on swindles and fandoms
so ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cesperanza's post about Multi-Level Marketing and monetizing fandom is still going around, and I keep wanting to put mostly-side-issue long comments on other people's posts, so here they are here instead.
I commented on the original post about how I felt like the correct comparison was not MLMs to fandom patreons (etc), but pyramid schemes to predatory publishers. The people who tell you how your novel will be a best-seller now that they've discovered your genius, and all you have to do is give them thousands of dollars for them to ship you thousands of copies of a badly-edited, badly-bound book for you to sell to your friends and family, they're the ones coercing writers to destroy their own social networks for other people's profit.
And in a lot of ways, the fandom monetizing methods actually inoculate against this - a member of a fan community who know about things like patreon and crowdfunding and kindle originals and legit self-publishing, who is friendly with other pro authors, who knows the histories of other people who've made the transitions and can chat with other people in the process and has things like beta-readers and knows that there's more to getting readers than just writing a thing - that person is way less likely to fall victim to a predatory publisher.
There's a lot of people misunderstanding MLMs in this discussion, too. Multi-Level Marketing has come to be used as a euphemism/synonym for pyramid scheme because calling something a pyramid scheme in the press is technically defamatory in the US unless you can prove it is one by the legal definition. But not all MLMs are pyramid schemes, only most of them (and nearly all of the trendy flash-in-the-pan ones).
An MLM is an organization where people recruit new people into the organization, and they get a percentage of their recruits' revenues in exchange.
In a classic pyramid scheme, this is literally all that happens. Person A says, "If you join and give me a $5 membership fee, you can recruit new people, and they'll give you their $5, and everyone they recruit will give you a percent of their $5, and before you know it you'll have hundreds coming in every day from new recruits far down the line, just like I do!" In that kind of scheme, as soon as new membership fees stop flowing in, the entire thing collapses.
Pyramid schemes are illegal in the US, but it's not the MLM structure that illegal, it's the fact that the main revenue source is the new member fees, rather than any actual value or profit.
There are non-pyramid scheme, reasonably legit MLMs, and the difference is: in a non-pyramid-scheme MLM, there is actually value being provided in exchange for the money that flows up, preferably at all levels. Even if no new sellers were recruited, and people just sold product, everybody would still be making money, and the organization would survive.
Lately, the most obvious way to tell the difference is that the more legit ones like Avon don't require new sellers to go into debt to start up - you sell from a catalog, or you don't have to pay for product unless it's sold, and you don't have to pay large fees for training or membership just to start selling - the training/set-up is free or a nominal cost for materials and travel. Also, in a sustainable MLM, the upper-level sellers are doing pretty intense mentoring/training/monitoring/support of the people under them, and are actually earning a lot of the money that flows up, because they want the people below them to succeed - it's a different structure but the same effect as money flowing up to management in a more standard structure. And nobody makes any money at all if the product doesn't sell, so usually there's incentive for the product to be something people want at a reasonable markup, and sellers can actually sell it.
There's still more risk to sellers and less chance of making a living wage, and often a fair amount of pressure tactics, but it's a reasonably workable business model long-term, and if people aren't making money, they can just quit with no big loss. (Really, it's just a more formalized version of how small home businesses sell by word-of-mouth in expanding social circles.) There was a recent Buzzfeed article about what Avon is up to lately that gives a pretty good view of how a non-scam MLM functions.
In a pyramid scheme, new sellers have to put up money up front, often for expensive training or something and are also often required to buy a very large amount of product on spec, which they can't return if they don't sell it. (This is very similar to the process of being "published" by a predatory publisher, and not essential to the MLM aspect.) This puts sellers under a huge amount of pressure just to make back their initial investment (and the vast majority of them don't), and generally forces people on higher levels to focus more on recruiting new sellers than mentoring existing ones, because nobody makes money on selling no matter how much mentoring is going on, because that's not the point of the thing, and since that's not the point, the product is probably shit and nobody can sell it anyway. (Often it's something like dietary supplements that's a swindle no matter how it's sold.) It's also why it's uniquely damaging to social relationships: you're not just selling to your friends, you're being coerced into actively swindling your friends, and usually before you've been in the thing for very long, you realize that, at some level, but you've invested so much you can't get out. It's poison all around.
MLMs are legal; pyramid schemes aren't. So the pyramid schemes have to have just enough of a 'product' to pretend they're a real MLM long enough to take the money and run, which makes them harder to talk people out of. And the problem isn't so much the MLM structure as that the whole thing's a swindle.
And we certainly have swindles in monetized fandom! Any method of making money can be turned into a swindle, by someone who wants to swindle people. We can probably all name several exciting chapters in the history of online fandom when fan swindlers have succeeded, for a little while at least.
And any method of making money can feel like a swindle if the people involved in it are just really bad at it (which also applies to a lot of v. small publishers who look predatory through sheer incompetence, but aren't actually making any money for themselves either.) We can all name situations like that too, probably.
And any profit-prioritizing corporation under late-stage capitalism is, at some level, built on a swindle, because our entire global economic system is currently built on a series of stacked swindles. So there's some stuff that does make me side-eye things like Patreon and Kofi, and what they try to promise people, even as fandom uses them more and more, but that's really pretty ancillary to the question of MLMs. And even at their worst, they don't require the initial outlay of capital to chain you to the swindle, or pressure you to pressure your friends to put themselves into the same level of debt as you.
So I'm still way more worried about predatory publishers going 'ooh, girls are selling fanfic now! Our fandom market's not limited to boys with no social support and WoW-with-the-numbers-filed-off epics!' or about homegrown swindles and for-pay fanfic sites than I am about people using crowdfunding or commissions to fill out that last couple of hundred dollars of rent. The real, ongoing problem with monetizing that destroys relationships is large corporations recruiting people to swindle other people for them, not individual fans looking for compensation for labor.
(The question of compensation for creative labor in general is an entirely different one.) (as is the question that's silently threaded through this whole discussions about helping needy people via pure charity vs. under a smokescreen of nominal 'earned payment', and whether that choice should be up to the helper or the helped.)(as is the question of to what extent patreon and company are themselves exploiting the fans who use them.)
(one of my cousins over christmas seemed to think I was anticapitalist or something, dunno what gave him that impression.)
cesperanza's post about Multi-Level Marketing and monetizing fandom is still going around, and I keep wanting to put mostly-side-issue long comments on other people's posts, so here they are here instead.I commented on the original post about how I felt like the correct comparison was not MLMs to fandom patreons (etc), but pyramid schemes to predatory publishers. The people who tell you how your novel will be a best-seller now that they've discovered your genius, and all you have to do is give them thousands of dollars for them to ship you thousands of copies of a badly-edited, badly-bound book for you to sell to your friends and family, they're the ones coercing writers to destroy their own social networks for other people's profit.
And in a lot of ways, the fandom monetizing methods actually inoculate against this - a member of a fan community who know about things like patreon and crowdfunding and kindle originals and legit self-publishing, who is friendly with other pro authors, who knows the histories of other people who've made the transitions and can chat with other people in the process and has things like beta-readers and knows that there's more to getting readers than just writing a thing - that person is way less likely to fall victim to a predatory publisher.
There's a lot of people misunderstanding MLMs in this discussion, too. Multi-Level Marketing has come to be used as a euphemism/synonym for pyramid scheme because calling something a pyramid scheme in the press is technically defamatory in the US unless you can prove it is one by the legal definition. But not all MLMs are pyramid schemes, only most of them (and nearly all of the trendy flash-in-the-pan ones).
An MLM is an organization where people recruit new people into the organization, and they get a percentage of their recruits' revenues in exchange.
In a classic pyramid scheme, this is literally all that happens. Person A says, "If you join and give me a $5 membership fee, you can recruit new people, and they'll give you their $5, and everyone they recruit will give you a percent of their $5, and before you know it you'll have hundreds coming in every day from new recruits far down the line, just like I do!" In that kind of scheme, as soon as new membership fees stop flowing in, the entire thing collapses.
Pyramid schemes are illegal in the US, but it's not the MLM structure that illegal, it's the fact that the main revenue source is the new member fees, rather than any actual value or profit.
There are non-pyramid scheme, reasonably legit MLMs, and the difference is: in a non-pyramid-scheme MLM, there is actually value being provided in exchange for the money that flows up, preferably at all levels. Even if no new sellers were recruited, and people just sold product, everybody would still be making money, and the organization would survive.
Lately, the most obvious way to tell the difference is that the more legit ones like Avon don't require new sellers to go into debt to start up - you sell from a catalog, or you don't have to pay for product unless it's sold, and you don't have to pay large fees for training or membership just to start selling - the training/set-up is free or a nominal cost for materials and travel. Also, in a sustainable MLM, the upper-level sellers are doing pretty intense mentoring/training/monitoring/support of the people under them, and are actually earning a lot of the money that flows up, because they want the people below them to succeed - it's a different structure but the same effect as money flowing up to management in a more standard structure. And nobody makes any money at all if the product doesn't sell, so usually there's incentive for the product to be something people want at a reasonable markup, and sellers can actually sell it.
There's still more risk to sellers and less chance of making a living wage, and often a fair amount of pressure tactics, but it's a reasonably workable business model long-term, and if people aren't making money, they can just quit with no big loss. (Really, it's just a more formalized version of how small home businesses sell by word-of-mouth in expanding social circles.) There was a recent Buzzfeed article about what Avon is up to lately that gives a pretty good view of how a non-scam MLM functions.
In a pyramid scheme, new sellers have to put up money up front, often for expensive training or something and are also often required to buy a very large amount of product on spec, which they can't return if they don't sell it. (This is very similar to the process of being "published" by a predatory publisher, and not essential to the MLM aspect.) This puts sellers under a huge amount of pressure just to make back their initial investment (and the vast majority of them don't), and generally forces people on higher levels to focus more on recruiting new sellers than mentoring existing ones, because nobody makes money on selling no matter how much mentoring is going on, because that's not the point of the thing, and since that's not the point, the product is probably shit and nobody can sell it anyway. (Often it's something like dietary supplements that's a swindle no matter how it's sold.) It's also why it's uniquely damaging to social relationships: you're not just selling to your friends, you're being coerced into actively swindling your friends, and usually before you've been in the thing for very long, you realize that, at some level, but you've invested so much you can't get out. It's poison all around.
MLMs are legal; pyramid schemes aren't. So the pyramid schemes have to have just enough of a 'product' to pretend they're a real MLM long enough to take the money and run, which makes them harder to talk people out of. And the problem isn't so much the MLM structure as that the whole thing's a swindle.
And we certainly have swindles in monetized fandom! Any method of making money can be turned into a swindle, by someone who wants to swindle people. We can probably all name several exciting chapters in the history of online fandom when fan swindlers have succeeded, for a little while at least.
And any method of making money can feel like a swindle if the people involved in it are just really bad at it (which also applies to a lot of v. small publishers who look predatory through sheer incompetence, but aren't actually making any money for themselves either.) We can all name situations like that too, probably.
And any profit-prioritizing corporation under late-stage capitalism is, at some level, built on a swindle, because our entire global economic system is currently built on a series of stacked swindles. So there's some stuff that does make me side-eye things like Patreon and Kofi, and what they try to promise people, even as fandom uses them more and more, but that's really pretty ancillary to the question of MLMs. And even at their worst, they don't require the initial outlay of capital to chain you to the swindle, or pressure you to pressure your friends to put themselves into the same level of debt as you.
So I'm still way more worried about predatory publishers going 'ooh, girls are selling fanfic now! Our fandom market's not limited to boys with no social support and WoW-with-the-numbers-filed-off epics!' or about homegrown swindles and for-pay fanfic sites than I am about people using crowdfunding or commissions to fill out that last couple of hundred dollars of rent. The real, ongoing problem with monetizing that destroys relationships is large corporations recruiting people to swindle other people for them, not individual fans looking for compensation for labor.
(The question of compensation for creative labor in general is an entirely different one.) (as is the question that's silently threaded through this whole discussions about helping needy people via pure charity vs. under a smokescreen of nominal 'earned payment', and whether that choice should be up to the helper or the helped.)(as is the question of to what extent patreon and company are themselves exploiting the fans who use them.)
(one of my cousins over christmas seemed to think I was anticapitalist or something, dunno what gave him that impression.)
no subject
On the other hand, if I was broke again, I would probably be seriously tempted to set up a Patreon or Ko-fi for this DW account in general, fanwork and non-fanwork and all, (although I would probably be too afraid to promote it very hard).
And if I do finish the Anne of Green Gables re-write we were talking about a few posts back, I will probably try to sell it to a traditional publisher, because it's public domain and I would love to see it in bookstores and libraries! (I would probably try to send all of my share to some charity related to Indigenous Canadian foster kids, though, because I don't need the money right now and I would feel weird about getting paid as the sole author.)
no subject
Mm. I would probably feel better about a general "Donate to me if you like what I do!" than a specific commission-for-fanwork situation, because that at least avoids the making-fanwork-into-moneywork thing, and also the problem where I would have to figure out how to charge for my time.
It seems ridiculous to charge minimum wage or more for my fanwork, and especially at Australian rates (most of my readers would not be Australian, and wages are much higher here than a lot of the world), but why so? We've spent so long establishing that fanwork has the similar literary/creative value as original work, so I feel like I'd be undercutting other writers if I charged below minimum wage for my work... Anyway, you can see I've overthought this, but I then I worry that being willing to do things for below a living wage becomes a horrifying race-to-the-bottom for desperate people, who are having to compete against people who just want to get a bit of cash for their hobby.
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Whereas something that would be more analogous to a CD, yeah: you can then buy that like you'd buy a CD, for CD prices.
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I can typically write 2-3k of fic and edit it in 1-2 hours, and minimum wage in my state is $7.25, so arguably $14.50 is a fair price for me to charge for something of that length. $30 would be a better hourly rate than what I make at my real job. I would feel like I was drastically undercutting everyone at either of those prices, though.
I mean, I know lots of people who can write maybe 300 words an hour! And often they are brilliant writers, this is in no way a criticsm of them. On the OTHER end, my first writing community included several people who would sit down and write an 80k novel in three days (...many of whom had severe carpal tunnel syndrome after doing that too many times, but that's a bit beside the point). So I don't think it's possible to set a categorical fair hourly rate for fiction writing; and it's not a coincidence that the pro writing organizations mostly set rates by the word. But there's a fairly significant difference, I think, between selling by the word in the usual way writing is sold and selling by the word on commission. Particularly if your agreement includes edits.
The other thing is that imo the issues involving client satisfaction and how much control the client has over the work they commissioned and such are fairly profound with writing, maybe more than with art. Like, writers as a group tend to profess not having that much control over the end product in a way artists really don't.
None of which is to say it should never ever be done, just, I think there's a reason it's not a particularly common practice and I'm wary of what's going to happen if it does get more popular on the way, especially with writers who are largely inexperienced in selling commissions of other stuff and pretty young as a group. On the other hand that's kind of true of everything, so. -shrugs-
no subject
If a lawyer billed only for hours spent in court, nobody would ever pay off their law school bills.
I can write a 2-3k fic and edit it in 2 hours reliably enough that I regularly leave fest fics until I am relying on that fact (which is... a different sort of issue. ;_;) But it's not "get prompt, immediately dash off 2k, done in 2hr." It's canon review, brainstorming ideas, figuring out the prompts and DNWs, sometimes asking questions of the recip, and spending a great deal of time thinking about what I'm going to write before I finally settle down to write. And the longer the story, the higher the ratio of time working on it to time actually putting words on page and editing.
If I had to go from prompt to finished fic for eight hours a day every day, billing only for "writing time", I would be writing a lot slower than 1k/hr.
Your process may be different than mine - maybe you really can do the entire process of prompt - idea - plan - research - write - edit - post at a rate of 1k/hr - but my experience is that generally people who think of themselves as "fast writers" are actually doing large amounts of writing work mentally, in their heads, while doing other things, without even really thinking about it as writing work. Which is fine, when it's your hobby! But they don't realize that until they end up in a situation where they suddenly lose that extra mental space (and often mistake it for writer's block.)
If you're trying to actually make a good hourly living off of it, you need at minimum 30-40 hours a week where you're getting that hourly rate, which means all of that "hidden" time for daydreaming about it or reviewing canon for fun suddenly goes away. And if you're not trying to do it full-time, you're still using that hidden time as writing time you're not getting paid for - which means you're undercutting people who do want to make a living, by doing work you're not billing for.
And none of that even includes the time spent, if I was selling it, on doing the overhead involved in finding clients, dealing with payments, etc. Which also needs to be counted as work time, and factored into your rates.
Formulas I've seen for pro illustrators tend to go something like, set a fair hourly rate for the time you spend actually making a piece of art (say $15/hr, which is the bare minimum to pay rent and have health insurance in my area, and what minimum wage would be if our country wasn't a oligarchic hellscape, and it should be more for skilled work), then double it (or more) to factor in the work involved when not actually putting brush to paint, including planning, marketing, and dealing with clients (so, $30/hr min) and then add in materials cost (low for writers, usually) and a fixed cost of something like $5000 a year for general business overhead like dealing with taxes and internet fees and so on, which needs to be averaged over your billable hours, so that takes you to say $35/hr.
So even as a "fast writer", you should be charging about $70 for something that takes you about two hours to write and edit, and that's still a very low hourly rate for a talented person doing skilled work, with very little wriggle room left in. $100-$150 for a 2hr piece is more reasonable for someone wanting to charge a rate that compensates them for their skill and will allow them to make a living, since you've got to assume you won't be booked up to your maximum all the time, and factor that in. (And at $100-$150 for 2000-3000 words you're already at the rates pro writers are getting, because the pro magazines pay the minimum they can and not have writers starve. And if you're a person who can write words that people are willing to pay $.05 a word for on a consistent basis, you could probably make a living as a pro anyway.)
At $15/hr for the actual writing, you're not just undercutting "slower writers", you're vastly undercutting yourself. Even if it feels like a higher hourly rate.
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The fact that you assumed there was another six to eight hours of research and plotting time is kind of my point, really.
*Unless it's research intensive, but the scenario I typically see people talking about with regard to commission work isn't "Let me write you a personalized history AU fic that incorporates the political ramifications of the Act of Union."
no subject
(If I was using my writing process for my last fest fic, I would be adding in another 60-80 hours, but that's why nobody is trying to make a living on yuletide fic.)
And that extra 1-2 hours overhead is not just planning/daydreaming time - it's time spent communicating with the client, including the initial negotiation and then getting the order and then billing; retrieving your payment from the client afterward (which is usually easy, but the ones where it isn't more than make up the time); doing the bookkeeping to track income and outlay and documenting that you did deliver the item as requested and dealing with your payment system and taxes and all of that; and doing the marketing/advertising/networking needed to get the clients in the first place; and so on.
For someone like a fanwriter or fanartist, btw, that 'marketing' section should also include things like keeping your writerly social media going. And a lot of people want to protest 'but I would be updating my social media anyway, so I can't factor that in as business labor' - well, you would probably be writing anyway, too. That doesn't make it any less part of the job of being a writer. This is why trying to monetize a hobby is always a mess. But if you were doing it full-time, you wouldn't have time to keep your social media going outside your 'writer time' without burning out, so you need to include it.
And yes, you should be factoring in daydreaming over dinner! If you were in a job where coming up with a new research avenue over dinner was part of your job, you would probably be in a job that was salaried, rather than hourly - with a yearly salary that's high enough to factor in that yes, you are almost definitely doing a lot of work outside your office hours.
(Unless you were an adjunct, in which case you'd be doing teaching work by the credit for starvation wages, coming home, collapsing, lamenting that you can't find the energy to do the research that would get you out of adjuncting, burning out, getting a government job, slowly realizing how much better life is when you can leave work at work, and eventually getting back to your research for fun. As an unpaid hobby. Because academia is also fucked.)
If you were a high-end lawyer who spent dinner strategizing about a case, you'd better believe you would call it a work dinner and billable hours.
If you're in an hourly job that expects you to be thinking about work outside the hours you're being paid for, your bosses are stealing your labor. *waves IWW membership card* *which is deepest red btw and they mail me awesome vintage-looking stamps to put on it every month*
I'm not saying that every time you think about a story, you need to go to a spreadsheet and track the hours. But I am saying that if you want to value your creative labor the way it should be valued, you need to factor daydreaming time into the wage you're paying yourself.
Sorry I am so strident about this - I spend a fair amount of time RL with people who are trying to make a go of it as freelance artists, and for awhile was helping someone run a con workshop on 'how to run your art like a business'. I have watched way too many talented artists refuse to believe that a rate that factors in all the work they actually do is a fair rate, and then burn out because to pay rent they're trying to do full-time at the drawing table with everything else squeezed into the corners and therefore can't get any of it done well, and then have a breakdown, lose their apartment and their cat, and quit art because clearly they fail at everything. It's a problem.
And it's so damn hard to convince people that "double your hourly rate for pen-to-paper + a little extra, to account for business overhead and general creative time" is reasonable, when it's usually lowballing it. And that's shitty. And I'm starting to see it happen with fannish writers too, and it's always the ones who are vulnerable and desperate and don't have the extra resilience to power through and figure it out.