November 16, 2019
Should Art Be Free? On Rights and Motivation
Visiting Home for Fiction today and tomorrow, you might see a banner advertising that my book The Other Side of Dreams is free on Amazon for a couple of days. What you perhaps didn’t know until now is that all my art is in essence free: All you have to do to get a free digital copy of any of my books is to ask for it*. Should art be free? This will be today’s topic.
* It’s even easier nowadays: Simply visit this page on the main Home for Fiction site, for an immediate free download! For some of the reasons, partly contradicting some of what you’ll find below, take a look at my explanation why I decided to offer my books for a free download.
The dialectics balance between the “rights” of the author and the “rights” of the public. We’ll have to define both concepts in order to make sense of this.
In a way, the answer to the question “Should art be free?” is a matter of motivation and expectations: What is the motivation of the audience to implicitly demand free art, and what are the expectations of the author?
Should Art Be Free, the Artist Should Starve
Here’s some news, in case you didn’t know: The artist is starving anyway. OK, perhaps I’m using “starve” somewhat liberally here, but only to make a point.
The overwhelming majority of artists are “starving”. That is, although they’re selling their art expecting remuneration, it’s not enough to allow them to make a living.
Artists – writers, sculptors, painters, or guitar players – most likely only have a meager income from their art. If you’re reading my blog, chances are you’re a writer. And – I’m guessing – you’re making a few bucks every month with your writing. Depending on your genre or whether you’ve been doing this for a long time, perhaps you’re making a few hundred.
Still, you’d be an overwhelming minority. There are many more who make only a few bucks and even more who don’t sell anything.
That’s “starving”, albeit in a metaphorical sense; you might be making $5000 a month as, say, a doctor. But in a writing context, your writing income classifies you as “starving”. Which means, you’re not making money with your writing, although it’s not free.
Free Art: Rights of Authors and the Public
As I mentioned in the introduction, to approach the question “Should art be free?” we first need to define the “rights” of the author and the “rights” of the public. The quotation marks are there to indicate the fluidity of the concept. What else did you expect from a concept linked to another fluid concept, art?
The Author’s Rights
The way I see it, the rights of the author are:
- to be recognized as the creator of the work in question
- to have the first and final word regarding remuneration of the work in question
I expect everyone understands the meaning of the former. As for the latter, it basically means that the author should be the sole authority on matters of monetization of the work: if it’s offered at a price, how much is the price, etc.
It also means that the author should be the recipient of any remuneration, deducting concrete expenses for the work of others (say, a graphic designer). If the author has decided that the work should be offered for free, nobody should be able to receive payments in the author’s stead.
It goes without saying that this second right is violated all the time by publishers, platforms, and what not. It’s the compromise between retaining control of your work and reaching an audience. It was also one of the lessons I learned as a published author.
The Public’s Rights
Things are trickier when it comes to the public’s rights. The reason is that, quite often, these rights can conflict with the author’s.
In its most simple manifestation, if we think of art as a necessary ingredient of culture and an integral part of creating a citizen, then the public’s right to accessible art conflicts with the authors’ right to request payment for their work.
Things get infinitely more complex when there are other agencies involved. This, sadly, is almost always the case. There are sellers, promoters, online platforms, and others who try to regulate the relationship between author and the public – usually for personal benefit.
As I mentioned in the very first paragraph of this post, most of you probably don’t knowAnd if you want to discover other things you might not know about me, take a look here! I do offer my work for free. All you have to do is send me an email and ask for any of my books. No strings attached, other than the procedure. You don’t have to write a review (if you don’t want to) or do anything else.
The reason I do it this way – instead of permanently listing my work online for free – is because I want my readers to make the effort and be proactive in showing they want my work. If there are readers who still want the book but don’t want to follow this more personal way, they are still able to get the book from Amazon but for a price. It all goes back to my rights as an author to decide on the process.
Which brings us to motivation and expectations.
(The Public’s) Motivation and (the Author’s) Expectations
To ask whether art should be free is basically to ask where these two concepts, motivation and expectations, meet. This meeting point is, maddeningly enough, a moving target. That’s what makes it such a difficult, even controversial point.
In a perfect world, where there would be universal basic income, where everyone would have access to health care and education, and where human rights would be safeguarded, there wouldn’t be a need to have this discussion at all.
In a perfect world, the public would get free art because authors could provide it.
Of course, as I stated earlier, the situation isn’t that much different anyway. The author is still “starving”. Why not, then, getting a hold of that moving target? Why not focusing on writing degrowth?
It’s All up to You
The question is rhetorical or, at the very least, abstract. I’m not in a position to prescribe anything. I’m simply describing one way of approaching the issue, without even claiming it’s the best – let alone the only one.
As with so many other things, the question of whether art should be free is a matter of individual priorities. For many authors, to offer their work for free is unthinkable. Not only am I not judging them, but I basically agree with them – in the sense that a blanket “free for all, no conditions” isn’t something I feel comfortable with. My own books are free, but only for those who want them enough to ask.
At the same time, you can’t find meaning in materialism – neither can you find justice there. If your greatest (let alone only) motivation is to make money with your art, you might need to reconsider your priorities.
4 Comments
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I guess I agree with you on the basic premise: the artist gets to set the price. And that I will willingly provide a free ebook for anyone who asks.
I’d appreciate a review IF the reader provides one, also willingly, but will not require it (not that I could).
At this point, readers are desirable more than remuneration; but if anyone is to make money from my work, it should be me. Even though, according to Malcolm Reynolds, half the human race are middlemen, I still find their ‘work’ fuzzy and easily inflated in scope and value. Just like agents, the middlemen pick and choose – from the actual work of thousands.
Obviously, I haven’t negotiated this properly yet, as I have acquired neither fame nor fortune. I’m still of the opinion that good work will find its place, and that garbage will be forgotten, but sometimes it feels like mining for gold in the bottom of a very deep well.
I really like the metaphor ending your comment; it reflects my opinion as well. The optimist in me would like to believe that good work will find its place, but then the pessimist/realist realizes how unlikely this is.
The problem with garbage is that there’s a steady stream of it. Although this might sound counter-intuitive, I think there’s a finite number of works that can reach the audience – in the sense that, realistically, a prospective reader can examine a finite number of works before committing to reading one. If, for simplicity’s sake, we imagined that number to be 10, then, though garbage might be forgotten quickly, that’s little consolation if there are 9 of them on any given day. In some sense, that they’re forgotten quickly is probably a bad thing from the perspective of good work: the people who consume garbage usually seek more of the same.
During my doctoral banquet, a professor asked me about my future plans. I mentioned writing fiction. And he replied (with his lovely Scottish accent, may I add) that the problem with writing fiction is that there are more people wanting to write a book than people wanting to read one. Even if that’s not literally true, it’s true in some esoteric way.
Thank you for your always interesting comments!
I write fiction. I write good fiction. It takes a huge amount of time, and I can’t let it out until it is as good as I can make it, and meets the standards established by a lifetime of reading ‘the good stuff.’ It is complicated by the fact that illness makes me even slower.
I am in a very bad position relative to the purveyors of garbage, as they produce huge heaping servings while I insist a single paragraph make sense.
But I could no more do what they do, listen carefully: than they could write what I write. This is paramount. I am not in competition with them; I compete with my role models and the sense of a collective standard of what is worth reading.
I am content. I hope, when I finish the trilogy, that my marketing will then get my writing a larger audience. But I still know that most readers can’t or won’t read what I write. Even though I count myself as a mainstream author, toward the literary quality end, but still nowhere near the true literary end of the spectrum.
We’ll see.
PS Relatively, the 1-10% of readers I might attract is a huge number now that markets in English are worldwide.
Art and knowledge should be free. Or at least accessible