What Do "Real" Authors Do?

A study in contrasts and similarities, related to the previous post about creator experiences. Author John Sundman noted that his publishing adventure from Creative Commons to traditional publishing got an interesting summary from a blogger.

Sundman's publishing journey is unusual, probably unique. He began with a Creative Commons-licensed work (Acts of the Apostles) that got a positive review on /, and saw a spike in popularity on Amazon. The novel was then sold to a small indie publishing house that was set to produce a revised version but was instead bought out by a bigger house. The rights then reverted to Sundman who wanted to produce a revised version of the book, incorporating improvements. The result is called Biodigital and it's about 60/40 reworked material/new material.

This sort of thing is (or used to be) quite common in the music space. Bands would release an EP with 4-5 songs and then later a full-length LP or CD containing those same songs - perhaps with a more professional production polish - and some new material. Record companies are set up to do this. Book publishers? Not so much. Sometimes you get a novel that's been made out of a short story (e.g. Ender's game) but nobody I know of has taken a previously published novel and remixed it themselves.

Sundman's solution was to use unglue.it, which I first heard about back in 2012. Under a new arrangement with unglue.it, Biodigital appears for sale but for a limited time. Around mid-2016 the book becomes free to remix for anyone else.

So, that's one point of view. Or, you could just pay the goddamn writer what they're worth. In this clip from an upcoming documentary on Harlan Ellison, the author rants about the "assholes" and "amateurs" who agree to work for free. Ellison wants to be paid for his work - in this case for an interview that Warner Brothers wanted to use on a DVD.

A real author, in this case Ellison, wants to be paid for their work particularly when that work is going to be used in a for-sale enterprise by a highly profitable mega-corporation such as WB. Ellison's rant is necessarily simplistic, but he has a basic point: the explosion of free content is making it difficult for people who want to make a living. The difficulty - again, see Erin Biba's rant - is that even people who are making money at these sorts of businesses seem to want contributions to come in for free. We, the public, give our free labor and content to YouTube and Facebook which use that content to make millions. It's been a couple years since the Ph.D. elite began to revolt against the publishers who make millions off their free labor but that business hasn't changed.

We're looking at a very wide gulf here: on the one hand we have individuals like Sundman and Fleishman who are on their own trying to figure out approximately everything and having a hard time getting actual income. On the other hand we have corporate entities that appear still to be quite profitable yet take advantage of individuals. I have no idea how to bridge this gap.