Software costs money.  Actually that’s not true – there’s plenty of free software out there for artists, and the ones detailed below are just as good as the expensive versions.

Browsers

Web browsers are usually free (or their costs are “hidden” within the cost for the operating system, as is the case with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) so this is an easy place to start.

There are two main browsers that will work on Windows PCs, Apple-Macs and Linux PCs:

• Mozilla’s Firefox
• Opera Software’s Opera

I prefer Firefox, but Opera is just as good. You can also find some browsers which work on some, but not all, operating systems.  These include Apple’s Safari (Apple & Windows only) and Google’s Chrome (Windows only).

But free software doesn’t only stretch to web browsers…

Graphics Software

Adobe Photoshop is great, but it comes with a huge pricetag of around $699/£557 for the initial software and then additional costs of around $199/£160 per upgrade to keep up with the latest version.

If you’d rather spend that money on other things (art materials, rent, food, beer…) then there is an alternative, the strangely named GIMP.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP runs on Windows PCs, Apple-Macs and Linux PCs and is completely free (as are all the upgrades). In addition it can read and write most Photoshop native PSD format files

There’s also an official site called the GIMP Plugin Registry where you can download hundreds of plugins to extend GIMP’s functionality.

There is one major area where GIMP falls behind Photoshop:  CMYK color space – the GIMP only handles RGB. Actually there is a plugin that offers basic CMYK support, but it’s certainly nowhere near the full support that Photoshop offers.

This is fine if you’re creating images for the web or for printing on your own printer, but if you want to send images to a professional printhouse then it’s a problem.

Other people have different issues and opinions.  If you want to see a range of opinions and more detailed comparisons (interspersed with the occasional silly flamewar) then just Google “GIMP vs Photoshop”.

There are other free graphics packages aimed at vector graphics and page layout – if there’s sufficient interest I’ll do a write-up of them in a future post.

Office Software

Word Processors and Spreadsheets are a necessity, whether you’re writing letters to galleries, typing up your artist’s statement/bio, or laying out budgets for grant applications.

If your use of Word Processors and Spreadsheets doesn’t involve many specialist features then it might be worth not installing any specialist software and instead using Google’s GoogleDocs – a free web-hosted application that allows you to create and edit your documents from anywhere in the world on any computer.

You can upload your existing documents to GoogleDocs – it will import and convert files created in Microsoft Word, StarOffice, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel, as well as PDFs, RTF files, and plain text files.

If you use some of the more advanced features on Word Processors or Spreadsheets then you probably need Sun’s free OpenOffice.org suite of software.

OpenOffice.org is a more traditional suite of office software, comparable to Microsoft Office, that includes Writer (a word processor, like Microsoft Word), Calc (a spreadsheet like Excel), and Impress (PowerPoint-like presentation software).  It also comes with Draw and Base – Draw is a basic drawing package, a little amateur for artists, and Base is a database package.

As with GoogleDocs, you can open all your Microsoft Word and Excel documents in OpenOffice.org, and you can choose to save documents in Word/Excel formats if you need to send them as .doc or .xls files to galleries or funding agencies.

OpenOffice.org is available for Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux platforms – and it’s all completely free.

Going the whole way – Linux for Artists

A few years ago I decided to ditch Windows and switch to Linux. It felt like a huge decision, but it was actually very easy.

Linux is an operating system – like Windows or Apple’s OSX. The difference is that it’s completely free of charge. And, in my opinion, it’s better than the others.

There are plenty of different types of Linux (each with their own advocates).  I’m going to recommend a flavour that I use, and one that’s becoming very popular for its ease of use.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu are two different flavours of the same Linux operating system.  The only real difference is the actual desktop – Ubuntu uses something called Gnome and Kubuntu uses something called KDE.  My preference is Kubuntu, but that’s just a personal preference.

There’s also a version called Ubuntu Studio which is specially pre-loaded with everything an artist could want:

Our aim is to assemble suites of applications aimed at creative people. Suites including the best open-source applications available.

For instance, Ardour 2 – A multitrack recorder/editor geared toward people familiar with Pro-Tools.

Graphic design and modeling applications including The GIMP, Inkscape and Blender. Along with plugins like dcraw to help with RAW camera files and wacom-tools for people with Wacom drawing tablets.

PiTiVi, Kino, Cinepaint are included for video creation. We hope to provide a creative environment to people as well as give a spotlight to some amazing open-source applications.

Let the creativity fly…

You can get all these software packages on Ubuntu or Kubuntu as well – Ubuntu Studio just has them all pre-installed for you, which might be handy if you’re just starting with Linux.

Those of you that venture beyond this blog to other parts of this website will probably know I’m currently working on a limited edition series of handmade artists books.

In this post I want to show how all the elements of this website will work together to help promote this new artwork, and a possible freeconomics model I’m looking at for selling the artwork.

Public documentation from the beginning of the project

Public documentation on my website

Firstly, I’ve been documenting the whole process in the Notebook section of this site.  The Notebook section is free open-source wiki software called Mediawiki – the same wiki software originally written for Wikipedia.

I chose to use wiki software because it meant I could simply log into it, create and edit pages, and cross-reference between pages very easily.  Unlike most wikis, I have turned off the ability for other people to edit it.  This is because I just want to use it as my notebook rather than as a collaborative tool.

I’ve also just started a thread in the discussion forum.  This only has an introductory post at the moment, but I expect that side of things to get busier as I progress with the project (I don’t expect to finish the artwork until around November/December 2008).  The discussion forum thread will enable people to ask questions, creating a dialogue rather than a monologue.

It’s important to note that public documentation starts the moment the project starts – it’s not something that is put together afterwards.  The Notebook section especially makes the creative process itself open and transparent.

Public documentation on Social Networks

As well as documenting the project on this site, I’m also documenting it on various social networks.  My DeviantArt profile was the obvious first choice—it’s an applied social network dedicated to artwork—so I’ve uploaded some of the initial photographs and text, and also explained the project in journals entries.

MySpace and Facebook are perhaps less immediately useful, but still important.

MySpace bulletins and blogs provide a space to explain the project and give updates, and images can always be uploaded to your MySpace photo albums (so long as they comply with MySpace’s somewhat restrictive photo policy), but linking out to your own website for further information is a grey area – MySpace seems to allow it for some sites, but not for others.

Facebook is also useful – and the ability to create groups and pages is something that should be investigated.

Using a Freemium model

I’ve blogged about Freeconomic/Freemium models before, but I’ve never suggested how they can be used to sell artwork.  So now I’m going to explain how I’m going to use them.

In the my blog post A Summary of Freeconomic Models I described the “multi-tier freemium” model used by the Trent Reznor’s band Nine Inch Nails:

Nine Inch Nail’s recent Ghosts release. 9 free tracks are available for download for free. The full 36 tracks are available for download for $5. Various limited edition high-(visual/tactile aesthetic)-standard production CD/DVD versions are available for higher prices (full details on Techdirt).

So, how do I apply this to a limited edition series of handmade artists books?

Well, having turned pale when adding up the costs of my materials so far, I am resigned to the fact that the thirty to fifty handmade artists books I create are going to have to be priced quite highly.  I’m not sure how much yet (because I haven’t finished spending), but for the purposes of this post let’s presume each one is going to be around £200 ($400 US).

Now, not everyone can afford that, or is willing to spend that much money on artwork, or—let’s be honest—likes my artwork enough to spend £200 on it.

So, here’s a possible multi-tiered freemium model I’ve been considering:

• A downloadable PDF ebook.  It’s not tactile, it’s neither handbound nor letterpress-printed by the artist, it’s not got the high production standards of one of the 30-50 books, it doesn’t even exist in hard-copy format (unless you chose to print it out on your printer) but it’s free.  This is for people who—for whatever reason—would never buy my artwork but quite like it.
• A print-on-demand hard-copy book.  Again, it lacks a lot of the high-(visual/tactile aesthetic)-standard production of an original piece of handmade artwork, but it’s printed by a professional print-on-demand publisher for around £25 (I’ve spent more than that on a round of drinks).  I need to do some research into the print quality of images in print-on-demand books.
• A Limited Edition series of thirty to fifty handmade artists books, finished to a very high standard, with photographs collaged in and the text letterpress-printed.  Each artists book will be uniquely and individually hand-bound by the artist.

I may slot some other options in there as well. How about a more expensive print-on-demand book, but with a limited edition set of postcards of some of the images?  Or just a set of postcards of the images as something people could buy separately?

By providing various options, from free to expensive via a mid-range of prices, I can not only get my artwork out to as many people as possible, but also make money as an artist.

Freeconomics took another step into the mainstream this week, as Multiplatinum-selling pop group McFly announced they would be giving away their new CD with The Mail On Sunday on July 20th.

Now, in terms of brands that combination is enough to make me vomit (I hate McFly and I hate the Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday‘s small-minded right-wing bigotry), but putting my personal hatred aside, it’s got to be said that it’s another big step forward for the mainstream adoption of new business models.

Taking a (probably well-deserved) shot at their former record company, Universal, McFly said that “Setting up our own label allows us to rip up the rulebook and find new ways of reaching an audience.”

Adapting a freemium model most famously championed by Nine Inch Nails, the band are giving away the basic CD to an estimated 3 million newspaper customers (for which the newspaper will obviously pay McFly a hefty lump sum), then selling a deluxe version of the album a month later as a CD, featuring four extra new songs, a bonus DVD and a 32-page booklet.

Obviously the record companies hate this (just like they hated the same newspaper’s free giveaway of Prince’s last album).

The BBC reports Music consultant and former Sony executive Neil Cartwright saying “The record industry invests in new artists, and if that money disappears you’re going to find it a lot more difficult if you’re a young band to find support. That really is the danger the industry faces.”

Well, yes, the record industry does face disaster if it refuses to engage with new business models (other than suing music fans), but musicians—both new and established—can easily continue to make money, and music fans can continue to enjoy new music.

It’s just the middle men who won’t be taking a big fat cut any longer (unless they start engaging with the internet and new business models in a positive way rather than ranting against them, and even turning against their biggest promotional tool – music radio).

Anyway, that’s far more than I ever wanted to write about McFly & The Mail On Sunday.

I’ve seen a lot of artist’s websites with fierce and furious demands not to “steal” their artwork (by which they mean the small digital reproductions of their artwork), insulting visitors before they’ve even begun to explore a website.

I’ve seen those annoying cut-and-paste JavaScripts to attempt to disable the right-click functionality (as well as a lot of other useful and legitimate functionality) to prevent visitors from saving the small digital reproductions of the artist’s work, in the process crippling visitors’ browsers and pissing them off.

I run things slightly differently – I agree with Tim O’Reilly’s seminal post “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution” where he stated:

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”

To me the small digital reproductions of my artwork that I display on my site are not my artwork – they’re my marketing.  And if they’re viral marketing (i.e. visitors want to download them and use them as their PC wallpaper or—even better—distribute them to other people on their MySpace pages) then I’ve been even more successful.

My artwork—as you’ll know if you’ve taken a look at my galleries—consists of collages, assemblages and drawings, with a few photographs.  It doesn’t consist of the small digital images of those pieces of artwork.  So when people take those images and use them for their own non-commercial purposes then it isn’t theft, it’s other people doing my marketing for me.

Now, you could say that because I don’t watermark my images then how can it be marketing – how can someone seeing one of my images on someone’s MySpace account possibly help me when the image can’t be attributed to me?

It’s simple – people like being Mavens. When asked “Wow, where did you get that image from” (OK, it’s probably more likely to be phrased as “OMFG!!111 – WHR DD U GT THT PIC FRM?!!”, but you get the idea) then the person can show off their knowledge by pointing the amazed newcomer in the direction of the originating website – my website!

Sure, in that situation some idiots may claim that they made it themselves, but that doesn’t cost me anything so I don’t care.

Sure, it costs me a tiny bit of bandwidth if people are too lazy to host it themselves, but if that’s the case then AWStats—my stat-tracking software—will tell me where it’s being used (because the referring page will be logged), which lets me see who likes the images of my artwork and how they’re being used – which is incredibly valuable information.  And the bandwidth cost is neglible – my £100-a-year web-hosting package gives me 150GB bandwidth transfer per month and I only use a fraction of that anyway.

There’s just one exclusion to the above.  I specified people using these images for non-commercial purposes.  Commercial usage is an entirely different matter, and for commercial usage money should change hands (from their hands into my hands!).

Building on Chris Anderson’s article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business I wanted to try to summarise some of the freeconomics models that have been tried out so far (if I’ve missed any, please feel free to add them in the comments).

For the purposes of this summary I’m ignoring products or services that are free because of government grants or funding. I’m also ignoring models which claim to have a free component, but the free item can’t be gained without paying for another product/service (for example, phone companies that give you a free mobile/cell-phone so long as you sign yourself into a minimum-duration contract). Finally I’m excluding “free sample” offers, because it’s a non-sustainable temporary discount rather than a long-term model.

The Freemium Model

Description

In this model, the basic service or product is free. The majority of people will be happy with the free version. Production/service cost-retrieval and revenue come from the minority of people choosing the premium paid-for version(s). The word “freemium” was coined by venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

Examples

• Simple 2-tier: Flickr – the basic service (with a limited monthly upload) is free, but an enhanced version (with no monthly limit) is available at a cost.
• Multi-tier: Nine Inch Nail’s recent Ghosts release. 9 free tracks are available for download for free. The full 36 tracks are available for download for $5. Various limited edition high-(visual/tactile aesthetic)-standard production CD/DVD versions are available for higher prices (full details on Techdirt).

The Cross-sell Free Model

Description

In this model, one service/product is free and one or more different—but related—service/products are available at a cost. A percentage of the people who enjoy the free product will also want to have the related non-free product(s).

Examples

• A band makes all their recorded songs available for free on the web in order to attract people to their (pay-for-entry) gigs. Additional non-free products available might include merchandise.
• An author blogs about a subject over time & in depth (free content), then publishes the same content—edited into book format—as a paid-for hardback/paperback book.
• A piece of software—e.g. a Linux distro—is free, but a technical support contract is available at a cost for those that want it.

The Sponsorship/Ad-Supported Free Model

Description

A product is given away free, and the creators make their money from adverts embedded in or around the product.

Examples

• Mozilla Firefox – the Firefox browser is free, and Mozilla receive about $72 million from Google for making Google’s search facility the default search engine in the search bar at the top of the browser.
• Google – Google’s search engine is free, but is supported by adverts running on Google’s AdSense advertising network.
• The free newspaper I read on the bus on the way to work – the cost of the newspaper is paid for by adverts throughout the paper.
• Commercial terrestrial television channels.

The Patronage-supported Free Model

Description

The product is free, but people are encouraged to financially contribute. Reasons to pay might include goodwill/appreciation, or some more tangible “reward” (e.g. being visibly acknowledged as a financial contributor or having some input into the final product).

Examples

• Radiohead’s “pay what you want” release last year. Although strictly not free (the credit card processing fee was obligatory) fans could choose how much they wanted to contribute. The average contribution was $5.
• Wikipedia—or rather the Wikimedia Foundation—is mainly funded by public donations who are listed at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors

Free distribution of digital content (music, books, visual art) is embraced by—and benefits—customers because it gives them access to a much wider range of content. This is because the restrictions on the amount of content they could get—based on how much they can financially afford—is eliminated.

Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required to find content they’re interested in – this is where Google leads the field by providing an ever-improving and expanding search facility for finding the content, whether it’s webpages, books, news, academic articles, images etc.

Free distribution of digital content is slowly being embraced by—and will benefit—creators (artists, musicians, authors etc.) because it allows their work—and reputation—to be distributed to a much wider audience.

Musicians such as The Charlatans and Nine Inch Nails are making headlines with new ways to make money while giving away MP3 files of their music for free (and unsigned bands have been doing it for years).

Authors such as Suze Orman and Dan Solove are giving away free ebook versions of their books, in the knowledge that the wider distribution this gives them helps to sell more paper copies of their books.

So where does this leave publishers? The book publishing companies and music companies seem to have been left out of this equation. You could argue that they’ve left themselves out of the equation by desperately attempting to pretend that the business model of content creation hasn’t changed while vainly suing fans for the crime of being early adopters of a new economy.

Actually, there is a role for clued-up skills-rich publishers. It’s just a slightly different role than they’re used to. The clues can be found when you examine the new business model summarised above and look for the holes. That’s what I’m going to try to do now (but not exhaustively – I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me).

Publishers can provide instant attention

As mentioned above, one of the biggest benefits to both creators and consumers is that content is more widely distributed and available to all. But in a world where a huge amount of digital content is free, finding that content is hard – it’s like finding a few choice needles in a field of haystacks.

Obviously search engines provide front-end interfaces for finding that content, but that’s not enough. Search engines such as Google need to interpret the searcher’s requirements and display the most relevant results first. Google’s algorithm relies on correctly interpreting the relevancy and reputation of each piece of digital content in order to give their users the right results.

Publishers can provide a huge amount of relevancy and reputation because Publishers’ old-business-model reputations have been translated into high rankings for their websites.

A record company specialising in hip-hop music has already built-up a reputation and many incoming links from hip-hop-orientated websites, whether they’re sites belonging to hip-hop musicians, fan-sites, hip-hop forums, etc.

A publishing company specialising in a particular niche—whether it’s an academic subject area, a particular genre such as science fiction, or a particular service such as news & current affairs—will have built up a reputation (and the accompanying relevant incoming links) from other websites in their particular niche. If I was publishing this blog post in the Freakonomics column of the New York Times then the chances are that it would get a lot more attention!

This reputation and the resulting links are incredibly valuable because they’re both numerous and extremely relevant, and can take years to build up. So Publishers are already well-positioned to take on the role of distributing instant reputation and relevancy to creators. After all, that’s one of the things they’ve been doing for centuries.

So publishers need to revalue their business models so that the bestowal of reputation and relevancy (and therefore attention) is seen as a major service that they can offer to creators. In order to better leverage this service, publishers need to work closely with relevant communities. That means actively engaging in conversations with their niche communities on email lists, discussion forums, social networks, and blogs (and in the non-digital world at conferences, gigs, book-signings, etc.).

Publishers can provide quality control and specialist technical expertise

Creators are not perfect, and most are grateful for help.

An author’s work frequently benefits from the skills of their editorial team, which is why you’ll often see the editor thanked in the author’s acknowledgements in the front of their book. The book production team use their amassed knowledge of design and typography to turn a word-processed manuscript into a professionally laid-out book that is a pleasure to read.

Musicians benefit from the editorial and technical skills of the producers & engineers who spend a huge amount of time coaxing the best performances from them, then expertly mix the raw sound into a polished—or artfully unpolished—finished track.

Moving back to the web, authors or musicians are unlikely to be their own web team. I’m not just talking about being able to throw a website together, I’m talking about a full web team consisting of ecommerce programmers, web developers, web designers, SEO experts, and emarketing strategists. Sure anyone can put a small website online (and that’s one of the great things about the web) but as the web has evolved the skills necessary to create and maintain a good website have both multiplied and increased in their complexity.

Any content creator—author, musician, or artist—can’t be expected to have all these expert skills, and hiring them individually (and project-managing the coordination between them) would be expensive and a huge consumption of valuable time and effort that would be far better spent doing what the creator actually excels at: writing, composing, playing, or painting.

That isn’t to say that the author or musician shouldn’t be directly communicating with their fans – they should. But managing the framework that enables and amplifies this communication is a job for a dedicated team.

So, publishing companies should be positioned to provide services that greatly enhance both the book/music and the online presence of the author/musician.

Again, this is already something that publishing companies do, but they need to emphasise this aspect of their service and market it as a suite of valuable services that they can provide to creators.

But publishers need to make money

Obviously publishing companies will want to be paid for providing these professional services – they need to make a profit. At the moment they get this money by charging for content, but as more digital content becomes free then this particular revenue stream will start to dry up.

I think that paper copies of books will continue to sell, as will CDs & DVDs. Returning to Nine Inch Nail’s recent release of Ghosts, even though Trent Reznor made the first 9 tracks available free of charge, he also released various paid versions from a full digital download of 36 tracks for $5 to a $300 ultra-deluxe limited edition package.

The $300 Ultra-deluxe limited edition package has already sold out, despite there being multiple cheaper (and even free) versions available. This utilises the generative of “embodiment” coined by Kevin Kelly which I’ve already talked about in a previous blog post. Hardback bindings of paperback books are another long-standing example of this strategy.

So higher-quality (higher revenue) non-digital formats are one revenue stream that could be added to sales of non-digital content in “standard” formats (paperbacks, CDs etc). This strategy can also be expanded to cover revenue from supplementary material such as subscription elearning software for textbooks or t-shirts and posters of musicians. Again this is something that is already happening (especially within the music industry) so the groundwork has already been done.

But to offset this, expensive traditional marketing (direct mail advertising, broadcast television ads) is going to have to be drastically reduced. I can’t think of any way to recoup the huge amounts of money spent on direct mail and mass-market broadcast ads in this newly emerging marketplace – it’s just not viable. Certainly not when you can better reach a more carefully-selected market (i.e. with a much greater percentage of potential customers) by spending much less money online.

The traditional marketing model of throwing a huge amount of cash—in the form of TV ads, billboards or direct mail campaigns—at an undifferentiated mass of people can only be sustained when you (artificially) control the scarcity of your product. When your product loses that scarcity (i.e. it can be easily copied and redistributed online) then you simply can’t keep following this old dogma. I’m not going to go into more detail about this because it’s been explained before by the likes of Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelly, Michael Masnick, and Umair Haque (amongst many others).

Unfortunately this is where many companies in the publishing and music industries “don’t get it”. They do understand the ideas of new revenue streams and the benefits of free content, but they can’t imagine not having to shovel vast amounts of cash into the raging furnace that is the traditional (obsolete) marketing system – they don’t understand that the potential cost of their marketing is plummeting for exactly the same reasons of efficient distribution and connectivity.

Once they accept this (and realign their marketing strategy accordingly) then the equation will balance and they’ll see the profit.

In every industry I’ve worked in, people have been obsessively concerned about underpricing their products.

Underpricing, they say, devalues the products (because, as Chris Anderson pointed out recently, they make the mistake that “the only way to measure value is with money”).

This “underpricing=bad” argument might have some mileage for products made of atoms, but when your products are made of ones and zeroes it becomes obsolete. That’s why it’s a nonsense to charge the same price for your ebook as you charge for the paperback (or, even worse, the hardback).

Of course, the ultimate underpricing is to make something free. Making something free doesn’t devalue it. I find a lot of value in Google, Flickr, Slashdot, numerous other websites and blogs, the Kubuntu installation on my computer, Mozilla Firefox, the WordPress software this blog runs on, PHP5 & MySQL, the NHS, Channel 4, free-entry to the collections at the Tate Modern (where I can gaze, without paying, at the Bacons, Picassos, Matisses…), even the free copy of the Metro newspaper I read on the bus every morning on the way to work. I value these things.

Telling people that you believe some things should be free can generate some aggressive criticism (as you’ll know if you’ve ever read the comments on, for example, Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog). You can feel like you’re being accused of being a communist/hippy idealist with no idea about business models in the real world. I’m sure that those naïve hippy idealists at Google—who are making a killing with their business model in the real world—would disagree.

Why is it that so many people who see themselves as “traditional hard-nosed business” types are completely clueless when it comes to the internet, especially the more recent trends in social networking?

Because they’re desperately trying to impose yesterday’s business models on today’s business. Umair Haque points to the twin obsessions of “product” and “monetization”:

When you try and “monetize your users”, you accept the almost obscene assumption that people are meant to be pimped out, sold to the highest bidder, resources to be slashed, burned, and exploited.

Umair is certainly not against businesses making money. In fact he highlights the fact that many businesses’ attempts to make money on the internet can’t make any sustainable income (because they are so clumsily contemptuous of their customers in the pursuit of profit).

Actually he summarises his argument most succinctly while replying to a comment on that same post:

as for figuring out how to capture value – the point of the principle is that when we figure out how to capture value, we must do it in a way that doesn’t destroy any value we create.

How long would Google remain the search engine of choice by such a huge margin if it sold out its users and “monetised” its clean, clear, front page (which must be the primest piece of real estate on the net) by cluttering it with ads?

Meanwhile earlier this week Trent Reznor just grossed $1.6 million in the first week of sales of Nine Inch Nail‘s new album. My friend Barry examines the pricing policy in more detail, but the pertinent point here is that Reznor gave away a 9-track download of the new release for free.

$1.6 million says that his fans didn’t think that the free tracks devalued his music…

When text on the web is free and abundant (even more so than music and images), why should a person pay for it? In other words, how can writers (and by “writers”, I’m including writers of fiction, screenplays, academic theory, graphic novels, journalism etc.—the whole kit and caboodle) make money when what they write is free?

The concept of “freeconomics” has been covered here before—and in many other places before I ever mentioned it—but I want to look at how it affects writers (since I’ve already looked at visual artists and musicians in this blog before, albeit only briefly so far). If you can’t sell your writing on the web, then how can the web sell your writing?

Rather than attempt to answer the question myself, I decided to get a couple of writer friends of mine to write their own answers (for free, of course!). They both work in different areas of writing and have different approaches.

So, giving their opinions today are:

• UK Screenwriter Adrian Reynolds. Adrian won a Times screenwriting competition, and a meeting with Working Title‘s Tim Bevan, with his very first film treatment. Since then, he’s been working on repeating that magic, and believes he’s onto something big in its pursuit, which has taken him into all sorts of interesting directions, including writing scripts for the BBC and seeing the première of one of his plays at a women’s prison. I first met Adrian at the bottom of a muddy quarry just outside Nottingham in 1997, where we were both involved in the behind-the-scenes aspects of a live adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit.
• US Freelance Writer Steph Auteri. Steph is a freelance just about everything (writer/proofreader/classical singer). She has written on women’s issues, dating, sexuality, and self-help, and sometimes even tells the future! She has toiled away all over the publishing stratosphere, in newspaper (both weekly and daily), new media, and academic book publishing environments. She has been published in Publishers Weekly, New York Press, Nerve.com, Playgirl, and other bastions of fine writing. She wouldn’t mind writing for you as well. I met Steph when she was working for the publishing company I work for – except she worked in the New York office, and I work in the far less glamorous Brighton office.

Me: When text on the web is free and abundant (even more so than music and images), why should a person pay for it? What added value can you provide?

Steph Auteri: I’m not so sure that a person should be paying for any of the content they’re finding online. The only web content I pay for is that on Mediabistro.com. I pay an annual fee to be a member of their AvantGuild program, and gain access to their How to Pitch articles and other features. The reason I find these to be so valuable is that the How to Pitch pieces provide specific and necessary information for mag pitching, such as contact names and e-mail addresses that I’d otherwise have to get off my ass to find out myself.

That’s why, as an online writer, I believe your best bet is either space advertising or supplementary materials (and by supplementary materials, I mean stuff like exclusive e-books or databases, or even nifty t-shirts that promote your site).

As you say, there are too many freebies out there for anyone to find it worth their while to pay for plain old blog content.

Me: What business models are available for the writer – how can a writer make a living (or even just a bit of extra cash from their hard work)?

Adrian Reynolds: When, with your technical assistance, I created www.yoodothatvoodoo.com, I did so for a number of reasons. A key one was and is to raise my profile among the community of online screenwriters that’s become known as the scribosphere.

In looking at what most of online screenwriters did, I knew I wanted to do something different. Like, believe it or not, most screenwriters don’t provide free writing samples on their sites: I’ve made a point of doing this. That means my site functions as a resource, and also as a marketing tool: if you as, say, a producer come across several sites, one way to distinguish them is by the scripts they include. The fact that mine does, and most peoples’ don’t, is in my favour.

Another aspect that came out of exploring how poor most screenwriters’ sites are is that I wanted to provide evidence of my ability to think about stories and the different media I work in. Again, there’s precious little evidence in most screenwriting blogs, many of which are fairly facile semi-personal diaries about what the writer had for lunch and their difficulties getting their agent to return a call. By contrast, I write pretty much every day a piece of 400 words or so that touches on some or other aspect of writing, creativity, film, television, theatre or comics. You may or may not like all of those pieces, but they undeniably paint a picture of me as someone with something to say about their craft and industry, which is more than can be said for most screenwriting blogs.

Steph Auteri: How can a writer make a living with their actual writing, and not just an almost-daily proofreading gig and once-in-awhile work for their former employer? Like, their actual writing? If only I knew.

Fortunately, I subscribe to sites such as ProBlogger.net, so I know that there are ways to trick out your blog—as I mentioned before—with supplementary materials and advertising? So you can, in fact, make money with your blogging. If you’re lucky. And if you’re dedicated enough to put in the time to build a money-making blog.

Outside of your blog, you can always…

• guest-blog at other blogs somehow related to yours,
• forget about that damn blog of yours (or at least make it second priority) by getting a paying blogging gig elsewhere,
• pitch your heart out to the mags & newspapers; print ain’t dead yet!
• sell out and do some copywriting, though that can be difficult as well. But it does make much better money.

Me: Has all of this work paid off?

Adrian Reynolds: Yes, and in unexpected ways. I was expecting to slowly make an impression with some of the more credible screenwriting resources, and that has happened, and I have acquired new readers as a result. I’ve also been approached by people who’ve read my script samples, checked out my piece on script doctoring, and have approached me about working on their short film and feature scripts. Perhaps the best piece of feedback I received came from someone on StumbleUpon. Their comment has disappeared—out of date I guess—but what they said demonstrated to me that I’d achieved what I set out to do, writing to the effect that ‘pretty much every day you’ll come across a real nugget here, particularly if you’re into screenwriting‘. Mission accomplished.

My big success with the site comes from an unexpected source however. I post on another forum which has nothing do with screenwriting, but where my profile links to www.youdothatvoodoo.com. And people who’ve been taken with what I’ve said on that forum have come to check out my profile and site, and got in touch to offer me work. As a result of which I’m now consulting on a TV series proposal by a very successful businessman, and have been discussing running very lucrative trainings on creativity with a couple of other people. I’m also advising people about how to improve their marketing, an area already know about and work in, but which my increasing knowledge of building an online brand is contributing towards in a big way.

So: have I got people to commission me to write scripts through my site? No…but that was never likely to be the case anyway. But I have got people interested in me as a writer, and potentially as someone who can work with them on their script, and who can also deliver on other fronts, such as training and marketing. All of which is already helping to boost my income—and all of which has happened since the site went live on December 31st last year.

With Chris Anderson’s next book “Free” due to be previewed on the front cover of Wired magazine next week, there’s a lot of chatter about how the way to make money in the future is to give stuff away. That’s a gross simplification of the “economics of free“, but it basically sums it up.

Kevin Kelly argues that since the internet makes it easy to copy digital content (whether that’s writing, music or anything else) then you can no longer rely on charging for that content (or, to be more precise, you can no longer charge purely for the content). That’s certainly something that the majority of the music industry has been finding out for the past few years (although the RIAA refuses to accept it, and is trying to build a business model out of suing music fans).

Kevin proposes eight areas (he calls them generatives) where you can make a living if your content is free (I won’t explain them in detail here – he does a much better job on his blog post).

The whole theory behind this is that since digital content can be copied and redistributed an infinite number of times at a near-zero cost then trying to charge for it is increasingly futile. In the words of the new economists, there is an abundance of digital content, and when you have something in abundance then its financial value approaches zero – you can only make money out of scarcity.

Everyone usually uses the music industry as an example, but I’m going to use the (book) publishing industry instead. Firstly because I’m contrary, and secondly because that’s where my day job is.

In the dim and distant past (by which I mean the 1980s and earlier) book publishing companies converted type-written manuscripts into neatly arranged, carefully edited, professionally typeset words on paper, bound them between two covers, and used expensive printing machinery to mass-produce their books. The process and materials cost a lot, so they had to spend even more money on marketing (brochures, getting well-placed reviews etc.) to recoup the costs, make a living and pay the original author.

Once exposed to modern technology, that scarcity is removed – an ebook can be infinitely copied and distributed.

Publishers have tried to artificially impose scarcity by shackling the ebook files with DRM (and trying to forget the inconvenient fact that every variety of DRM gets cracked within a couple of weeks by a bored 15-year-old).

The alternative tactic was to refuse to create an ebook version of a book, in order to prevent the book becoming digital content in the first place. This tactic has been slightly more successful than the music industry’s attempts, since creating an ebook of a book was much more time-consuming than creating a set of MP3 files from a CD. I say “was” because a work colleague sent me a link to a news item earlier today about a book ripper that will convert a 500-page paper book to an ebook in about an hour. Sure, the technology costs $3600 at the moment, but as my colleague commented, that’ll drop rapidly over a couple of years.

So, faced with their content becoming infinitely abundant, how can book publishers make money?

Books can come with additional online supplementary resources. There are a multitude of ways in which these resources can be made to generate money, including (but not limited to) subscription charges, ad revenue, and licensing. The supplemental online resources model is most visible with textbooks, but even a novel could come with online extras (an author’s blog, background on “the making of” the book, etc.) supported by ads.

Another, more traditional, answer is in hardback books (or cloth-bound books, as they’re called in the US). Given that the hardback version of a book usually costs twice as much as the paperback, why on earth do people buy hardbacks? Why does putting 300 pages between two sheets of thick card cost £15.99, when the same 300 pages sandwiched in thin card costs just £7.99?

One answer is immediacy. The hardback binding of a book is frequently published before the paperback binding, and customers who really want that book as soon as possible are prepared to pay the premium. However, when the “book ripper” technology mentioned above becomes cheap and abundant, then the immediacy value of the hardback binding will cease.

Another reason for the increased value of hardback bindings is what Kevin Kelly calls embodiment:

PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good.

As an artist who has a fascination with texture, tactility and books as artwork (altered books, handmade art books, etc.) I can immediately understand this. While a typical hardback binding of a book isn’t bound in gilded leather, its weight and solidity makes it feel somehow more special.

I’m wondering whether expensively tooled and gilded book-bindings will make a comeback when the written content becomes infinitely abundant. It reminds me of a passage from a (wonderful) book by Gene Wolfe called The Shadow of the Torturer where the protagonist Severian is listening to the reminiscences of the old blind Librarian, Master Ultan:

“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

And so, Ultan’s blindness (which creeps up on him later in his narrative) proves no obstacle to his profession of caring for the books (and therefore the understanding of their value), which does not require the ability to read them, but rather an appreciation of the book as a tactile objet d’art.

Marginalia: literature fans will recognise that the blind Master Librarian Ultan is a reference to Umberto Eco’s blind librarian Jorge of Burgos from The Name of the Rose, who in turn is a reference to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. But I digress…

Books bound in kraken-skin or cased in exotic alien woods are, unfortunately, somewhat beyond the means of publishing companies at the moment, but a return to the application of tactile aesthetics to book packaging may well come soon (note also the increase in the analogous use of textured cardstock Digipaks in audio CD packaging).

However, the main worry for publishers would be whether the sales of these much more expensive bindings would compensate for the explosion of free digital content (free content which would satisfy most of the customers who currently pay for the cheaper paperback bindings).

The answer is “probably not”, although I think there would still be a market for paperbacks for some time. Tim O’Reilly’s seminal blogpost Piracy is Progressive Taxation.. seems to agree:

The availability of free online copies is sometimes used to promote a topic or author (as books such as The Cathedral and the Bazaar or The Cluetrain Manifesto became bestsellers in print as a result of the wide exposure it received online). We make available substantial portions of all of our books online, as a way for potential readers to sample what they contain.

… Interestingly, some of our most successful print/online hybrids have come about where we present the same material in different ways for the print and online contexts. For example, much of the content of our bestselling book Programming Perl (more than 600,000 copies in print) is available online as part of the standard Perl documentation. But the entire package—not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aesthetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging—is only available in print. Multiple ways to present the same information and the same product increase the overall size and richness of the market.

But eventually, as ebook-readers become better (think full-colour e-ink displays) and more commonplace, I think the paperback market will start to decline.

Mike Masnick’s Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free states that you should “set the infinite components free” (in my example, the words of the book) and realign your business model to “charge for the scarce components”. In Masnick’s example of music, the infinite (-ly reproducible, and therefore abundant) component is the MP3 file. The value of scarce components will rise:

Concert tickets are more valuable. Access to the band is more valuable. Getting the band to write a special song (sponsorship?) is more valuable. Merchandise is more valuable.

So returning to my example of book publishing, author events—readings and signings—should rise in value and (if authors catch on) will be far more ubiquitous in bookshops around the country. I’m sure other scarce components could be identified.

One mistake I hope the publishing industry doesn’t make is the disingenuous “calculation” made by the music industry’s army of lawyers: that every free mp3 file downloaded is a “lost” sale.

People are far less discriminating when consumption is free. If every show on television was pay-per-view then I wouldn’t automatically switch it on when I got home from work – my viewing would be far more discriminatory (and massively reduced). Similarly file-sharers report that their downloading of pirated MP3 files isn’t happening instead of them buying CDs, but rather in addition to their music purchases – they’re trying before they buy, free-sampling a much wider range of possible purchases before choosing those for which they are prepared to pay for an embodiment in the form of a CD (with its physicality, cover-packaging and booklets).

So, an abundance of free ebooks should vastly increase the potential market for the added-value paid-for scarce components. But this will only work if the publishing companies (and the authors) have positioned themselves to make money out of those generatives.