Compensation Part 2

Getting paid is good. It's nice to see a whole bunch of zeros behind, well, behind any number. However, that isn't the case when you've decided to live the artist's life. It has never ceased to amaze me how any number of people, friends and family members included, have never had any trouble paying me for a drink and giving me a tip all those years I stood behind a bar. It's like they'll pay the eight bucks and a two buck tip without even blinking. Yet, come to buying one of my books? Forget about it. It's the exact same price, ten bucks, and of the ten bucks I'll get two. Sure, getting paid is a wonderful thing, wonderful indeed, but it just isn't a realistic expectation.

In fact, I feel like writing, and anymore especially, is a real hustle. I've known those creative writers who make a great deal of money, a whole lot of sales, but there is a time limit to it. I had an associate many years ago who wrote an entire series of military/zombie novels. He told me he'd had a ten thousand dollar month. Pretty impressive, and wow, I was proud of him if not a little envious. He also told me that the life expectancy of a novel in today's rapid fire publication scheme is less than ninety days. This means, of course, that a writer can work for weeks, months or years on a novel and only get the opportunity to sell that book over a period of ninety days.

Then there's the guns for hire writers I know. These are the writers who write for papers, magazines and blogs. These situations really do involve the old fashioned hustle. It's a different set of circumstances now than it was just a few years ago. For instance, a good friend of my used to work for the weekly paper. He wrote two very small articles a week, made a hundred bucks apiece. In the course of a month, he made enough money to pay his bills. He had a modest life, but his time was his own. Then, the paper went to a blogger's format. Instead of making one hundred dollars per article, he would be making a mere twenty five. The implications are many here. First, it would take a writer now four times as much time and work to make the same money. Second, what about the quality of writing?

Monetary compensation is important only because of the way most of us live, have to live or are forced to live. We live in a relatively tame time where most of us are filed away in towns or cities and that means that we are forced to comply to the customary housing and utilities paradigm. Along with all of that, it seems to me that the cost of living has gotten very high and by and large, the wages have dropped. It's a precarious situation, indeed. Therefore, many of us go off to work, one job, two jobs, more? When paying the bills becomes a priority, what about the love of making art? What about the compulsion to make art?

All of that aside, the inconvenience of making art in an advancing expensive world, has art become devalued with the vast amount of data available to the touch? It's like this: if you have ten writers who each write one book, and your market can support one hundred dollars of sales, then each writer will get ten dollars. I know this is a simple view, and not likely proportional, but take it as a small example. Now, let's change how the system works. We have digital downloads and we have print of demand. We no longer need the help of large publishing houses, agents or editors. So now, instead of having ten writers writing a book apiece, we have one hundred writers with a book a piece. One hundred books. The market will still support exactly 100 dollars. This now comes to a a buck per book, one buck. I don't think this example is too far off the mark. We now live in a world with more data available daily than we had before.

Occasionally, I think about the intellectuals of a few hundred years ago. Some of these people claimed, and probably rightly so, that they had read every book ever published. I don't think it was an exaggeration. I don't feel like it was an exaggeration because there may have been a few hundred books at most published. These days, not the case. Everyone is self-publishing. Good on them for doing it too, I think. But it amounts to millions of volumes every year.

It may seem like a strange thought that I've recently been having that money is just not real. It isn't real. Sure, it's tangible. I trade hours of my day, of my life, working to collect a paycheck that ultimately gets parceled out to the varying goods and services I use. It's an amazing system in which we live. Free market or not. I still use cash, because I can see how much something costs and I can put it to a direct amount of time or activity in which I earned it. But this is so not often the case any more. Most people use cards. Some people use their phone to pay for the goods and services. This is especially frightening because there is no direct relationship to the work/money association. Never mind if art is involved.

Because if art is involved, the amount of labor and time it took going into whatever product is never going to be a relational compensation. When a person goes to work, even the most menial of jobs, there is an hourly rate of pay to support that particular position. With a writer, however, it works very differently. Whatever the final product is, a poem or a screenplay or a novel, the amount of work both in hours and emotions does not have a tangible dollar amount. But wouldn't it be wonderful to get paid by the hour, or like it was in the olden days, by the word?

So, why do it? Why bother? If you have to ask that question, it's not likely you're a writer or will become a writer.