A "come-to-Jesus" moment for me. 🙌 I hate that the myth is perpetuated that anyone can get rich online as a creative. It's exploitive of artists. As you stated, only a very small percentage can financially sustain themselves through online content alone. Thank you for speaking the truth.✌️
Thank you for writing this newsletter. Your experience mirrors mine (though you are much more successful financially.) In my experience, this issue is doubly hard for women, because we are always viewed as arrogant and grasping and greedy when we ask people to pay for our work.
I agree with everything you wrote. I think it a huge systemic problem that is a piece of everything we’re dealing with today that mostly comes down to the wealthiest among us pulling all the strings to make sure all the wealth flows upward. I have no answers but I support lots of creative folks across different platforms. At this point, I’m thinking about which ones I can drop because it’s just too much financially and emotionally. There are several substacks I’d like to support but I’ll just have to drop others. So it’s actually not a great system for the consumers either. Like I said, I have no answers but thanks for bringing up a really important subject.
I was self employed once too, and lucky for me, my husband was a retired Navy enlisted guy so I did not have to worry about health insurance....otherwise I could not have been able to do it.....I am signed up to more than one person who, like you needs to support him/herself and family....thanks for the thoughtful letter to educate those who think everything should be free. Spot on, John
As an educator with a Master of Library Science degree, I have given many trainings in copyright. And there are always those who will say that if they can get it for free, why shouldn’t they. I would have to explain the same way you did, but sadly didn’t always get the light bulb moment.
Sorry, John. I'm one of those who have read your work for free for a long time--years, at least. I don't know if it's been a decade, but years, certainly. I have subscribed at the base level; but I'm sorry to say it can only be for a month. Eating is important, after all.
I'm on a fixed income, my spouse being the sole earner in our little household (a 34-foot ancient RV). Her job--an online ad copywriter--is being actively wiped out by AI and Google as I write this, her successful 15-year business slowly dying. It's a tough time for us, and a perfect, bold-faced period to make your essay's point.
But for me, too. You see, I've been writing fiction for more than two decades now. The most I have ever earned in a year from all my hard work--and it has been very hard work--is slightly more than fifty bucks. If I want to be read--bottom line--I have to give that hard work away for free. There is no alternative, to quote a profoundly nasty former British prime minister.
She was right. There isn't one. People won't give you the time of day unless you're willing to just shovel your hard work, dedication, inspiration, tears, prayers, torment, anxiety, and heartbreak out to them for free; and then what happens is very few ever even looking at it, let alone bothering to engage with it. If they download it (most of my work appears in ebook format) they simply delete it over time without reading it, leaving the 0.4 percent who ostensibly engage with it but who never post a review, never make contact, never bother to reach out and say, "Hey, I really liked that! Thanks for giving it away!" Not even that much--five seconds, that's it, press send. F*cking done.
The social media ecosystem has produced a brutal statistical power curve where only a tiny handful can make a living at their art, regardless of what that art is. The rest of us are screwed six ways to Sunday, with nary a reacharound or a cigarette offered afterward. But it's more than that. For example, almost three-fifths (58%) of Americans, once they graduate high school, never pick up another book the rest of their lives. Musicians, painters, sculptors, documentarians, dancers, and so on face similar entry odds, if not worse.
Our so-called "attention economy" is in fact a Wild Wild West oligarchic blood-sport race to the bottom, and only a few will win in any form of fashion to sustain themselves. How many singers are better than Taylor Swift out there--more talent, more drive, more imagination, more whatever--who will never get even a sliver of local spotlight, let alone statewide, let alone national or international? They exist, mark my words. And they will slog their talents and wares in total obscurity, with most of them giving up simply to keep eating, to maintain a roof over their heads, to pay for medicine. This culture isn't concerned one whit with talent, inborn or earned, with moving upward towards the light, with what I call "bestness," but only greatness--who's popular, who's got the most cash, who's getting the clicks, who's generating the memes and the controversies, who's winning the big awards, who's getting splashed about like Roy Kent plays--here, there, every-f*ckin'-where. Everyone else be damned. That is deeply toxic, and speaks to a massive, nay, perhaps fatal, spiritual deficit in folks, not to mention an intellectual and emotional one. A culture that rewards only those who achieve the Great Big National or Worldwide spotlight is a culture on its deathbed--as we see. After all, look who almost half of America--at least--is planning to vote for in November. It's a big, giant, bloated orange "flag"--and we ignore it, and all it implies--at our direct and immediate peril.
And so I shall slog on in obscurity. I shall never be able to make a living from my writing--as in ever. I've accepted that. Does that make me inferior to Stephen King or the increasingly tragic JK Rowling? Only in terms of greatness. But definitely not in terms of bestness. I can say, honestly, and without boasting, that at least two of my self-published novels are as good as anything King or Rowling have written, and absolutely everything EL James has. But since I'm a total unknown, all I'll get for that comment is derision, disbelief, disdain, and damnation. "Yeah. Whatever, dude," I can hear folks say. And no one will ever bother to find out whether or not I can walk my walk to back up my talkie-talk.
Thanks for writing this John. I was so surprised at the faithful reader who had never considered that she read your work for free, every day for most of a decade. How did that not translate for her as something she might want to support by paying for it? But, you explain that too. I was truly floored and it opened my eyes. Now, the question is, what to do with that revelatory information about readers?
A "come-to-Jesus" moment for me. 🙌 I hate that the myth is perpetuated that anyone can get rich online as a creative. It's exploitive of artists. As you stated, only a very small percentage can financially sustain themselves through online content alone. Thank you for speaking the truth.✌️
Thank you for writing this newsletter. Your experience mirrors mine (though you are much more successful financially.) In my experience, this issue is doubly hard for women, because we are always viewed as arrogant and grasping and greedy when we ask people to pay for our work.
I agree with everything you wrote. I think it a huge systemic problem that is a piece of everything we’re dealing with today that mostly comes down to the wealthiest among us pulling all the strings to make sure all the wealth flows upward. I have no answers but I support lots of creative folks across different platforms. At this point, I’m thinking about which ones I can drop because it’s just too much financially and emotionally. There are several substacks I’d like to support but I’ll just have to drop others. So it’s actually not a great system for the consumers either. Like I said, I have no answers but thanks for bringing up a really important subject.
I was self employed once too, and lucky for me, my husband was a retired Navy enlisted guy so I did not have to worry about health insurance....otherwise I could not have been able to do it.....I am signed up to more than one person who, like you needs to support him/herself and family....thanks for the thoughtful letter to educate those who think everything should be free. Spot on, John
As an educator with a Master of Library Science degree, I have given many trainings in copyright. And there are always those who will say that if they can get it for free, why shouldn’t they. I would have to explain the same way you did, but sadly didn’t always get the light bulb moment.
Sorry, John. I'm one of those who have read your work for free for a long time--years, at least. I don't know if it's been a decade, but years, certainly. I have subscribed at the base level; but I'm sorry to say it can only be for a month. Eating is important, after all.
I'm on a fixed income, my spouse being the sole earner in our little household (a 34-foot ancient RV). Her job--an online ad copywriter--is being actively wiped out by AI and Google as I write this, her successful 15-year business slowly dying. It's a tough time for us, and a perfect, bold-faced period to make your essay's point.
But for me, too. You see, I've been writing fiction for more than two decades now. The most I have ever earned in a year from all my hard work--and it has been very hard work--is slightly more than fifty bucks. If I want to be read--bottom line--I have to give that hard work away for free. There is no alternative, to quote a profoundly nasty former British prime minister.
She was right. There isn't one. People won't give you the time of day unless you're willing to just shovel your hard work, dedication, inspiration, tears, prayers, torment, anxiety, and heartbreak out to them for free; and then what happens is very few ever even looking at it, let alone bothering to engage with it. If they download it (most of my work appears in ebook format) they simply delete it over time without reading it, leaving the 0.4 percent who ostensibly engage with it but who never post a review, never make contact, never bother to reach out and say, "Hey, I really liked that! Thanks for giving it away!" Not even that much--five seconds, that's it, press send. F*cking done.
The social media ecosystem has produced a brutal statistical power curve where only a tiny handful can make a living at their art, regardless of what that art is. The rest of us are screwed six ways to Sunday, with nary a reacharound or a cigarette offered afterward. But it's more than that. For example, almost three-fifths (58%) of Americans, once they graduate high school, never pick up another book the rest of their lives. Musicians, painters, sculptors, documentarians, dancers, and so on face similar entry odds, if not worse.
Our so-called "attention economy" is in fact a Wild Wild West oligarchic blood-sport race to the bottom, and only a few will win in any form of fashion to sustain themselves. How many singers are better than Taylor Swift out there--more talent, more drive, more imagination, more whatever--who will never get even a sliver of local spotlight, let alone statewide, let alone national or international? They exist, mark my words. And they will slog their talents and wares in total obscurity, with most of them giving up simply to keep eating, to maintain a roof over their heads, to pay for medicine. This culture isn't concerned one whit with talent, inborn or earned, with moving upward towards the light, with what I call "bestness," but only greatness--who's popular, who's got the most cash, who's getting the clicks, who's generating the memes and the controversies, who's winning the big awards, who's getting splashed about like Roy Kent plays--here, there, every-f*ckin'-where. Everyone else be damned. That is deeply toxic, and speaks to a massive, nay, perhaps fatal, spiritual deficit in folks, not to mention an intellectual and emotional one. A culture that rewards only those who achieve the Great Big National or Worldwide spotlight is a culture on its deathbed--as we see. After all, look who almost half of America--at least--is planning to vote for in November. It's a big, giant, bloated orange "flag"--and we ignore it, and all it implies--at our direct and immediate peril.
And so I shall slog on in obscurity. I shall never be able to make a living from my writing--as in ever. I've accepted that. Does that make me inferior to Stephen King or the increasingly tragic JK Rowling? Only in terms of greatness. But definitely not in terms of bestness. I can say, honestly, and without boasting, that at least two of my self-published novels are as good as anything King or Rowling have written, and absolutely everything EL James has. But since I'm a total unknown, all I'll get for that comment is derision, disbelief, disdain, and damnation. "Yeah. Whatever, dude," I can hear folks say. And no one will ever bother to find out whether or not I can walk my walk to back up my talkie-talk.
That's a genuine tragedy. But not just for me.
God bless America.
Thanks for writing this John. I was so surprised at the faithful reader who had never considered that she read your work for free, every day for most of a decade. How did that not translate for her as something she might want to support by paying for it? But, you explain that too. I was truly floored and it opened my eyes. Now, the question is, what to do with that revelatory information about readers?