I’ve got one foot in big tech and another in traditional publishing. The worlds couldn’t be more different.
Software is driven by a culture of ‘open-source’. You make something, and give it away for free. The theory is that, over time, by standing on shoulders of giants, as an industry, it will arrive at a better place than if it was all kept to ourselves. There’s an expectation, from the outset, that people will take our ideas, change them, and give us back something entirely new, something that we might then evolve even further. It assumes that ideas are infinite and malleable and will only get better with time.
Publishing talks about copyright. They talk about ‘protecting’ the rights of the author. That if someone uses the work, the creator of that work should be paid ‘fairly’ (whatever that means in legal terms). The theory is that paying people for these ideas will provide the motivation for those artists, and others, to keep producing work. This right to be paid for your ideas in this industry is fought for ferociously. It assumes that ideas of an individual are worth something significant.
In the software world, there’s little to no curation. There are millions of projects of variable quality across the internet. In software, this is a good thing. The crowd decides what lives, and what dies. Beneficial code and ideas tend to spread, bad ones don’t.
In publishing, it’s highly curated. Publishers have a finite number of book slots to fill every year. Projects are picked on the merit of the idea when measured against what will sell, and what’s come before. That selection is made by people in a particular class of society. Publishing produces less ideas, but they are believed to be higher quality. However, those ideas come at a cost – people need to be readers and books cost money and not everyone has access to a library.
To be perfectly honest, both have pros and cons but, right now, I can’t help but believe that open-source is, in fact, aligned with a greater good. There is an inherent bias in publishing, on a number of levels. This is no one’s individual fault but the result of systemic and structural inequality – the same inequality that governs all aspect of our culture. I know that publishers are working SO hard to change their practices, to try to dismantle the inherent biases that have formed their own cultures over the years but that’s going to take time. What do we do in the meantime? Protect our ideas so that only the wealthy have access? There’s got to be a better way – maybe that’s open-source?
I genuinely believe that people will pay to consume stories, and the arts, if they can. When I see my books and works pirated, it brings me a little joy, not despair, because the biggest threat to the arts isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. I’m also privileged in many ways, the biggest is that I don’t rely on my artistic work for income. That’s a game changer. But, the ASA reports that the average annual income for authors from their books is around $11,000 AUD, so, with that in mind, it seems that most authors aren’t relying on their artistic work for income, either? Is that because of an inherent undervaluing of the work artist’s produce? Or something else? Stamping down on pirating, or trawling the internet for breaches of copyright won’t bring that annual income number up to a living wage. The time and energy spent doing that may be better spent creating the next work.
I don’t know about other authors, but I don’t work in the arts for income. Others I know say a similar thing, or, at the very least, it’s not the primary driver. If money was important to us we’d all join the finance sector. Self-expression is important (but that changes when a publisher gets involved anyway), so the real reason I work in the arts is to change culture.
Right now, publishers bring curation, distribution, and a second perspective that generally leads to higher-quality work (but may also risk biasing away from audiences who don’t have the education or means to engage with a ‘higher-quality’ work). Automation will destroy their competitive advantage of distribution (and the economy of scale printing costs they benefit from in large-scale print runs) over time. That leaves ‘curation’ and ‘quality’ as their only advantage. But who are the gatekeepers? And who should be? Should literature be controlled by the educated few? Or should authors and illustrators aim to get their work in as many hands as possible to create a more diverse literature landscape that is a truer representation of the world as it is? Even if it means ceding a few dollars to get the work in the hands of people who can’t afford it.
I don’t have answers to these questions, and I’m very aware I’m coming from a privileged position here. Media companies are eating each other as a solution to ‘staying alive’ so we’re slowly moving toward a less diverse media landscape, anyway. Publishers are leaning more and more on celebrities as a way to ‘keep up’ with how to reach buyers in a noisy and uncontrollable attention-landscape unleashed (and controlled) by the internet and social media services. Publish a celebrity and you buy their audience. They’re doing their best to ‘protect’ ideas, but the internet is a force that even media companies can’t comfortably reckon with or predict. It’s changing too fast, too organically, and with not enough transparency.
Meanwhile, software is eating the world. There has never been a better time in history for an artist to reach the widest audience possible. We are no longer sitting in a provincial market square in France that sees 17 walkers-by a day. In a button click, we have access to millions of people. To limit access to an idea that may change a life seems short-sighted and unintuitive to me.
What we really need is more people engaging with the work. I know, as do many privileged people, that the arts and stories change lives. You only know that feeling from being privileged enough to have had the experience. Stories lead to a kinder and more empathetic world. They lead to better educated people and better education solves a lot of the world’s problems. Maybe what we need to do is let go, to stop squeezing our manuscripts and our illustrations tighter and tighter for fear of not being paid or acknowledged. Maybe we need to keep making the work that we know does good and have faith that it’ll find a place in the world – whether that place can afford it or not.
