I don't produce art. I just write stories. And if people want to read my stories, they can - as long as they pay me for them. If they don't want to pay, that's fine. No obligations, no-one 'paying for my self-indulgence'.
I would disagree with the notion that art is by definition 'self-indulgent. Blatant author insertion and author living vicariously through their art/characters would be risky areas to get into, although in occasion writers manage to pull that off too. But most of the time, art is a compulsion, and revealing oneself in uncomfortable or even unconscious ways, going deeper than the need for attention. One of the main driving forces of art is social commentary. Processing of what's happening in the society in the here and now, and other times, writing is used to change entire philosophies, provides a paradigm shift towards a better world. Many artists gave their lives in pursuit of this truth, how many were exiled even hunted and killed, for criticising the regime, or some other aspect of the elite in their plays and paintings? They didn't risk all that in order to satisfy some fantasy or ego, they did it because they had to.
Of course, and I managed, somehow, to divorce my thinking from the courageous social commentary. By self-indulgent (I should truly stop using such words, because as demonstrated, they lead to miscommunication) I was meaning that by creating art the artist is pleased, and since the artist is being pleased, then the artist is indulging the self. (I did not mean to suggest something like gluttony.) Also, what would you consider "author insertion?" Curious. ETA: Well, I did mean it to be a bit gluttonous (since the artist's opinion regarding the artist's work tends to claim priority). That is only so far, though.
I would argue that your thesis has worrying implications for work in general. To be paid for one's work isn't supposed to be a sort of consolation prize for a life of misery. In an ideal world, everyone would take joy in their work, and be able to do that joyous work because others value it enough to pay for it. But joy or no joy, everyone needs to get paid. I want to ask a question, and I'm worried that it's a rude question. But I'm going to cautiously ask it anyway: Are you yet of an age, or in a position, where you, personally, need to earn your living? I ask because when you don't yet need to earn a living, then being paid has a different nuance--it's a reward, an "extra", not a necessity. In that context, I can see that one might feel that accepting an extra reward for something that was a pleasure anyway might seem wrong. But once you have to earn a living, it's not an extra; it's survival. You need food and clothes and a roof. It's wonderful to be able to earn those things with work that one loves, but in any case they have to be earned, one way or another. To choose to do work that makes one miserable, so that one avoids being paid for doing one's true life work, seems counterproductive.
My disillusion is that I don't know what I'm doing concerning publishing and editing. I wrote my book, and I'd like someone to help me edit it. But I'm not really wanting to show it either, if that makes sense. I wouldn't mind paying someone to edit my work, though I feel like I can do it myself at the same time. my work is definitely not finished, and if I were to turn it into a publisher, myself or a traditional, it will be shot down. maybe that's what some of the people are saying when they mention that a book has to be 'ready' and not 'half-assed'
To your first point on definition, yes. In the totality of all of my posts here, I have presented a ramshackle argument. Definitions are nonfunctional and vague, logical flow is rarely present, and conclusion is lost under a rock somewhere. I am aiming to redact everything I have said. Regarding your question of my circumstance, no, I am not currently in a position in which I need to financially support myself. Do not worry rudeness, and I get where you are coming from. Really, I do. From a certain point as well, my entire spew could be seen as the ramblings of some blunt youth. Maybe they are; maybe I delude myself with the decision that they are not. I would say that I do no view income as supplementary, though. I understand the difficulties and nuances of a world in which one must survive. I have certainly not lived them, but I can logically acknowledge them. I am trying to question beyond these things. I have not been making my "arguments" on the assumption that money is "reward." Or, at least, not the reward you mentioned. But yes, I know that one, if given the opportunity, would love to make a living off something one made. I would add that my thoughts on this topic are tying into my thoughts regarding social Duty. Really, I irresponsibly began to speak. I should have thought of Zeno, in that there is reasoning to my one mouth but two ears.
You need a critique group or to get some more posts in the forum (and 2 critiques in the workshop) then post a 1,000 words give or take to get an idea how much work your book needs. If it needs work, you'll get help. If it doesn't need much work the next step is a beta reader. There are editors for hire, I don't know much about hiring one but I expect to pay for professional editing when my novel is finished. No sense paying until it's close to being ready.
So there you go, glad that's settled. You'd have to be independently wealthy not to want to be paid for creative work just as we want to be paid for other kinds of work. I don't owe society a social debt that says I should work for free. It's a trade relationship, give and get.
I'm working on posting here in the forum. I find no sense of urgency to get the 20 posts in a rush; they will come as they will. And I'm 100% positive it needs help --I have some awful grammar when it comes to getting the tenses correct. I'll often write a sentence such as: The boy ran to the house and opens the door; as he does such he realized that something is not quite right about how the door creaked. ...okay, maybe that's a little worse than I normally do. But it's about on that level. I'd feel awful subjecting someone to 1000, even 100 words of that. Not to mention 70k. And yes, I'm poking fun at myself a little. I know my weakness(I'm sure there is more I'm not aware of though) and I am working to fix it....but oh gosh, it hurts even my eyes trying to read the grammatically horrendous work of my story, aha.
It's off topic in this thread but right away I can see you need help eliminating filter words: "such" and "quite" And you are right about the tense problem: did - realized; does - realizes And there is some telling there that might be better shown: He opened the door. His ear picked up a change, the pitch of the door creaking was off ever so subtly. These are all things you can learn.
I wish I could start a separate topic for this actually; I really, really don't want to derail the actual topic of this thread, being self-publishing. Is there a place that I can?
A lot of people choose their careers. Just because they choose to do something they enjoy, should they not get paid? Should we only pay people to do jobs they don't like? I write because I enjoy it. When I get published, I expect to get paid for it because I worked my ass off to produce that book. If readers don't want to pay for it, there's always the public library.
The scope of argument that I proposed is too limited. To properly address what I'm getting at, I need to challenge capitalism, investigate social Duty, and the nature of worth. This issue is too complicated to simply sum up so, from my perspective. I feel that situation isn't ideal, however.
@Swiveltaffy Keep in mind you are talking to a vocal minority about the importance of compensating artists for art. A vocal minority is not necessarily wrong, and you should not necessarily ignore it (I myself have had interesting discussions with the very same vocal minority regarding issues on which I disagree with the minority), but remember to take it with a grain of salt. Keep it in perspective. I find it all too easy to fall into the trap of only listening to a vocal minority and then thinking that it is the consensus (or worse, that it is the truth), so I often must remind myself to get a healthy balance of perspectives. Personally, like the vast majority, I pirate every movie, song, and book I can get my hands on because I cannot be bothered to give a shit about doing the "right" thing. Therefore, I would be a hypocrite if I asked people to pay to read what I wrote, which is one of the main reasons why I have no plans to do that. (The main reason is that my ultimate goal is for as many people to read it as possible, and requiring people to pay for it can only reduce the amount of people who read it.)
Ah, a variation of the "Silent Majority" excuse. Followed by the "I steal what I want so I'll claim it's wrong for people to expect payment for their work" philosophy. Interesting times we live in...
Quick tip on how humans communicate with each other: when you say you do not care about doing the right thing, that is not the same as claiming you are actually doing the right thing. Take note of that. It might come in handy later.
When you say 'vocal minority' are you referring to the laws of every single country and the fact that vast majority of people buy their books and CDs and wall art? Not necessarily because they want to be 'doing the right thing' but because it never occurred to them to sit on the internet all day long trying to access torrent sites, spending hours downloading content, taking copyright marks off the images, downloading songs from suspect sites full of malware and reading books as poorly scanned pdfs. In my experience, people who are doing something they know is wrong, often delude themselves that 'everybody's doing it' be it a victimless crime, or not.
We may, possibly, have some ground in common here. I don't think that it's wrong to get paid for your creative work. But I'm also not a fan of the way that people seem to measure their creations entirely by whether they get paid for them. I used to participate on a forum about blogging, where almost every word is about how to make money from one's blog. I gave up on the forum, but at some point before I gave up I wrote a rant about the fact that people don't try to "monetize" their activities when they cook, or knit, or sew, or play softball, or throw a party, so why do they have to monetize their blogging? Of course, some people do try to monetize their parties--I read somewhere (Miss Manners?) about the problem of people who don't know how to socialize without the excuse of selling Tupperware or Special Moments figurines or demanding shower gifts or in some other way turning the party into a transaction. I'm fine with unpaid creative activity. And I think that sometimes people have to accept that their creative activity is not going to make them a living, and quite often isn't even going to earn them enough to be worth the trouble of bringing money into the equation. But that's different from the idea that creative activity *should* be unpaid. If you usually drive a cab or provide tech support or sell insurance, and you're in an amateur band that brings people joy a couple of times a month, that's great. If you start having a streak of success that lets you start charging and quit that job and devote all your time to music, then do it. But if you don't, don't feel that that means that your playing isn't worthwhile.
Lobbyists and politicians are a vocal minority. And the "laws of every single country" you refer to are the result of a recent bandwagon led by a vocal minority of countries. So yes. Just now, you did a pretty good job of explaining why your example is irrelevant to what I said. Especially with the part I bolded.
You used the expression of 'vocal minority' to qualify the position of people in this discussion who are saying that copyrighted material shouldn't have an expectation attached to it of being free - a position respected if not taken by a vast majority of artists, producers and consumers. Just because some minority groups, like lobbyists, ALSO hold the same views, you can't disregard the fact that other, much more numerous groups, are respecting, if not actively supporting, copyright, which makes it a majority, not a minority opinion. However, if you insist on your wishful thinking, I won't waste time trying to dissuade you.
But therein lies the flaw in your argument, because if the minority became a majority, and no one paid for what you pirate, there wouldn't be anything to pirate because in this society you need money to simply live and support a family. To think otherwise is cretinous. Yes, there are people who are willing to give away creations for nothing but in order to do that they must, at some point, make a living from something. A doctor for example, cannot heal people, if they are not able to look after themselves. A government cannot give money to people who do not earn unless others pay taxes who are earning, and so on. The new books, music and art you take for granted will no longer be produced. You only have to look at the music business to see the effect of piracy and the decline in new music and creativity. And books for that matter. You'd be surprised how many mid-list authors now have jobs to make ends meet, meaning they simply can't write as many books, ultimately depriving the reader. That means you, or have you forgotten that?
You'd be surprised how often it happens. It's not all about contracts or series really, but author-branding. Once a writer starts writing a certain kind of book with a publisher, it becomes difficult to convince them you can write other stuff as well. What happens then is the writer publishes under a pseudonym, and often self publishes just to get around any possible contractual issues with that publisher.
Do you have hard data on 'how often that happens'? Because my personal experience doesn't really fit with that. My agent is currently negotiating a deal with Penguin for me, and one of the original lines in their version of the contract was something about a guarantee that my next written or published book will be the second book in my two-book deal. So, on the surface, they were trying to tie me down in a way not dissimilar to what you describe. But my agent just laughed at the clause and said something like, "They don't really expect us to sign that," and as negotiations have gone on it's become clear that they don't expect us to. They've changed it so the next book in that genre will be the second book in the deal, but as I write in several other genres, it's not really a problem. But the effect of what they've done is to make it more likely that I'll write in different genres, not less. (In reality, I'm going to write and submit the second book as soon as possible, because I don't like having 'to do' lists. But if I was trying to put that second book off, I'd have to write in different genres for it to happen). And in terms of pseudonyms - I was thinking I'd need a new one for each genre in which I wrote, but Penguin thus far is saying they think I should stick with the same one unless I'm writing something totally weird. I think the sticking point may be the part where you're trying to "convince [the publisher] you can write other stuff as well." I don't really need to convince Penguin I can write other stuff, I just need to convince some publisher. If authors are signing a contract with a publisher and expecting to never go on submission again or never have to look for new contracts, I think they're fooling themselves. If I write in a new genre, I'm back to... well, not quite to 'start', because my agent represents all my genres, but in terms of her work, she's starting over. Anyway, TL;DR version: I can see how someone seeing (or worse, signing) the initial version of the contract I was presented with might feel tied down. But I don't think that's the way it's going to play out in practice.
