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More and more I am seeing the traditional distribution line being broken, in larger and larger degrees of success. The internet has provided a direct line from artist/developer/manufacturer to consumer, and more and more people are learning that they can take advantage of this in a multitude of ways.

Recently, many artists have been creating their own products (or pitches for potential products), looking at how much money it will actually take them to produce, and selling products accordingly or asking for start-up money for said projects. Of particular note would be Double Fine’s recent success with Kickstarter, and Louis CK’s sales on his personal website (instead of via iTunes or similar), in which both parties made incredibly large amounts of money in extremely small amounts of time.

Double Fine’s project can be viewed here (Start from the bottom if you want the full story, though the first video from the bottom sums up a lot of the initial information quite well):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure

Louis CK’s project can be found here:

https://buy.louisck.net/news

As a side note, I would like to mention that Louis CK’s product was released completely free of DRM (data rights management, designed to prevent copying of data), making it potentially possible for just a handful of people to buy it, and then distribute it for free to the rest of his fanbase. The interesting thing here is that they didn’t.

The first thing that needs to be mentioned is that we are killing a lot of the current middleman business, be it huge publishing houses and their associated distributors, large video game publishers and their usually greedy and fairly horrendous business models designed to gouge the bejeezus out of the consumer, or even just local stores trying to sell similar products. This doesn’t, however, mean that these companies are going to disappear, just that they need to learn to adapt to this reality where the artists and other people that actually act on ideas they’ve come up with are going to have a much larger say in what happens with their product, a change that I believe will change the market for the better.

The second is that this direct-sale model will create prices on products that will be much lower than they are now. Particularly with digital products, if a producer of media can create a product and sell it directly to the user for little to no processing cost to either party (i.e. no distributors need to be paid, no shipping needs to be paid, etc), the price of a products sinks to reflect what the product is worth and the producer actually needs, and then the producer gets almost all of that money directly, without having to cut it up into little pieces to pay people that didn’t have anything directly to do with the project.

I like that these kinds of things are happening more and more, as I’d rather have a market run on the personal integrity of the consumers than one based on the lack thereof within the companies that supply the products.

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“If you can write and have something to say, you will do well in life. Most people can’t write to save their lives and have nothing interesting or valuable to say”. – John Yunker

John Yunker and Midge Raymond, both authors and publishers at Ashland Creek Press, came in to speak to our class about small presses, the e-reader marketplace, and how to really sell your book. I really like the above quote from John, because I find it to be so true. Good authors are hard to find, even among published works. Sometimes I find myself reading a book that is poorly written and has so many errors, I want to grab a red pen correct it all, and send it back to the author with a big sticky note saying “try again”. It’s the authors that can really write who do well in this world. Stephen King didn’t get to be at the top of booklists by creating mediocre stories. I’m quite sure also that he worked his butt off promoting his first few novels.

Promoting your work is another thing that John and Midge really impressed on me. I never really thought much about it before. For some reason, I figured you got an agent to find a publisher, and once you got your work published, it just either went big time or it didn’t. Like magic. Only, I learned that the publisher isn’t necessarily responsible for promoting your book. Today’s authors have to be quite aggressive in getting their work out there. And with all of the social networking sites available, as well as blogs and YouTube, it’s never been easier.

I had never really thought of these things as a means to promote a book, but after listening to John and Midge, the sites seem like the perfect place to hawk your work. The added bonus of many of the social networking and other media sites is that it opens the possibility for immediate feedback and comments from people visiting your site. When it comes to books, reviews are extremely important. The more good reviews a book gets, the more likely it is that it will be read by more people. I know from personal experience that I am more likely to buy and read a book if it has been recommended to me by someone. In our fast-paced world, word-of-mouth has never spread quicker, the internet acting as a bulletin board. When you post a promotion about your new book, it’s suddenly accessible to everyone. And getting everyone to hear about your book is at least half the battle.

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Until recently a solid definition of ghostwriting had never been presented to me. Ironically, knowledge about the field of ghost writing seems as illusive as the ghost writers themselves. Personally, the first time I’d heard about ghost writing was when a movie with Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor came out apparently dealing with the topic. I’m not sure if I have been an exception in my delayed learning, but I thought an explanation and some facts would be useful for any other late bloomers.

First of all, what is ghost writing? According to U.S. News, it is the anonymous authorship of a written work, published under a pseudonym. So, ghost writers are hired to write for other people, and publish under that person’s name. Jobs in ghostwriting include memoir writing, autobiographies, interviews, speeches, and family histories. One of the more common emerging areas in ghost writing is medical journals. In recent years there have been several complaints about the style of writing performed by ghost writers. In the objective field of medical/scientific writing, ghost writing articles have been accused of bias, and being unable to competently write in the voice of the named author.

Oddly, being willing to go unrecognized for your writing can pay very well. The median pay for an experienced ghost writer of at least 8 years, as listed by U.S. News, is $56,900. Ghost writers with more than 8 years of experience can make between $49,800-$111,000
annually. These figures are significantly higher than the estimated wage of a first year college graduate for 2011; a whopping $22,000. Who says an English major can’t feed themselves?

One of the highest paid jobs in ghost writing is in academic plagarism; or being paid to write school papers for struggling students (obviously not financially struggling, though!). The November 2012 edition of the Chronicle Review featured an article anonymously submitted by a ghost writer who has worked since his college days to write papers. The author reported that on any given day he is working on upwards of 20 different projects. The huge demand for academic papers on ghost writers is such that the “companies” that hire them have to turn away students during midterms and finals. Ouch, are students really this dishonest and lazy? Apparently so. The ghost writer from the article claims to have written over 50,000 pages of academic writing since he began, covering every imaginable topic. Depending on the topic and deadline of a given paper, the ghost writer claims to have charged $2,000 for a piece.

It seems that the real money for artists nowadays may not be in fame afterall, but in the foregoing of public esteem for the satisfaction of a job well done.