[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology: e-lit publishing and economics

Scott Rettberg scott at retts.net
Fri Jul 30 00:26:32 EST 2010


Hi everybody,

I think Simon responded more clearly to Chris Sullivan's comment that  
I would have. Generally, I would say that contesting a certain idea of  
what authorship constitutes does not imply any sort of conspiracy  
against authors, just a different idea of where authorship sits within  
a creative system and a creative economy. I do however think that when  
people edit, revise along the way, determine the color of a book  
jacket or choose a particular typeface and whether to push your book  
with ads on the side of busses or bury it in the back of the table at  
the book fair, that is collaboration in the production, distribution,  
and reception of the literary artifact. And I think it's important to  
think about the nature of these systems and the different roles that  
different actors play in them.

I keep referencing book culture, and it is a logical reference point,  
but I should emphasize that I believe the evolving environment of  
electronic literature to be an altogether different kettle of fish,  
and I'd like to briefly make some observations about the economics of  
this environment, and to look at few different examples of economic  
models.

The first hypertext fictions were published by Eastgate systems, a  
hybrid software developer and publisher, in the 1980s and 1990s. The  
hypertexts published by Eastgate produced with Eastgate's Storyspace  
software, such as Michael Joyce's Afternoon, Shelley Jackson's  
Patchwork Girl, Stephanie Strickland's True North, and Stuart  
Moulthrop's Victory Garden, were the first works of electronic  
literature to receive a great deal of critical attention. Eastgate's  
distribution model is based on a combination of a print book  
publishing model and an early software industry distribution model.  
Authors signed exclusive contracts with Eastgate, which agreed to  
publish, market, and distribute their work, and to reward the authors  
with royalties no more or less generous than those of print  
publishing. The authors sign over their rights, and the publisher  
gives their work a certain imprimatur and provides  some basic  
services, such as editing, marketing them on a website, burning CDs  
and sending them in the mail to customers. Good enough, perhaps.

There were however a few problems with this model. Perhaps because of  
the limited scale of the audience for literary hypertext, Eastgate  
priced its products in such a way that the resistance to purchasing  
them is fairly high. Individual works of hypertext fiction, poetry,  
and non-fiction sold by Eastgate start at $24.95 and run up to $49.95
While I understand the logic of this pricing model (people would pay  
that much for hardcover books, after all), one wonders if those works  
might have met with a much larger audience had they been priced at 1/5  
of that point and made available as digital downloads. From the  
author's perspective, the primary benefit of publishing with Eastgate  
was the imprimatur attached to publishing with a model that replicated  
that of print publishing. The other problem with this model, both as  
implemented by Eastgate (and a general issue with any electronic  
literature) is that a publisher of electronic literature cannot simply  
publish a work and stock it, secure in the knowledge that it will be  
there and work the same way in five or ten or twenty years. As  
platforms develop and change, works of electronic literature written  
in particular platforms may no longer function on those platforms. I  
had a conversation with Michael Joyce when he visited UiB this fall. I  
have shown and taught his Afternoon for a number of years. On the  
latest version of the Mac OS and a contemporary macbook, however,  
Afternoon no longer functions. A publisher working on the Eastgate  
model is taxed both with the challenge of distributing works initially  
and maintaining them in such a way as they will continue to operate in  
the future. It is no easy task. I haven't tested all of the titles  
currently available in the Eastgate catalog, but my guess is that a  
large proportion of them simply would not work on my computer, and  
there is nothing on the publisher's website to indicate which works  
have and have not been updated in such a way that they continue to be  
readable on contemporary operating systems.

Before the Web, of course, e-lit authors had few other options  
available to them. Other publisher in other parts of the world were  
publishing electronic literature in a similar way, in France and in  
Austria, but the logical path between e-lit authors and their  
audiences was still based on a print publishing model.

Then came the Web. In the 1990s two important shifts took place  
regarding electronic literature publishing models. The first was that  
a number of authors began developing electronic literary works  
specifically for the Web, and releasing them on a free and open basis.  
The second is that increasing numbers of authors set themselves to  
exploring the expressive possibilities of a number of other platforms  
than Storyspace, each of these different platforms with its own  
constraints and affordances opening up new possibilities and resulting  
in the production or reification of a myriad of new literary genres.

The shift to the Web did not necessarily result in a huge audience for  
electronic literature, but it did result in a the removal of a number  
of communication barriers between creative practitioners working the  
field, greatly increased the *potential readership* for e-lit, and  
changed the nature of the publishing environment. Where Eastgate's  
audience was primarily academics interested in "cutting edge" avant- 
garde literature, the e-lit on the Web was available to and appealed  
to a number of different constituencies. Robert Arellano's Sunshine  
'69 (1996), Mark Amerika's Grammatron (1997), and The Unknown  
(1998-2001), which I cowrote with William Gillespie and Dirk Stratton,  
are three examples of early hypertext novels that reached other sorts  
of audiences outside of academia. While we never received a penny of  
royalties for the Unknown, for instance, we were able to take comfort  
not only from the fact that it was written about in a number of  
newspapers, magazines, and journals, but that we were regularly  
receiving messages from readers who simply stumbled across the work on  
the Web, usually while searching for something else.

In the past I have advocated, and I continue to encourage, the free  
and open distribution of electronic literature. I don't think this  
should be the only model, of course, and I would like to see authors  
in this field able to make a living from their work. But the benefits  
of having one's work available on the Web are enormous. When people  
ask me where to find my work, I tell them to type the title and my  
last name into Google. There you have it. And while people  
distributing their work this way don't make money by selling their  
work, the majority of the e-lit writers who have found employment in  
various university positions over the past decade have reached their  
audiences and built their reputations by publishing their work in Web- 
based venues of one sort or another. While Mark Amerika was giving  
everything away, he found himself invited to speak at various venues  
around the globe, exhibited in a number of art venues, and managed to  
support himself in spite of his habit of giving away everything for  
free. The analogy to the rock band that posts torrents of its latest  
album and makes its living off of live shows and t-shirts is not  
completely off target. And while teaching may provide the main source  
of sustenance for contemporary e-lit authors, rather than the sale of  
their work, I see no shame in that. It's also the case, after all, for  
the majority of working print writers and a substantial number of  
artists.

When the ELO published the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1,  
in the fall of 2006, we decided to require all of the authors  
submitting work to assign the work a Creative Commons Non-Commercial  
No-Derivs Attribution License. Our reasoning for do this was that the  
license would allow anyone who wanted to exhibit or share the work do,  
particularly in educational contexts. A teacher, for instance, may  
feel free to take a CD of the entire collection and install it on  
every computer in the school, without asking anyone for any permission  
to do so. We also decided to make the collection freely available on  
the Web and on CD-ROM. The editors, Stephanie Strickland, Katherine  
Hayles, Nick Montfort, and myself, felt that this was one of the most  
important aspects of the project.  We did not charge anyone for the  
collection, the production of which was supported by a number of  
academic programs which planned to use it in their curricula. While  
none of the authors who published their work on the Collection have  
received any royalties, I think that most of them would agree that the  
benefits have been greater than this cost. Their work has been widely  
read, taught, and considered in environments that it likely would not  
have been otherwise. And having a diverse, freely available, easily  
located, relatively stable, archived, and aggregated collection of  
electronic literature has been of immense benefit in developing  
electronic literature in educational contexts and in giving the  
international creative community a set of common referents. The second  
volume of the Collection, edited by Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, Brian  
Kim Stefans, and Laura Borras Castanyer, will be published this fall.

The fact that there hasn't been much of a market economy to speak of  
involved in electronic literature publishing during the recent decade  
has had upsides and downsides. While e-lit authors have not found  
wealth from their work, they have found a creative community of peers  
and a number of different sorts of audiences. I think there have been  
a number of other benefits to the situation. Experimentation has  
flourished in this environment. There is no pressure to write "the  
next Twilight" or the next "Harry Potter" in field because there is no  
pressure from the marketing team. There is no marketing team, and the  
artists are doing what they want to do with their time, following  
their own path of experimentation.

I've gone on a bit, but I do want to point to one very recent and  
promising example of an artist who is making some money from creative  
production -- Jorg Piringer, the Austrian digital poet/lettrist/sound  
artist/performer, has recently published a couple of art piece/sound  
toy/gadgets "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" and "Gravity Clock" as apps  
for the iPhone. Each sells for $0.99 on the app store. He has sold  
thousands of copies of both programs, and reports that it is providing  
a steady stream of income. Royalties? He keeps 70% of the income from  
every download. When he presented at the recent roundtable at  
Kingston, Jorg also reported that he has been surprised with other  
sorts of reactions to his success in this platform. While he has been  
showing his work around the world and on the Web for decades, he said,  
the fact that people have paid something for the app makes them seem  
inclined to value it in a different way. While he had submitted works  
of equivalent production value and merit before, for instance, this  
year one of his iPhone apps received an honorary mention at Ars  
Electronica.

The model of making a work of e-lit available not for free, but at a  
very low price point that presents little barrier for the customer,  
and offers authors terms that are very generous in comparison to  
contemporary publishing models seems one  very promising as a  
potential model for the future distribution of electronic literature.

All the Best,

Scott



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