it’s 30% too. $1260. The distributor, by the way, wants 10% on the 500 print books you sold through them. That’s $300. Well, so far Orbit has lost almost $7000 on this book.
If MSRP was $8.99? $8990, and Amazon’s already paid. Well, we’re closer. They’ve only lost $4000. Incidentally, if they don’t pay the author an advance and just give them “25%” as Howey suggests, the author “only” gets $2250, but Orbit has only lost maybe $400. Another few months and they might break even.
Hachette’s barely eking by at $8.99 MSRP, and the author is $2250 ahead instead of $430 behind.
Everybody thinks they will do better. You can make this look better for Amazon & the author by selling more units. In scenario one, you will break even after you’ve sold another roughly 150 books. You’ll make the same as you might have in the Hachette scenario 760 books after that – so in order to make the same money on 1000 traditionally published books at $8.99 MSRP ($14.99 on Amazon), you’ll have to sell 1400 self published ones at $5.99. Maybe you think you will make those sales. I feel that this is… optimistic of you, but that’s your business. It is your dream to gamble on. You might, after all, make it big, like Hugh Howey.
But it would be business insanity for a mainstream publisher to operate as if they are guaranteed 1400, or even 500, sales of every book they publish. They know very well they have to balance the misses with the hits. They have been doing this for decades, after all.
And, of course, there’s the pesky issue of the salaries listed there. It costs more for a publisher to make a book because it employs people – real humans making middle-class salaries. We should not begrudge those people their jobs. Hell, most of them are probably the same creators Howey defends. The $2200 you might make self-publishing a book is not going to pay your bills, not unless you can write a novel every three weeks. Even being a freelance designer or editor isn’t going to pay your bills – not unless you are extraordinarily successful – or you put your prices up. I don’t edit six 80,000-novels per month, let me tell you.
No, it’s publishing that supports the entire creative industry. That’s where book lovers find jobs. Is that worth a buck per book to you? Is it to me.
May 22, 2014
Reviews May 22nd 2014
A new Clavis Aurea is up at Apex Magazine! I looked at some interesting depictions of power this time around – have a look!
May 8, 2014
Reviews May 8th 2014
My short story reviews are up at Apex Magazine. This week, some exploration of what really makes a “hopeless situation” and how a protagonist reacts. Read here!
May 2, 2014
Do We Have Diverse Books?
The hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks has been blowing up on Twitter this week. The idea is to give visibility (literally, photographs) to how little racial, gender, identity and ability diversity exists in publishing on all levels. We need diverse books, but we also need diverse stories, editors, publishers, agents and booksellers (eloquently elaborated upon by Daniel José Older on Buzzfeed and Bogi Takács both on eir blog and in Strange Horizons). No matter how you cut it, we need to see every face of humanity when we turn to a book.
Pictures are great, but is our money where our mouths are? I thought I’d take a trip around my own bookstore to have a look. I feel as if we offer a diverse selection of writers, but until you really take a calculator to it, you never really know. So here’s a case study based on our frontlist fiction shelf. These are the hardcovers on display at the very front of my store as of 10am on Friday, May 2nd 2014. This is what greets the buyer when they walk through the door.
Three Brothers by Peter Ackroyd (British Male)
Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (Lebanese-American Male)
Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor (American Male)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Canadian-born New Zealand Female)
Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole (Nigerian-American Male)
Independence by Cecil Foster (Barbadian Canadian Male)
Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow (American Male)
Falling Out of Time by David Grossman (Israeli Male)
Boy in the Twilight by Yu Hua (Chinese Male)
The Wretched by Victor Hugo (French Male)
Fire in the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam (Bangladeshi Canadian Male)
In The Slender Margin by Eve Joseph (Canadian Female)
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li (Chinese American Female)
All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu (Ethiopian-American Male)
Caught by Lisa Moore (Canadian Female)
Bark by Lorrie Moore (American Female)
Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenyan Female)
Between Friends by Amos Oz (Israeli Male)
Orfeo by Richard Powers (American Male)
Lovers at the Chameleon Club by Francine Prose (American Female)
Light and Dark by Natsume Soseki (Japanese Male)
The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan (American Female)
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Canadian Female)
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan (Canadian Female)
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese (Ojibway Canadian Male)
By the Numbers:
In the interests of not spending all day picking into the personal lives of writers, I have decided to count only the most visible forms of diversity – race and presented gender. That will be what the readers sees when they pick up the book. Will they see people like themselves?
TOTAL # OF TITLES – 25
# Male – 15
# Female – 10
Country of Origin:
United States of America- 6
Canada – 6
Israel – 2
China – 2
Barbados – 1
Britain – 1
Lebanon – 1
Nigeria – 1
France – 1
Bangladesh – 1
Ethiopia – 1
Kenya – 1
Japan – 1
Visibly “white” – 13
Visibly a “Person of Colour” – 12
Biggest single group: White American Men, at 3.
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Some notes:
I have opted to count writers by their country of birth rather than current residence because writers with solid literary reputations tend to be snapped up by big American universities. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is currently tenured at New York University and University of California, Irvine – I don’t think anyone would argue that he is not a Kenyan writer.
“Visibly white” is tricky business. I counted both Israeli men as “white”, though Grossman and Oz are both Middle Eastern Jews who write in Hebrew. They are clearly writing from a different place than Richard Powers or Victor Hugo.
Two-thirds of these displayed writers are men, but I should note our two biggest bestsellers of the quarter are Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. These are not listed because they are sold out.
What does this mean for diversity? I think this looks good by a very low bar. We probably have one of the more diverse selections of books out there, but it is STILL a list in which more than half of the books are written by the dominant racial group. Putting aside countries of origin, a full 40% of them are American.
(Another 32% are Canadian, giving the North American contingent 72% of this shelf’s space – though this is mostly to do with the intricacies of publishing rights. We deal with Canadian distributors and Canadian publishers, who publish primarily domestic writers. International lists & translations do not make up the bulk of what they do. Another reason why “country of origin” is a more useful measure of diversity here: we want to see the faces of our neighbours, who are Canadian no matter how else they identify.)
Older asks us – those of us in the industry – to ask ourselves what we can do to make things better. What can we read, review, buy, sell? We carry fiction as a public service here – we don’t sell a tonne of it. We have it because we should, and when someone comes in looking, we want to be able to say yes. So we aren’t going to stop carrying Jay Cantor or E.L. Doctorow. These are good books. But we can add more good books. We take our cues from reviews, mentions in the newspaper, and customer requests. Last year one of our biggest fiction sellers was We Need New Names by Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo because it got the buzz, and serious readers follow buzz.
To beat that dead horse, write reviews. Blog about what you’ve read. Pitch those reviews to the magazines and papers. Show the industry what’s good and nudge the buyers who’ll tell them what sells. Making a Top Ten Books That Do Something For Me list? Make sure it represents. If it doesn’t, wonder about what you’re reading. You are the mouth, my friends. We all are.
April 25, 2014
A Blog Hop!
Sometimes a girl just doesn’t know what to blog about, when out of the wide, limitless blue comes a friendly blogger-writer-friend with a golden baton that they will pass on to you, inscribed not only with the solution to all of your blogging problems, but permission to talk about yourself.
The reclusive bookseller in her natural habitat.
Really? May I? Simon McNeil (author of The Black Trillium, forthcoming from Brain Lag Publishing) says yes! It goes like this: because I have been tagged by Simon, I will answer the questions he has laid out for me. At the end, I will pass the baton to three more writers, who will answer similar writerly-questions which I will ask them. The pedigree of this blog hop is a good one: Simon was tagged by Adam Shaftoe, Adam by Matt Moore, Matt by Marie Bilodeau, Marie by Eileen Bell…. it’s possible this goes back to the birth of the universe if you want to follow it there, and Godspeed to you if you do.
With no further ado, here are the questions Simon put to me!
1) What book most affected your decision to begin writing? Why that book?
Like a lot of writers, I was one of those who decided to “be a writer” when I was maybe 7 years old, so I don’t have the clearest recollection of what story might have inspired this choice, if there was one. One of my first “long” works was a “sequel” to The Princess Bride (actually just the movie told over again, only starring me as the Dread Pirate Roberts’ BFF and co-adventurer) which I wrote when I was 8.
When I ran away from home and eventually enrolled in Celtic Studies in university, though, it was because of Charles de Lint. His Newford books in particular. I wanted to live those – writing something similar came a close second. I wrote dozens of first chapters that never went anywhere. Living them was a much greater success – but that’s another story.
I didn’t REALLY finish a book until they invented NaNoWriMo and I decided to jump in and pull a Harry Potter. I wanted to write meaningful, socially-conscious kid’s fantasy with a strong political/ecological message. And I think I did. I don’t know that this means Harry Potter got me seriously writing, though. It was a combination of things.
2) How do you deal with difficult protagonists in your writing and reading? Is it possible to bridge the gap between “I don’t like them” and “I don’t care about them?”
I tend to work with a close, limited POV with my protagonists, and the reader gets a lot of interior dialogue. My hope is that even if you don’t especially like the narrator, you will understand her. She makes her fears, motivations, justifications and expectations abundantly clear.
I don’t use difficult protagonists, though, unless they have a flaw which is meant to expose a particular point I am trying to make with the piece. You don’t need to like them in order to see how their politics/fears/hubris plays out in the world. I don’t ask my reader to connect with the character all the time – just to think about what the existence of people like them means to the world.
3) Pantser or plotter? Explain why.
I used to be a pantser, I am now a plotter. Nothing will give me worse writer’s block than coming to a point in the story where I realize it is going nowhere, or where trying to tie together all the threads will result in an enormous, ugly knot.
My weakness as a writer is in plotting – deciding what happens. I am good with the abstracts: settings, ideas, characters and motivations. I often know more about my world’s biosphere than I do the story’s plot direction before I start. Without plotting, my stories wound up just being the meandering adventures of interesting characters. They’d discover things, go places, have many meals and intelligent conversations – but none of it ever went anywhere and it didn’t culminate into anything. It didn’t mean anything. That thing most writers have, where they think “wouldn’t it be cool if this happened?” I don’t have a good sense of that. So I need to make sure I sketch out my story arc ahead of time.
4) Write a pitch for your favourite story you never wrote.
Okay, the following is the pitch for a novel I did start, and wrote the first four chapters of… but I don’t think I’ll ever be going back. Still, I had so much fun writing it.
“Seven years after the magii of Al’Tahj opened the first portal to Jammatan, the ocean world’s secrets are still buried. Thousand of islands hide ancient ruins, sophisticated artifice and complex messages from a long-dead civilization, now reclaimed by the jungle, the ocean, and the huge creatures that have come to dominate the world.
This is a world that rewards the brave, the reckless, and the ambitious. Those who cross through the portal and stake their claims on this new world grow rich, if they don’t get killed.
The Gloriana is bound for the open seas led by Captain Aziza Dualeh, who has a near-mystical talent for attracting, and conquering, trouble. Among her crew is the artificer Taban Haji Kaar, planted by the Caliphate of Al’Tahj to carry out a mission known only to him – a mission Taban finds himself increasingly unwilling to complete. Out on the frontier, away from the comfort and politics of Al’Tahj, Taban finds himself distracted by, of all things, his heart…”
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Tag! I’m sending you next in the direction of Rati Mehrotra, Mari Adkins & C.M. Rosens! All three women have some fantastic work on the horizon, so I hope you’ll check them out.
April 24, 2014
Clavis Aurea April 24th 2014
I talk about Terror, Horror & Ann Radcliffe over at Apex Magazine this week in my Clavis Aurea reviews. Have a look!
April 15, 2014
Five Great Heroes for Small Girls
Navigating media with a young girl can be a disheartening experience. If you think representation matters, like I do, you’re constantly on the lookout for smart, confident, diverse girls represented in interesting ways. They can be hard to find, but not impossible. Six years in, I have built a small but sturdy library.
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking, the hero of Astrid Lindgren’s eponymous books, was my #1 most favourite female hero for kids before I actually had kids. There were very few characters I, personally, identified with more when I was eight. Pippi lives alone with a horse and a monkey. She has incredible super-strength, which is neat, but not nearly as enticing as her independence. She has a father somewhere, distantly, who is a buccaneer captain. Pippi isn’t bothered by her father’s absence since he is alive and merely busy having adventures, so Pippi’s feral independence isn’t darkened in any way by loss or grief. She just straight up gets to do anything she likes, and does.
Mosca Mye
Mosca Mye is the hero of Frances Hardinge’s incredible books, Fly By Night and Twilight Robbery. Another lone, independent 12-year-old, Mosca does have a darker past, and it adds a definite edge to her character. Razor-sharp, Mosca escapes her dull relatives after sort-of-accidentally-on-purpose burning her uncle’s barn to the ground and freeing the loquacious conman, Eponymous Clent, who comes to be her partner in crime. She also has a goose named Saracen, who is the fiercest creature in all the world. Mosca’s not old enough to have lost a childlike innocence, despite her street smarts, and she survives all sorts of dangerous encounters on wit alone. Bonus points for major themes of literacy!
Zahrah the Windseeker
I’m partial to bold, independent heroes, but my elder daughter is a different creature. Adventures are scary to her, even when they come out well in the end, and so she instantly attached herself to Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the 2008 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa). Zahrah’s a shy, contemplative 13-year-old who is absolutely reluctant to go charging off into danger. She needs to think, internalize and understand – and occasionally be given a final firm shove. But she has strength of character and wisdom beyond her years, not to mention SHE CAN FLY, which is obviously amazing.
Kiki
It would be easy to make this a list of characters from Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films, but let’s stick to one. Kiki is probably the strongest of Miyazaki’s characters. The film is about her and her growth as a character, and very little else. But it’s enough. Kiki’s independent, but less sure than some of the more assertive characters. She’s a witch, but she doesn’t know what her special skill is yet, and she quickly learns she isn’t as rich or fancy as other girls in the big city she has chosen to live in. Her fears and struggles are terrible relatable, though Kiki never sacrifices her fundamental goodness. Though she’s almost a young woman, the film’s lack of a “bad guy” makes it wonderful for kids of any age.
Zita the Space Girl
Ben Hatke’s Zita the Spacegirl (along with the sequels Legends of Zita the Spacegirl and The Return of Zita the Spacegirl) has pretty much everything you can ask for in space opera, pared down to the innocent scale of a young girl. Zita has arrived on a strange planet via a portal triggered by her best friend. He’s abducted: she dives through to rescue him. Instantly she’s thrown into huge, galaxy-spanning plots, con artistry, large scale rescue missions, desert crossings, overthrowing governments, salvaging robots, riding giant mice, standing up for economic refugees – have I missed anything? Probably – Zita almost has too much going on, but this never bothered my kids. Zita’s powers are pluck and the moral high ground – and it works.
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I’ve had a thing or two to say about good representations for young girls before, and my essay “The Princess Problem” is now available as part of Jim C. Hines’ Invisible: Personal Essays on Representation in SF/F. Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to Con or Bust, a fund administered through the Carl Brandon Society that helps get people of color/non-white people to attend SFF conventions. Take a look! Excellent work within.
April 10, 2014
Clavis Aurea April 10th
The 3rd installment of my short fiction reviews are up at Apex Magazine! As ever, you should read them!
April 4, 2014
How To Get My Money – Periodical Edition
I read a lot of periodicals. I have subscriptions to fifteen magazines or journals, and buy individual issues of countless others. I try to at least look at each one, even if I don’t always read them cover to cover. I feel as if I might have some grounds for talking a bit about why people might read your publication, and why people might not.
Here is a step by step guide to how I will approach your publication, as a reader; what will convince me to read and what will drive me away.
A shiny new ‘zine appears!
Yay! I click through to the website. Oooh, looks interesting.
Can I buy an issue to read on my ereader?
If I can, I will buy it right away. I might hesitate if the only retailer is Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble or some other giant. If it’s direct, Weightless Books or Gumroad, I won’t even stop to think. I will BUY. I will read! Horray!
Can I subscribe to an e-edition?
If the ‘zine has a good track record or speaks directly to my soul, I will subscribe without too much thought. After all, I spend $20 on a book, why would I balk at spending the same amount of money to get 4-12 issues emailed directly to me? I love esubscriptions. This is why I have six of them.
Can I buy a paper copy?
Okay, so not everyone is putting together digital ‘zines. That’s cool. I like paper better anyway. I will buy physical copies if the total cost of the issue plus shipping is under $20. I will likely subscribe if it is something I really love. I love mail. This is why I have nine physical subscriptions.
Does it have an awesome mobile site?
Once I cannot buy an issue or subscription for comfortable reading, things get tricky. I used to read on my phone, but this resulted in a rapid decline of my eyesight, headaches, and general discomfort. I can read in short bursts, but I will not curl up with an issue on my phone.
If I have to read something on my phone, it had better be optimized for mobile reading. The text size has to be big enough, or adjustable. The menus must be simple. There can’t be ads or flash graphics reloading things every thirty seconds. Preferably, the text should take up the entire screen, so I don’t have to zoom (and end up with scrolling issues).
Some ‘zines have got perfectly serviceable mobile reading experiences (Apex Magazine and Ideomancer do good jobs). I tend to open these ‘zines in web browsers and leave them there for weeks. Maybe I will get to them, maybe I won’t.
Do I have to read it on an old-school website?
I probably won’t read. It’s too hard. It’s uncomfortable. I will only bother if a specific story has been recommended to me so many times that I can’t look away.
I mean, I get it. It’s free. You’re all working for free. But it is because it is free that I’m not as likely to read if you make it hard for me. I paid for my other magazines. I’m invested. Given the choice between reading something that hurts my eyes online, and reading something I paid for on my Kobo, I will do the latter every time. And I do have to choose – 15 subscriptions, after all. I can’t read everything.
A quick note on Kickstarters:
I acquired a large number of my subscriptions through Kickstarter. If you are running a Kickstarter for your periodical, it is an early subscription campaign. If you are running a Kickstarter for a periodical and your core tier is not “SUBSCRIPTION”, then you are doing it wrong. Any Kickstarter campaign, whatever it is for, should sell, fundamentally, the thing you are making. Probably for cheap, like an early bird special. It is dead easy for a supporter to see that $15-$20 tier and say, yah, I’ll throw you a twenty. And I get a subscription, which would cost me $22 if I waited! Good deal! This is where most of your supporters will lie. Your subscribers too. You will have contact with these supporters for the rest of the year. They are your core constituants.
Tiers full of postcards, prints, signed books, Tuckerizations, critiques… these are cool, but this isn’t what you are selling. This is the extra stuff, the honey that sweetens the pot of Zine Tea. If I have to pay ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS to get the equivalent of a subscription, you have missed the point. I want to love your product. It looks like a cool product. Please sell your product.
A quick note on free ‘zines who do everything right:
You produce a great product, you make ezine subscriptions available and you do it all for free. You are AMAZING. But I still want to give you my money, and you are making it hard by giving it all away. I know, I could just click the PayPal button. I probably won’t. I will procrastinate. I will think, “I should throw some money in the tip jar some day.” I won’t get around to it.
It takes very little “extra” to get me to pay in. Release the paid material a week ahead of the free edition, as Beneath Ceaseless Skies does. Maybe include an extra story in the e-edition. Send me a t-shirt, I don’t know. But do something to fish for that money. You might think you don’t want it, but you do. Give it all to your featured author if you feel bad pocketing it. Buy your slushies Starbucks gift cards. But do take the offered money and put it to work. If you don’t, somebody else will, and that person might not be as awesome as you.
So, how about you? What makes you read a ‘zine? Leave a comment even just to say hi!
March 28, 2014
On the Economics of Creative Industries
Yesterday, Ontario’s major news outlets reported that the provincial government was finally starting to crack down on illegal unpaid internships, starting with a blitz, apparently, of the magazine industry. The reactions from the left shocked me. Progressive people who should have known better bemoaned the death of these “great opportunities” and wondered where new graduates were supposed to get “valuable work experience” now.
So a completely voluntary arrangement that worked for both sides is now illegal. Great work, government of Ontario!
— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) March 27, 2014
I undulated between frothing anger and silent shock all afternoon. From… jobs, maybe? The paying kind? How did we manage to swallow, hook line and sinker, the idea that the first step into the workforce should be unpaid?
We probably swallow it because we of the creative-dependent industries work deep in the belly of starving artist territory. Not only are we told day in and day out that we cannot make a living at our art, but we’re chastised for having entered Humanities programs in the first place, then shamed if we consider “soul-destroying” paid work over pursuing our art. Writers are told not to quit their day jobs, cartoonists give their product away for decades before managing a single successful Kickstarter campaign, and we pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for skill-developing workshops.
Of course we expect people to work for free. An internship, after all, is about education, and we have agreed as a society to pay tens of thousands of dollars a head for those, endlessly, forever. Rational, kind people continue to argue this morning that as long as you’re learning something at your unpaid “internship”, they should be legal.
@jaredbland It’s such a narrow view of education to say an internship can’t be educational unless associated with a university.
— Nick Mount (@profnickmount) March 27, 2014
So why stop there? What separates a “job” from a “learning opportunity” anyway? Especially in the creative fields, where we’re offered jobs for “exposure” and “experience” every day? Or academia, where you publish relentlessly for no compensation whatsoever except a vague CV-padding? You learn something at every good job – why pay anybody for anything?
To further muddy the pool, almost everyone who is associated in any way with the publishing industry works for free once in a while. I read slush for free. The only people who get paid at a place like Taddle Creek are the writers. Rose Fox recently argued that editors need to start asking for a piece of the pie. They correctly point out that “money isn’t thick on the ground” in the industry, but we have to draw the line somewhere.
If the only people who can break into an industry are the people affluent enough to work for free for years at a time, you’re going to get an industry entirely staffed by white, middle+ class, single young people. Diversity and representation you can throw right out the window, because most people don’t have rich parents, savings, supportive, well-employed partners, or 28-hours available to them in a day. You also help contribute to false economics when you fail to factor in all the labour that goes in to your product. Every literary product I have backed on Kickstarter recently has completely glossed over the editorial costs of their book. $5000 will get you ten stories, cover art, printing and shipping costs, and that’s it. The editors, layout designers, promoters and marketers? You’re volunteers. You’re unpaid interns.
We work for free because we want these products to be made, to be available. Given the choice between volunteering to edit something for free and seeing the project die in development, we choose the labour of love every time.
But listen, broadly applied, this is a false dichotomy. The publishing industry is worth billions. If the editors, authors, designers and publicists aren’t being paid, who is? When St. Joseph Media eliminates 20-30 unpaid internships and blames the government, they are being incredibly disingenuous. The Gagliano family who run St. Joseph Communications do very well indeed. CEO Tony Gagliano has donated millions of dollars to cultural projects throughout the GTA – and good for him – he can find $750,000 to pay 30 interns minimum wage.
The money is out there, but we’re never going to see it if we don’t start putting our labour back into the equation. After all, the more of us that are being paid, the more we can pay back. Hey writers – you know you can claim magazine subscriptions as a business expense, right? Do that. Pay in. Demand it pay out.