Creative Artists Giving Away Their Work

There is an ongoing debate among creative artists of all sorts, including SFF writers, as to when it is OK to "give away" their work without compensation.  This debate recently came to a head again with two recent posts by artists.

First, Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory fame sounded off in a blog post you can’t pay your rent with “the unique platform and reach our site provides”. In Wheaton's case, he complained about an "offer" from The Huffington Post to reprint a blog post he had written entitled Seven Things I did to Reboot my Life. Although excited by the possibility of reaching a large audience, Wheaton was less than enthused by their refusal to pay for the work with their approach to him including the following:

Unfortunately, we’re unable to financially compensate our bloggers at this time. Most bloggers find value in the unique platform and reach our site provides, but we completely understand if that makes blogging with us impossible.

 Wheaton's response on twitter was

Writers and bloggers: if you write something that an editor thinks is worth being published, you are worth being paid for it. Period.

This advice applies to designers, photographers, programmers, ANYONE who makes something. You. Deserve. Compensation. For. Your. Work.

 After all, as he mentions in his blog post on the subject:

Huffington Post is valued at well over fifty million dollars, and the company can absolutely afford to pay contributors. The fact that it doesn’t, and can get away with it, is distressing to me.

Second, following the announcement that the World Fantasy Convention is seeking designs for a new trophy (after the old H.P. Lovecraft one was abandoned in light of his disgusting racist past) but was not offering financial compensation, the artist John Picacio posted Artists Beware calling on all artists to boycott the process. In his mind, the process is "predatory" and that promises of "exposure" and "prestige" are not enough compensation. As for what would be acceptable compensation, he wrote:

It’s a convention with assets, even if it doesn’t want to compensate artists with money. It could have compensated all professional 3D artists who submitted ideas with a membership to a future WFC. It could have compensated the winning sculptor with a lifetime WFC membership. It could have found any number of creative solutions.

I expect that the WFC will offer something like this very soon.

Unlike The Huffington Post, the WFC is not a highly valued company. Rather, it is a volunteer run organization that does not make profits (although I do not think it is a registered non-profit) which relies on its members participation. As a result, Picacio's post attracted a lot of negative comments on his facebook page. Irene Gallo (of Tor Books, and of Hugo Awards controversy fame) directed people to www.shouldiworkforfree.com which lays out very limited conditions under which giving away your work is acceptable.

Naturally, if a person wants to be a professional creative artist, they have to sell their work at some point. But I can think of many good reasons for giving away your work for free, including the prospect of getting exposure for a new artist trying to break into the field. Whether to donate work is ultimately up to the artist and they should do whatever seems right for them.

However, it is important to keep in mind that calls for artists not to give away their work are not entirely free from bias; they are not always the "public service announcements" that established artists claim them to be. Make no mistake: some of the hostility from creative artists to giving work away for free stems from a fear that this will eat into their own earnings. After all, why should publishers pay top rates to an established artist when you can get a similar (even if slightly inferior) work for free from a newcomer? For established artists, these pleas not to give away work are attempts to form and enforce a cartel aimed at raising prices. And as usual with cartels, the incumbents stand to gain while newcomers will lose.

Of course, this all relates to the question of how to run a short fiction SFF (or literary) magazine. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, the economics of this market makes it very hard to pay authors professional rates. Quite simply, the demand for short fiction is limited, while many, many authors are supplying works of short fiction. This naturally tends to drive the price---the compensation offered to authors---down. I've argued that the future of short SFF requires a new business model, perhaps along the lines of that used by academic journals (in some disciplines) and I've seen nothing since to lead me to change my views.