creators surviving in times of plenty

[miriam_e]

Okay... the lesson is don't write something while tired and post it without checking it properly in the cold, hard light of day. While not everything I wrote in that post was crap, so much was erratic that I'm too embarrassed to let it stand.

I'll rewrite it more rationally and repost it some time in the future.

For the record, I think the main points still stand. Donation holds a lot of promise in a world where filesharing is easy and costs almost nothing. We artists need to find a way to harness the power of the internet.

Comments

[flemco.livejournal.com]

A) Throughout history, one thing is certain: Any business plan where the majority of the income is founded on the altruism of fans? Will fail. Stupidly. Donations? Yeah, let's see how many comic artists have been able to live off their donations. You can point out a few anecdotal bits about R. Milholland and Pete Abrams, but they're very much in the minority of artists who ever lived off Donations without eating scrounged socks 3 meals daily. And even the two artists named here are not, contrary to popular belief, able to live just off donations by far. Merchandise makes up for a LOT of money.

B) How to survive? Stay off the internet if you want to make money. I will never put my novels online, solely because I want them to cost money. My comics? The second they hit the net, it's a financial write-off, from an income perspective. People do not hand over much hard-earned cash for a bovine quadruped when they can just as easily get the calcium-infused teat secretions of said beast for a net cost of $nothing.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I understand you misgivings because the way the net works is contrary to everything that has gone before, but you're missing my main point.

We don't have a lot of choice in the matter. All the big media are concentrating in fewer and fewer hands and they're winding back on their operations and becoming more bland and less adventurous. Coupled with the vast increases in numbers of creative people now and in the very near future this is really bad news for us artists. We have to find a way to use the net. If we don't, then there will be far fewer of us surviving by our work. We can't rely on traditional business. Increasing costs of energy and paper mean self-publishing is going to be less and less viable. And as more and more artists place their work online for free (for the reasons mentioned earlier) people will become less inclined to buy paper-based works.

This is not something we can afford to dismiss. It is something that will happen. Our choice is to get in early or get swept along with everybody else... or miss the boat.

There are a lot of people making a good living out of the donation model, and yes, there are also a lot more people who aren't. That alone doesn't invalidate the model. There are a lot of people making a good living out of selling paper-based comics, but there are also a lot more who aren't.

I hope the donation model will prove to be a valid business model for the future. I kinda doubt it will do as well in the USA as it might elsewhere in the world, where altruism is more prevalent. I say this not to put down people in the USA (where I have a lot of good friends). It is just that I've seen too many experiments where, for instance, a person lies on the footpath as if they've fainted. In the USA people rarely, if ever, help. In most other countries people quickly stop to help. There seems to be a strong vein of greed is good and never give a sucker an even break and fear your neighbor in USA.

You mentioned another point that I'd missed: merchandising. I'll add it to the list above. I'd originally included it but it somehow got lost in transferring this to LJ. Thanks for reminding me. :)

Good luck with your artwork. I hope you succeed, whatever route you take.