First Publication Rights…Or Not

Someone recently reminded me on the NaNoWriMo forums that by posting my written work online and leaving it publicly accessible, I’m giving up my first publication rights.  My reaction was: so what?  I did know that first publication rights exist, what they are, and why they’re desirable things to hold on to.  But I just couldn’t see why I should be bothered.

The person who reminded me of the existence of these rights apparently thought that I was suffering from lack of confidence in my own work (exact words: But, why are you so convinced you couldn’t be published?)  There was no way to realistically reply to that question without sounding like I was trolling for compliments, so I didn’t.  The real answer, however, is: It’s not that I’m convinced I couldn’t be published.  I just don’t care about being published any more.

I found my own reaction more than a little startling, because for a great deal of my life, I worshipped the idea of being published.  In my childhood, I desperately admired writers who had gotten their work published in book form, especially speculative fiction writers.  I did all I could to emulate them, from madly writing my own fiction to reading novels at the rate of four and five a day, trying to absorb the intricacies of plot and depth of character, the elegance of phrase and economy of description that appealed to me the most.  And earlier this decade, drunk on the economic independence implied by my first earnings, I went out and self-published a tiny collection of fiction written during my teenage years.

It was a flop, of course, and somewhere down inside I had known it would be even before I embarked on it.  That whole psychological knot would make a blog post of its own if I ever found the relevance in putting it up here.  More interesting right now, however, is the question of why first publication rights have lost their value in my eyes.

(Note: first publication rights are exactly what they sound like, the very first time your work is published; online, in print or broadcast, as long as it’s released in complete form.  A more detailed explanation is found here.)

In recent years I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the publishing industry.  One reason is that I feel its business model is failing (see the post preceding this one, where I postulated an entirely new model for it in years to come).  Another reason is the arbitrariness of its entry barriers, which practically every aspiring writer in every genre is going to have run into at some point or another.  And yet another very large one is its failure of quality control.  Let me elaborate on the latter two – the first one is pretty well covered in my last rant.

The entry barriers for new writers are set high, which I mentioned in my last post.  This is understandable for two reasons: one being the necessary business concerns, because publishers have to make money too, and they can’t afford to invest in projects which will one hundred percent be commercial flops.  (I’ve seen at least one publisher which DOES invest in commercially non-viable projects.  The business is not doing well.)  The second reason is that the editors who select manuscripts – termed acquisition editors in some places – are only human.  They can scarcely comb through every submission to pick out its good points and justify its viability, especially when some of those submissions come with a host of spelling and grammatical errors.  Not to mention that many starting writers have all-but-unreadable styles, ranging from those who seem to be describing the panels of a comic book image by image, to those who apparently live and breathe passive style, to some who slap down their characters’ point of view with all the style and meaningfulness of installation artists throwing soiled underwear on a bed.  (Believe it.  I’ve seen all three types and more.)

These explanations come into question when editors decide to turn a manuscript down because it doesn’t fit the stereotype of what writers from a certain group ought to be producing, or because they themselves do not like the genre or subject material.  Editors are human, and that means they make human decisions – which can be pretty arbitrary.  (I plead guilty on occasion.)  The question becomes bigger when some of those unreadable manuscripts mentioned in the preceding paragraph somehow make it into print, errors and all.  And it links up with the greatest peeve I have had with the publishing industry for years – the failure of quality control.

Have you picked up a good novel and found your enjoyment of it disrupted by glaring spelling, grammar or even pagination errors?  I’ve seen plenty.  Have you picked up a novel by a supposedly good, best-selling author and found it choked with plot holes big enough to swallow the Singapore Flyer, or flattened into unreadability by stylistic inconsistencies and (in the case of sequels) plot and character non sequiturs so glaringly enormous that you begin to suspect it was written by someone other than the best-selling author?  I have, with the result that I don’t read Piers Anthony, C.J. Cherryh or Tanith Lee any more.  They are great writers and do great work, but for this reader, the errors let through by their publishers have completely turned me off their work.  I won’t even go into why publishers are still pushing Mercedes Lackey’s novelizations.

For me, issues like these have devalued book publishing.  Working in it myself, going through the practical realities of self-publishing and seeing the backstage workings of printing, distribution and marketing also helped to puncture the bubble.  The glamour of getting a book in print is just that – glamour, like airbrushed British political posters.  Commercial value becomes meaningless when the bulk of it lies in marketing and distribution rather than in the content.

Rather than cling onto my first publication rights and spend months, maybe years, waiting on the merry-go-round of editorial whims and sales departments’ constant lowering of the quality bar to meet the mass market, I’ll release everything on the Internet.  So what if I’m giving up the chance of money?  Putting money first isn’t going to improve my work – going by some of the bestsellers and sequels out there, it might well drop the standards of what I end up producing.  So what if I’m giving up the chance of fame?  ”Fame” these days is more equivalent to hype.  I don’t like glitzy bare-all ads or vacuous reviews that might as well have been produced by a random generator program.

In my opinion, trying for “first print” publication is useless, especially in Singapore.  It means hugging my precious work so close to me that no one can get a chance to lay so much as an eyelash on it, while hoping for a 1/1000 break that probably won’t ever come.  It involves wasting years chasing editors who aren’t interested while the manuscript lies pristinely unread in a drawer instead of gathering useful critiques from the wider world – years that could be better spent brushing it up, releasing new and improved editions, producing a sequel that has genuine value rather than being churned out for the sake of sticking with a selling formula.

Essentially, first publication rights are worthless from where I stand right now.  And I demonstrate my valuation of them by throwing the lot away on my blogs, which no one reads.

Reproduction rights, on the other hand…go look at the terms of use.  Otherwise, I couldn’t care less.

The Future Of Publishing

I’ve been meaning to write on this topic for a while, and I happened to get some stimuli today – in the papers and in this month’s issue of the Silverfish Books newsletter, which carried a thought-provoking article on the situation of the publishing industry (read it here).  Essentially, people are not buying books as much as they used to – not in print form.  They are turning to e-books and digital libraries of the sort Google is creating.  And, according to an article reproduced in today’s Straits Times, piracy of e-books is shooting up, just as it did when music and video became digitised.

I’ve long believed that the present model of the publishing industry is becoming increasingly less sustainable.  Lessons can be drawn from the experiences of the video and music industries, especially the music industry.  Experts will say that prices are inflated and consumers are paying more for packaging than for actual content; they will also say that the drive to create the next big hit (note create, not find - read: more packaging), similar to the publishing industry’s current drive to find the next bestseller, has led to innovation and new content being stifled.

If we look away from blaming the big record companies, as tempting as many people find it, we can also single out the attitude of the Internet generation: the deep-rooted belief that everything on the Internet should be free, regardless of how much it cost to produce.  Newspapers in America are already foundering because their readership is migrating to free-access portals owned by content aggregators.  In fact, studies have shown that while the digital age has brought about a massive boom in content aggregation, it has not led to a corresponding increase in content generation.  Those who carry out research via the Internet will be familiar with the phenomenon.  It involves finding the self-same article repeated across a dozen different sites, sometimes without even being attributed to the original creator.  Why?  Because it is so much easier to collect and re-host content than to create it.

What does this mean for content generators – in the specific context I address daily, small-time content generators such as freelance writers, artists and designers, people with limited access to the market?

I see four key challenges here.  The first is the challenge of exposure.  As so many people have already pointed out and will continue to point out, the Internet is the great saviour of freelancers.  It’s the place where you can sell yourself for free, with just a little ingenuity and careful management.  In an earlier post, I advised aspiring teenage writers to clean up their online profiles, and here I’ll share a brief example of why this is so important.

I maintain a profile on WritersNet, brushed up and worded to look like an online CV.  A few months ago, someone from the ACCA AB Magazine was looking for writers based in Singapore and the region, with experience in producing business/finance/accounting articles.  He found my profile, decided it was suitable, and contacted me.  Sounds simple?  But think of how easily it might NOT have happened.  If I had kept my WritersNet profile to the level that most aspiring writers do – focusing on the “creativity for its own sake” aspect and not selling anything of commercial value – the AB Magazine person wouldn’t have given it a second look, and I would be out one opportunity.

The challenge of exposure is therefore to make use of it.  The powerful publicity machines of the big companies are no longer necessary for up-and-coming artists, no matter of what stripe.  Technology long ago made it possible to create your own work without needing access to the expensive equipment used by professionals; now technology has made it possible for you to promote your own work without needing an entire team of spin doctors and media experts.

Exposure is two-edged, however.  The other side of the challenge is not to drown in other people’s exposure.  You are not and will never be the only person selling yourself out there.  Every mouse click brings up an entire directory of other writers and artists, good and bad, prolific and one-hit wonders.  You have to find a way to stay ahead of the pack and not just be another grain of sand among many, waiting on the vagaries of a search engine to throw up your work.

In response to the challenge of exposure, I believe that the publishing industry will, in time, no longer be dominated by large print publishing houses.  Instead we will see Internet content aggregators who collect the works of small independent writers and artists, moderate and edit them to meet certain standards, and release them – for free.

This is the second challenge: revenue.  Traditionally, content generators in the publishing industry derive the bulk of their revenue from selling their work: either one-off payments, royalties over a period of time, or percentages of sales.  This model runs into difficulties in several places, however.  Firstly, there is the issue of quality control becoming overly tight.  When people have to pay you for your work, they will naturally want to make sure they are getting their money’s worth.  The immediate result is a high entry barrier for newcomers, because publishers, producers and everyone else who is going to invest in a new release are wary of trying out anything that might potentially make a loss.  (Those who are not wary and charge idealistically ahead usually do end up making a loss; but that’s another story.)  They prefer to stick with tried-and-tested writers and artists, people who have already succeeded, and often they stick with these big names to the point where the name becomes more important than the quality of the product; quite the reverse of what new entrants face.

The other difficulty is what I mentioned above: the growing reluctance of consumers to pay for content.  They want it free.  If the consumer isn’t going to pay, the content generator isn’t going to be able to get money from selling the content.

Does this mean that we, the small-time content generators and newcomers, should hop on the piracy-smashing bandwagon and restrict the release of our work to only those companies big enough and with enough legal clout to protect it from freeloaders?  I think not.  That is sheer counterproductiveness.  When we restrict the release of our work, we restrict our own market.  We end up creating a little bubble of inflation where a select group of readers and viewers are paying more for the packaging and delivery of the content than they are for the content itself – and not only that, the bubble is vulnerable to anyone creative enough or disgruntled enough to crack the protection.

The solution, as I see it, is to go along with the freeloaders.  We have to create a new Internet business model where content generators need no longer rely purely on selling their content.  In fact, content sales should make up only a small proportion of their revenue.  The rest ought to come from value-added services.  These can take the form of advertising – simple endorsements, covert support – or expertise in the content generator’s own area, as consultancies do.  They could even be spinoff products.  Take a random novelist who self-publishes independently, through their own free-access website, and has a small readership of a few thousand a month.  They could offer advertising space to related products – cosmetics for the chick-lit genre?  Computer accessories for science fiction?  Dating services for romance?  And not just any advertisement that comes past – a little moderation of the kind of advertising would be very useful, because people do know how to tune out web ads and they will tune them out if they once perceive that there is no value in them.

The example above is really the most basic kind.  People have already come up with even more sophisticated concepts and will continue to do so.  In short, the bulk of publishing revenue in the future is not going to come from charging people for content that can be easily duplicated and distributed for free.  It will come from value-added services that are complementary to the content itself, and which people are willing to pay for.

This comes to the third challenge: intellectual property, that perennial hot potato topic.  There has been an enormous amount of debate on the value of patents and copyrights.  There is the undeniable argument that it helps newcomers establish themselves free of competition that would otherwise stamp them out.  But there is also the argument that it equally helps anti-competitive actions by large and established parties that do not even need the monopoly.  In today’s newspaper, in fact – the same paper that ran a story on e-book piracy – a reader’s letter was published, mentioning that farmers who grow GM crops are prevented by patent laws from using the seed for more than one harvest.  If this is indeed true, it ranks up with the withholding of HIV treatment drugs as a self-defeating abuse of intellectual property laws – but that is an argument for another place.  The point I prefer to make is that intellectual property laws, for small-timers, can very often end up as a legal headache – whether you are seeking their protection or trying to evade it.

Simply put, when it comes to content that can be released on the Internet, you have only two choices.  You can follow the example of the music industry and cling onto your intellectual property with all your might and main, going to great costs and extreme lengths, alienating many of your own customers, and finally drawing a little Berlin Wall around your part of the Internet and spending the rest of your shelf life defending it against anyone who tries to come in without buying a parking ticket.

Or, you can let it go to whoever wants it – make it freely available, put minimal restrictions on it (consider, for instance, a file uploaded under a Creative Commons license, for anyone to access and redistribute as they like) and trust that people will enjoy your work enough to keep coming back for more.

Or – you can strike a compromise between the two, as many game developers are doing by releasing preview versions of their games, risking cracks and duplications but also increasing the number of people who download and try it, and thereby increasing the chance that people will actually find the game good enough to buy the full version.  But even this compromise will eventually drift one way or another.

I think that the final version of intellectual property, at some time very far off in the future, will be exactly what the freeloaders want – the majority of creative content freely available, but packaged with other necessary or value-added service that people will have the choice to pay for or not, as they wish. Bestsellers and chart-toppers will be decided not by how many copies are sold in stores, but by how many copies are floating around the Internet on various hosts and how many hits they total in a month.  The cost of putting them up and hosting them in the first place will be borne not by publishing entities, but by the individual content generator.

(Note that I am not mentioning professional content such as research and statistics data.  That is a completely different sector altogether.)

All of the above put together adds up to the fourth challenge: mindset.  I strongly believe that all this is going to happen whether we like it or not.  In fact, it is already happening to one extent or another, to the point that I could write an entire research paper on it and still not cover the entire phenomenon.  (I’ve barely scratched the surface here as it is.)  Resisting it will simply put us inside self-built wells, like the proverbial frog.

Writers and other content generators need to accept that we will have to take full responsibility for the publication and production of our own work.  Going through publishing houses is becoming less and less viable, and this is so exaggeratedly the case in Singapore that it almost seems redundant to mention it here.  And full responsibility means not only creating it, but editing, moderating and polishing it to meet standards that are acceptable not just to ourselves but to people who possess higher levels of skill and discernment than we do.  (Yes, go and find people like that.  Make them read your work and give you genuine, critical feedback.  How else do you expect to advance?)  In other words, we need to take ownership of our work from inception to infinity.  Just throwing it out there and basking in satisfaction at its completion is not enough.

We need to accept that we are not necessarily going to get paid for our work.  If it was commissioned by an external party, that is a different matter; but creative work that we do without commission has to be treated like a cold call for a job application.  We are not guaranteed payment.  We are not guaranteed a good reception.  We are not even guaranteed readership.  The dream of fame and riches is just that – a dream.  For that matter, it was always a dream.

And we need to accept that we cannot hold onto our work.  Once it is uploaded to the Internet, we no longer have any control over who sees it, who downloads it, who copies and redistributes it.  All we can do is ensure that we are properly recognized as the creator.  (For this, tools such as Copyscape and the Creative Commons licenses exist; how far you want to take them depends on you.)  We need to accept the old saw about imitation and even outright theft being the sincerest form of flattery; we need to stop thinking of it as theft, full stop.

This is not a freeloader’s point of view.  It is a content generator’s point of view.  The industry is going to change, because its current model is not viable.  We’d better change along with it.

Children Grow Up

Warning: rant-like recollection of a candidate, unnamed, for Singapore’s Worst Teacher.

Children grow up.  This is an unfortunate truth.  They turn into adults, and whatever they learned in their childhood transmutes itself, in the adult specimen, into a full-fledged personality comprising habits, values, thought patterns and in some cases, old grudges.

What brought this to my mind was a conversation in the Arts House a few weeks ago, at the NaNoWriMo TGIO party (yes, that stands for Thank God It’s Over).  One of the teenage participants had mentioned that he was very interested in mathematics, and another guy sitting at the table launched into an impassioned spiel about how family, teachers and classmates would try to hold him back to the same level as his peer group.  (I bet you’re reading this from my Facebook feed, yes I’m talking about you.)

Listening, I thought: there speaks the voice of unpleasant experience.  And I found myself thinking of the time, more than ten years ago, when I decided that I loathed mathematics.  It was a decision that ended up removing the sciences and anything math-related, even accounting, from my career choices.  It was also a decision sparked primarily by the very poor teaching methods of the lady who was supposed to educate my class in the fundamentals of mathematics.

I was streamed into the now-largely defunct Gifted Education Programme back when GEP actually meant something more than another qualification that kiasu parents made their children cram to get.  Just at the time when I entered secondary school, a fourth secondary school, Dunman High, had been cleared to run GEP classes.  My batch was the first cohort – just two small classes of under twenty students each.  We gave the teachers a lot of headaches, I’m sure – I recall the Chinese teacher telling us that we made him lose weight in the programme’s first month.

In the second year, a new mathematics teacher was brought over from Raffles Girls’.  Later I found out that she had been an English language teacher.  Her method of teaching mathematics involved rotework of the kind most GEP students had not experienced before – each mathematical problem in an exercise had to be done according to an exact series of steps, not one left out, not one new one put in, and even the wording had to be exact.  The omission of one “the” in a concluding sentence resulted in a fail grade for the entire exercise and the whole thing having to be rewritten ten times.

This was probably standard at the time and would have been less objectionable if not for the lady’s other quirks.  At the time, we had a habit of storing our mathematics textbooks in the cupboard for audiovisual equipment, because it had a lock and was presumably safe.  Turned out that this teacher had a key to it, and she confiscated every textbook left there, then decreed that we had to pay a $1 fine to get it back.  That was not fine.  Some of us – myself among the number – came from backgrounds that were not well off.  $1 was a lot to a secondary one student on a tight allowance back then.

(The money went into the class fund.  What was it used for?  I doubt it was anything of real benefit.)

This lady – the cousin of the history teacher, if I remember correctly – dealt with us in other ways that, in retrospect, make me wonder if she was a little mentally ill.  She would stalk into the classroom unannounced and if everyone was not on their feet within three seconds, we were ordered to drop to the floor and do ten push-ups on the spot.  I remember being genuinely appalled and very disgusted when, on one occasion, she did this during ANOTHER TEACHER’S CLASS, at a time when there was a GUEST SPEAKER PRESENT.  I also remember that the guest speaker, who was actually halfway through addressing us when she interrupted, was visibly trying to keep a polite expression on his face.

She had particular disfavourites that she liked to pick on as well, one girl in each of the GEP classes at our level (she “taught” us from secondary two to secondary four).  Both of them were friends of mine.  She ordered one of these girls, who passed away at the age of eighteen, never to come into her class again, and refused to teach if that girl was in the classroom.  When the other girl volunteered to have class T-shirts printed, she agreed – and then, when my friend had them printed on grey material at her own expense, this teacher threw a tantrum, said the grey material was unacceptable and ordered the girl to reprint them on white – again at her own expense.  I forget how it was resolved in the end, but I’m quite sure my friend was never reimbursed from that class fund built on confiscated textbooks.

When I was in secondary three, this teacher also tried to make me fail my end-of-year English paper by deciding that my fingernails were too long, and refusing to let me take the paper until I had reduced them to an “acceptable” length – which took enough time that I was left with less than thirty minutes to complete a comprehension and write an essay.  (She did not succeed.  My essay scored top in both GEP classes.)

I can’t speak for the other students who were in my cohort – although I clearly recall that this teacher wrote a truly terrible school-leaving testimonial for one of my friends, the same girl who was so unfairly dealt with over the matter of the class T-shirts.  Every time I apply for a job and am asked to send in a copy of my testimonials, I wonder how my friend handled it.

For me, at any rate, the end result of this teacher’s behaviour was the line of reasoning: is this how mathematics teachers behave?  Then I do not want anything to do with mathematics in future. And I followed that reasoning up staunchly, rejecting the sciences when I applied for junior college (admittedly the choice of the arts stream was what got me into Raffles Junior College, because there was hardly any competition for it) and even trying to drop mathematics as a subject entirely.

The mathematics teacher for my class in RJC was wonderful – I say that, knowing exactly what a very bad teacher is like.  Thanks to him, I stopped rejecting mathematics, but it was a little too late by then.  I had let all my science subjects slip at the O-levels because I associated them with maths, and then, in junior college, I realized that I didn’t like the arts much either, particularly that mainstay, literature.  So I ended up in the Singapore Management University, studying business management.

After all of this, I am now a writer with a background in business studies, and probably not at all what the GEP educators envisioned the end product of their programme to be like – a lot less high-flying, a lot less socially useful, certainly earning far less.  And sadly, many people have told me in the intervening years that I have a scientific bent, and repeatedly asked me why I did not go into the sciences.  I did use to have an interest in science until my rejection of mathematics spilled over into it.  But I often wonder what I could have contributed to Singapore in the scientific or engineering fields, if I had been able to further that interest.

Children, and teenagers, grow up.  And all too often, it is only when they grow up that we can really see what damage was done during their formative years and their adolescence – if not by family, then by educators who, without the student’s interest at heart, let alone the national interest – are young people not a national investment? – handle them arbitrarily and sometimes maliciously.

Children grow up.  Remember that when you find yourself tempted to mistreat a child physically or emotionally.  Battered children grow up to batter their own spouses and children.  Children who see their parents lying and stealing grow up to lie and steal.  Not always – but far too often.

And adolescents who are influenced by the role models in their lives – no longer parents, but teachers, older teenagers and peers – grow up to remember those influences.  Would I shake the hand of my junior college mathematics teacher if I met him on the street?  I would, warmly, and inquire about his wife and son, and send him a card later.

Would I shake the hand of my secondary school mathematics teacher if I met her on the street?  I thought once or twice that I would be more likely to sneer at her.  Now, I think I would simply ignore her.  And that said, I have merrily trashed her reputation with the above account, which is entirely true except perhaps in the small details (was that exercise supposed to be rewritten ten or twenty times?)  But I’ve also been kind enough not to mention her name.  Although anyone who wants to dig it up can do so from the other specifics provided.

Children grow up.  If we are lucky, they remember and emulate the positive influences that made them the way they are.  If we are unlucky, they remember and emulate the negative ones.  And if we are really unlucky, they look for revenge on the negative influences.

Please remember: children grow up.