In Defense of Giving your Work Away:

(a.k.a. "The edge Cartoonists have over the RIAA")

This post is a glorified response to an interview over at kottke with Cory Doctorow, who apparently has some fairly strong opinions about giving away your work. Naturally, there're a few hecklers in the comments who don't "get it". This would be a fine argument to sit on the fence of, except I know of at least one stable business model that basically thrives on 'Giving Work Away', and since I'm reposting my remarks (more or less), you can take a guess what I'm referring to: Comics, comics, and more comics.

For years, people only paid for their newspaper comics as an incidental part of the newspaper; to children and adults alike, such work was essentially 'free' for them, because newspapers were a given and the news content of the paper was what was truly 'paid for', and not the comics, except when they bought the books and merchandise. The system had hiccups, the way any general monopoly does, but for several decades this model worked out fairly well for cartoonists (at least the ones that "made it", anyway).

The internet equivalent is in webcomics, with several key differences; no editorial process, no risk of a risque strip being yanked, no pre-payment from newspapers to publish and carry the work. One would expect that, if comics worked the way books and music work, they would charge people just to see the pages.

Yet they don't. All their work is free to view, and in most cases, so are the archives, making it harder to justify book sales. And yet there are probably just as many (if not more) people profiting off of webcomics, even if these profits are not as big (yet) as the average person appearing in newspapers. These cartoonists are just as niche, just as specialized, have just as much to lose, and yet they thrive, even when the majority of their work is just 'given' away.

Why? Because cartoonists work constantly. There is always 'another day' to cover, another page in the story, another advancement of the tale, and thus each individual page is cheap and worthless without the rest of the story. That commitment to the work's creator (and NOT their work itself) is the most important vector for profit. Nobody 'cares' about DMFA; they like it, sure, maybe even love it, but they care about Amber far more. Schlock Mercenary is good, but Howard Tayler is better.

The comics are an elaborate lure designed to make you want more, and recognize the hand that feeds; the person behind the comics becomes center stage. And it's not just comics; the whole "2.0" revolution is based around this idea. Jonathan Coulton's songs and Hugh MacLeod's cartoons are proof that stable models can be built around people, and not just items. The work is worthless without the creator, and so giving away the work is exactly what they WANT to happen, because as long as people can follow the lure back to the hook, everyone gets what they want.

The way songs (and other media) are done now, though, there's no lure past the song itself; the song IS the hook, so to speak. So . . . perhaps the reason big, foreboding, faceless companies are afraid of giving away their work is because they know that there's no person behind the work, and so they're subconsciously afraid that once people have it, they won't want anything more from their 'creators'.

No wonder they're scared of file-sharing; it actually forces people to care about something other than material items for a change.

Stay Away from the "Real Artists"

When I'd first started the blog, I had a huge diatribe written out about DeviantArt and how while the site had useful features, the DeviantArt community itself was poisonous and essentially the MySpace of art sites, with the exception that you have to pay good money to DeviantArt to properly assault people's eyeballs. I deleted it for (among other reasons) believing that I was being heavy-handed to blast the place just because they made it too easy for everyone to get a page there; after all, making things easier is something any person starting out in a new field wants to encourage.

After roughly a week's worth of sitting on this, I realized the problem wasn't Sturgeon's Law; it was the presence of the "Professional Internet Artist", which falls in the same vein as the "Internet Tough Guy" but with minimally more marketable drawing skills. They might be big people in a certain corner of the community, or they might actually be pretty decent artists, but the main distinction is that they either:

• Still hang out too much online in certain communities to be anything worthwhile, especially if they work in a digital medium. Yes, becoming known in communities is important to becoming well-known, but at the same time, if you're there too much it's an admission that you've got nothing better to do (which, if you're starting out, is at least partly true) or you're a lazy artist. Being a Lazy Hacker is cool; being a lazy artist isn't.
• Seem to think they know exactly what's wrong with your attitude and your work, but at the same time aren't willing to help you do anything about it. The reason is that they have no incentive to give you any advice other than "go away and come back when you're better", but we'll get to that in a moment.
  

While it'd be all too easy to say they're just assholes for the sake of being assholes, we'll have better luck actually getting to the heart of the difference why (at least if you're going into a niche part of the art market like comics) it's best to just avoid these folk. Most of the rationale can be traced back to a key difference between a 'Professional' Artist versus a 'Professional' Blogger (and let's face it, I keep saying your comic's a blog for a reason): Professional Artists work on individual commission. Professional Bloggers work on collective effort.

As to why this makes a difference, look up to where I mentioned "having no incentive" to be nice to you and give you appropriate criticism. Artists work for money just like everyone else, but they work for only one person's money at a time. Until the artist gets to a level where more people are willing to pay than he's willing to work for, he has to make himself stand out as above the 90% crap line; there's a lot of ways to do this, but the favored method seems to be making everyone else look like crap through criticism.

Criticism can be a subtle form of trolling, in that any sort of response to it tends to make you look like an asshole for questioning it (unless it's really obvious they've overstepped a boundary), while for the person giving the crticism it gives them twofold benefit in making them look better than you are and either forcing you to accept the insult (thus proving them right) or reject it (which gives them an opportunity to label you with a bad attitude, giving them the high road). This isn't to say all criticism is bad, but "You forgot to draw Sonic's ears in" is far less likely to get a bad response than "Your anatomy is awful, I'd never commission someone of such low skill."

Depending on collective effort, meanwhile, is a necessity for comic artists and bloggers alike because there is far more strength banding together for them then there is in standing apart the way freelance artists do. The reasons are obvious: Bloggers depend on collective authority and the connections of the internet to maintain their positions of power, and likewise, comic artists working together can leverage conventions and other money-making opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible singly.

Comic artists won't have nearly the same level of arrogance regarding their work because they realize that beyond the general skill involved in 'making art', comics require the ability to tell a story as well: this means skill in paneling, lettering, and other comic-specific traits that have to be balanced in along with the ability to make good artwork. Having 'great' artwork is now relative because it has to be balanced in with producing lots of it in a way that is interesting for the reader to follow, and of course, the more you work with other comic artists, the more likely they will draw new fans to you as well; some of the best artists work as parts of a comic collective that assist and support each other by association.

Ergo, comic artists have incentive to be as helpful as possible; a rising tide floats all boats, after all, and anyone who can get new readers into their comic can also bring new readers into everyone else's comic as well as their own. Since comic artists only require a little from everyone instead of depending on one person's commissions, working to get lots of new readers (of which a few will hopefully pay more to get something special!) is a key goal of their work.

So support your local comic artist. You'll be supporting everyone else's too.

Stop Starving Yourself, Stop Starving Yourself...

Starving yourself is bad, mmkay? And the cutting. And the booze. I realize that whatever a man, a woman, two dwarves and a parakeet get up into the privacy of their own home is their business, but for God's sake, man, making yourself feel like shit makes your work feel like shit too.

Whether you really want to admit it or not, your work is an extension of your well-being on top of everything else. Happy artists get work done. Not-so happy artists get work done too, but it probably won't be their best stuff. There's being able to convey certain emotions in your work, and then there's dragging yourself into these deep dark pits where you can't seem to do anything but sit in front of the TV watching The Price is Right and sucking down cheese. Or maybe that's the point in the creative process where you decide to get your character captured and raped by some psychopath. Either way it's not the place to be.

Sure, there's times where pain is acceptable, necessary, and even beneficial. Self-destructive behavior is none of the above. Don't fool yourself into thinking that this is limited to physical actions either: DeviantArt pissing you off because you're not getting enough hits/comments? Stop visiting. E-mail making you mad? Check it less. Troll getting on your case? Block his ass.

The simple matter is that drama, whining, bitching, and moaning in general are turn-offs. Sure, you can still be successful AND be completely emo, but don't expect it to get you further than the ones who look unflappable and know where to cut their losses. It's a reputation thing, and it's not that people won't sympathize with you... it's that if you bitch over everything they'll wonder when you'll start bitching about them instead.

If you don't want to look back on your posts and cringe, stop writing the posts in the first place and spend more time doing something about it.