[Retric]

> Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience.

Ethics

> You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit.

The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.

After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.

[dredmorbius]

Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.

Published for profit.

There are numerous other incentives to produce books.

Schopenhauer has something to say about publication for profit:

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Auth...>

[Retric]

Hogwash.

Producing books without a profit motive requires some other means to support the vast time investment. Thus robbing the world of great works from those lesser creatures who still need to work for a living.

The only loss is competition drowning out the works of well off but talentless people. We’ll get vanity projects either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.

[dredmorbius]

Profit motive's not doing much for great works of literature:

"The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024)

Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>

I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out).

I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest.

I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view.

There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.

[Retric]

The big five are hardly the only purveyors of for profit works.

Go back through any list of the great works and you’ll find a great deal of populist authors. Shakespeare, Dickens, Herman Melville, etc were producing the exact kinds of works you’re looking down on.

Perhaps something fundamentally changed, but it seems more likely bias is talking here.

[dredmorbius]

William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) predates the first modern copyright law, the Statute of Anne (1710), by roughly a century. His income came from performances, that is, asses in seats, not book sales. His posthumous fame came in large part from the fact that those published plays were free from copyright encumberance and could be performed or published without licence fee.

Dickens pioneered the model of serial publication on which other authors of his time (notably Tolstoy) made much comment.

You've failed to mention Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was constantly in debt, damned near killed himself with one of his two possessions (a revolver, the other being a nickel), broke and unemployed in San Francisco. His relative financial flush later in life was largely due to his father-in-law's support. And asses-in-seats on the lecture circuit.

Melville, like many other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald of Gatsby fame comes to mind) saw a greatly-increased fame after his death, with Moby Dick becoming reestablished on the centennial of Melville's birth, some 28 years after his death. Melville worked during his life as a clerk, sailor, and farmer. His writing career met with very limited financial success. His works were great, no doubt, his income failed to measure up, and could hardly be considered his chief incentive. Later in life, like Twain, Melville benefitted by inheritance and lectures.

[Retric]

The point you seemed to have missed was each of them were populist authors.. To look down on populist writing is to misunderstand western literature.

Further we never got to read a book by Shakespeare because of the lack of copyright at the time. Imagine a world where he had more time to devote to such things.

Similarly Dickens was hampered by being paid by the word.

Melville on the other hand wrote Moby-Dick through the commercial success of less famous works. What happened later in life isn’t particularly relevant here, what’s generally considered the greatest work of western literature was completely dependent on someone being paid for their writing. It wasn’t some breakout novel from a new writer it’s the culmination of serious refinement of his talents that takes not just inspiration and life experience but time.

[quesera]

> The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable

There are a lot of profits in the industry, but as I think you're alluding to, not a great proportion of those profits go to the creators.

I want a model where I can compensate artists and creators (up to and including producers) equally to (or better than) the distribution and marketing arms. This can be cobbled together in some cases, but not simply.

[Retric]

> not a great proportion of those profits go to the creators

That’s often stated but misses the underlying reality is that the money is mostly spent on things which increase revenue. An unadvertised movie means less people pay for tickets, remove it and there’s less to go to everyone else.

> equally to (or better than) the distribution and marketing arms.

Obviously there’s fat to be cut from these industries but being a self published author isn’t some shortcut to success and would become even harder with very short copyright terms.

Some authors are finding success on Patreon etc, but it further limits the talent pool by requiring more than just being a good writer.

[quesera]

You're right. Marketing is expensive. Distribution is cheap these days, but often the two functions are colocated.

I would even posit that many popular creative works are commercially worthless, absent the expensive marketing. And in some cases, the marketing comes first and the creative work is basically an effort to fulfill the marketing spec. Implicitly or explicitly.

But like venture capital, the entertainment industry is sustained by the huge successes, and they are motivated to overspend on every attempt. This works in VC (for founders at least) but it doesn't work well for artists.

I don't have a solution, but I wish for something that would bypass the go-big-or-go-home model while fostering organic success. (And I'm thinking of the music industry primarily. Movies and books occupy different spots on the continuum, though some of the same issues do apply.)