The Independent Revolution
The Internet is quickly becoming the financial savior for up and coming artists. Whether you play music, make movies or write books, you can find a way to get your work out to your potential fan base on your own, while making more money than ever before – and keeping your artistic integrity.
The era of corporate patrons for music, fiction and art is over. Publishing houses, record companies and even movie studios are becoming a thing of the past. Quite simply, the big companies take too much of your potential profit while strangling your creativity.
It is time for the Internet to set you free.
With today’s technology, you have the ability to stand up and take control of your art while becoming the master of your destiny. With a little bit of time and effort, you can find the true success your artistic vision deserves!
The truth is, there is no reason at all to waste your time and energy trying to sell your work to the big boys. In fact, in most cases getting a publishing deal or a record contract with a name company will compromise your integrity and end up costing you money. The same holds true for movie studios – they are facing a challenge to their domination, never seen before in the history of the industry.
The problem is that big corporations don’t exist to extend your vision or celebrate your art. Instead, they are mostly publicly traded companies focused on improving their stock price and bottom line. The most important thing for them is how they look to the stockholders during the next quarter – not the state of your career or financial stability five years from now.
That’s why it often seems like corporations seek you out in order to exploit you and make money off your hard work – and could care less whether or not you see a dime for your efforts.
It’s not really their fault – it’s simply what they need to do to survive.
That doesn’t mean you have play their game. For years there was no alternative but to sell your soul to the devil if you wanted to be able to make a living through your art – but in the past 10 years, the rules have changed.
Today, whether you want to make cutting edge science fiction films or write books set in a brand new universe, you have the tools at your disposal to make it happen.
Why It Is Almost Impossible To Make A Living Through Book Publishing Houses
Just consider the basic economics involved in publishing. If you were to sell only 5,000 copies of your next novel, you would make most bestseller lists. But, at the average publishing house compensation of $2 per purchased book, you would only make $10,000 for your efforts after the publishing house took their cut. [Link and Link]
That means that you would have to write two bestsellers a year (no mean feat) simply to make $20,000 a year. Depending on the size of your household, you might still be living under the poverty line!
Writers often don’t realize how low their royalty rates are going to be when they sign their initial publishing contract. The representatives of the publishing house often throw out numbers that seem high, telling writers they will receive 10 or even 15 percent of sales. What they don’t mention is that the writers will receive their percentage based on the wholesale price – which can be as much as 55 percent lower than the retail price.
Often, publishers send books to book clubs, which can cause your profits to fall even further. In some instances book club authors report getting as little as 10 cents for every book sold – which can make earning a living nearly impossible. [Link]
Another concern is the terms of the contract you may end up signing to make your “book deal” a reality. Most writers are not business people, and many are so excited that someone wants to publish their work that they never bother to hire a lawyer or look at the small print in their contract. [Link]
Commonly, authors end up signing away all of the promotional rights to their work. In other words, you won’t even be able to promote your book on your own blog without getting specific permission from your publisher.
Imagine if you knew that your publishing house wasn’t promoting your book correctly – and you knew how to connect with your potential fan base – but you were legally barred from doing what you knew needed to be done to promote your book sales.
Also, publishing houses often include non-compete agreements that can last for years. This prevents you from going to another publishing house, or even starting your own company that might touch on something you mentioned or included in your manuscript.
If you are lucky and you feel like your publisher is doing everything they can to help you, this might not seem like a bad deal. But, if you ever have problems with your publisher or see an opportunity for a better offer, you might find that your hands are tied and you have no recourse but to let your career stagnate until the contract is over.
Then they will insist on the first right of refusal on your future works. This means that despite the fact that they may not understand how to promote your books, they can keep you from getting them published elsewhere – under more lucrative terms for you.
Meanwhile, your work is making money for the publishing house. No Media Kings recently did a breakdown of where the money goes – hint: it’s not to the artist – when a book is published. [Link]
Imagine what you will have given up simply to have brought in that money.
You will have had to let editors – who may or may not respect your work – insist that you make changes to your novel. You’ll probably have to have gone on book tours, You’ll have had to agree to any and all changes the publishing house insists on – even if you know it will make your novel worse.
What’s really upsetting is that the publishing houses won’t be making these choices in order to advance your artistic vision – they will be doing so in order to make your work acceptable to chain stores – like Wal-Mart – which are notorious for refusing to sell anything that might be considered in the slightest way controversial.
Now, imagine if you were selling that same book yourself online. You’d have several different options. You could publish it in e-book format. In that case, you’d make a 100 percent profit of every copy downloaded. So, if you sold the same 5,000 copies, you could make a profit of $45,000.
That’s quite a difference.
Of course, many authors want their books to be in print and not just online. That’s fine, and understandable. Still, you could promote your book over the Internet – and not pay exorbitant amounts of publishing house overhead; use the Internet to market your book to a global audience – for almost nothing – and only pay the wholesale printing and shipping costs.
In the real world, that means that if you sold your book for $20, you could easily make as much as $10 or more per sale. In other words, you could generate at least five times more revenue from the same book – and never, ever have to compromise your artistic vision.
An Online Writer’s Success Story
Let’s look at the example of Patrice-Anne Rutledge. Once a successful technology journalist, she decided to use her Internet skills to make money writing and publishing her own books. Through her site, websavvywriter.com, she has become a best-selling author of 24 books, has seen her Amazon.com sales rank soar (she has a perfect five starts on Amazon), and now spends her time making even more money teaching other aspiring authors how to make money publishing their books – all without having to deal with major publishing houses at all – and keeping most of the $19.95 her latest book retails for on her site.
Alternate Revenue Sources For Writers
Publishing is far from the only way a writer can make money using the Internet to promote their work. In fact, some writers don’t charge anything for their books yet still make a good living. How do they do that? It’s simple: the book builds up a fan base, and they use that fan base to develop other marketing channels. Some authors go on paid speaking tours – which both generates income and allows them to build up hype for their next work by speaking directly to their fans.
Others sell t-shirts, coffee mugs and other knick-knacks to fans that generate even more money. This is easier to do than you might think. For example, you can go to Cafe Press at cafepress.com and within minutes have t-shirts and mugs designed and on sale on your website. It costs nothing to sign up for Cafe Press, which simply takes a small fee for every item ordered through their site.
You can also put your work in e-book format and sell it on the web for maximum profits. The advantage of e-books is that you spend nothing on printing or shipping costs – people simply download them to their own desktops.
It is possible to set up your own website – if you have the programming know how – or else use any of dozens of sites that allow you to sell your e-books through them for a commission, including clickbank.com and beyondthesidewalks.com.
Some authors go the Print On Demand (POD) route to maximize profits and limit expenses. When you use a POD service, like lulu.com where your books are printed as people order them – which means you never have to worry about inventory rotting away, or paying money to print books that may not sell.
Developing A Fan Base
One of the old arguments for signing with a big corporation was they would help you build up a fan base that could help you generate income from your art for years to come. The dirty little secret is that you no longer need them for your promotions – you can in fact build up your fan base quickly and easily on your own.
There are any number of ways you can build up a fan base – at virtually no expense:
Start your own blog: Getting a blog going is a great way to start finding people who like your writing. Simply post to the blog on a regular basis and respond to your fans, and you may start building up a following right away. Both LiveJournal.com and Blogger offer free hosting and tools to get your blog started in minutes.
Podcasts: A podcast is a file that people can download to their iPods or other MP3 players. Some authors choose to charge money for their regular podcasts, while others give them away free in order to promote their writing. You can post your podcasts around the net at places like iTunes, Podiobooks or other similar sites.
Audio Books: A lot of people don’t have time to read, but do get stuck in their cars for long periods of time or else want to listen to something while they work out. This particular marketplace is hungry for audio books. There are any number of places you can sell audio books – from Amazon.com to the rapidly growing Audible.com.
Of course, independent publishing for writers is still a new concept. In the same way that many writers still insist on using typewriters when the average PC could help them save hours of time, many writers have yet to embrace the Internet.
This is largely because up until 20 years ago, authors had no choice but to find a large publishing house and accept virtually any terms they offered. It would have been well beyond the capabilities of nearly any writer to arrange printing, distribution and advertising of his or her work.
The Music Industry
So, it may be more useful to look at independent musicians, who have been using the Internet to publish and distribute their music for far longer than authors have. While their medium may be different, their artistic process and the basic economics behind their decisions to go independent are roughly the same.
The royalty percentages offered by record companies have not changed particularly much over the past 50 years.
Today, the average artist is paid .0755 cents per track on each album sold. This means that on the average album, an artist makes between $1 and $2 per album sold, according to First Monday.
Considering that albums often retail for as much as $17 or more, that means that for every dollar a band generates from their work, about 16 times that amount is going to the record companies and stores.
Record companies have often argued that they deserve the money because they take the risk in laying out money for promotion, tours, marketing and CD distribution/production.
In the same way that publishing houses argue that writers need them to distribute their work, record companies make the point that without them, new artists would never be heard or exposed to the masses.
The problem with this argument is that it is roughly 10 years out of date.
The Internet now offers artists a myriad of ways to get their music out there – in many cases, more effectively than record companies ever have been able to.
Imagine you were selling your CDs online from your own website or MySpace page. Blank CDs cost roughly $1 each, and it costs nothing to record onto them. So, if you sold your CDs from your website you could charge $8 per disk – roughly half what a CD costs in a record store – and still make seven times as much money per disk as you would if you were signed to a major label record company. Better still, you would never, ever have to compromise your music in any way.
A great resource, if you want to produce and sell your own CDs, is CD Baby. This site, which works like an online music diary, allows you to upload and host your music. Then, if people want to buy your songs, the website will print, package and ship the CD directly to your fans – meaning you never have to worry about inventory, billing or returns. You simply get a cheque once a month for any and all sales your music generates.
When you choose to go independent and promote your music through the Internet, you have a lot of options when it comes to building up your fan base:
MySpace: MySpace has become one of the most effective band promotion tools in history. With MySpace – which is free – you can upload your band history, as many of your songs/demos as you’d like and information about how your fans can contact you. Your fans have a place to come together, talk about your music and even share your music with others.
Online music sales: Selling your music online is the future of music. You don’t have to worry about packaging or shipping, just about making music and money. Many bands put their songs on sale at iTunes, but you can also use TuneCore to get your singles on as many online music stores as possible.
Podcasts: We talked before about how podcasts can help writers get their work noticed. Podcasts are even more powerful for musicians, because they often target a specific musical genre with a built-in fan base. Some great sites include podshow.com and garageband.com.
The Rise Of The Independent Artist – A True Success Story
Let’s take the case of the British band, The Arctic Monkeys.
When they first started performing in 2003 they didn’t have a record contract, but were looking for a way to get their music distributed to as large a fan base as possible. So, they used their computer to burn demos of their songs onto blank compact disks.
They handed these disks out at their concerts. For economic reasons they couldn’t burn and give out thousands of CDs – but it turned out they didn’t have to.
Instead, their growth became organic, thanks to the Internet. Fans started putting the demos online – in file sharing chat rooms, and on social networking sites like MySpace.
This was not really the band’s doing. In fact, they told Prefix Magazine that they had not even heard of MySpace at the time, and had no idea that their fans had built a MySpace page dedicated to them.
Their popularity soon became so great that they were headlining concerts and festivals – even though they were an unsigned, independent band. The record industry noticed and it got to the point where they actually had to turn away record industry scouts from the guest lists of their concerts. Their Internet fame had record companies salivating to sign them.
What kept them from signing at this point was a concern that the record companies would try to control the content of their songs and their visions – so they held out.
Eventually they found exactly the deal they wanted – including a one million pound publishing deal with EMI – and the rights to have no interference with their creative process at all.
The album, when released, went to number one on the charts – despite the fact that there was nearly no music industry-related advertising or promotion for the band at all.
In other words, their independent status not only turned them into rock stars; they were able to build their entire fan base – and most of their profits – on the power of the Internet and independent marketing and promotion efforts.
All this for a band that the music industry wasn’t even slightly interested in before.
Television And Movies In The Age Of The Internet
The Internet revolution of the film and television industry began in 1999 with the release of the Blair Witch Project – which quickly became the most profitable film in history. Costing less than $30,000 to make, according to the Internet Movie Database, the film ended up taking in more than $240 million.
The exceptional thing was that nearly all of the movie’s promotion was done online and in other non-traditional mediums. The filmmakers built a site dedicated to the Blair Witch, which stirred up interest. They also put up cheap fliers on college campuses and created an entire mythos about the Blair Witch, all without the help of a major television or print advertising campaign.
Today, there are even more options for aspiring independent film makers who want to break into the industry, without having to deal with Hollywood politics.
YouTube is probably the best example of this new trend. Any filmmaker can upload clips of their movies – for free – and then track how popular they become. Your potential fan base can provide instant feedback on your films, and you can let yourself grow in the marketplace.
Just as importantly, success on YouTube has started to translate into financial success for many small filmmakers.
Take Brooke Brodack. In September of 2005, she started posting her independent film clips on YouTube. Her clips became popular, and in June 2006 she was signed to an 18-month development deal with both Carson Daly and NBC.
A great site for upcoming filmmakers is Revver.com. This site allows you to upload your own short films. The site then attaches advertising to your upload and splits the ad revenue with you. That means that more people watch your movies, the more money you can expect to make from the website. Best of all, they handle all of the accounting and promotion, so you simply need to produce and upload your clips to create a passive income.
What this means to the industry is clear. In the future, rather than studios and television networks developing ideas and talent in-house, they will be looking for potential viewers to identify the type of content and direction they want. This creates a unique opportunity for independent filmmakers to break into the industry and have their work discovered.
The Bottom Line
The point of this is that there is no reason at all for any artist to deal with publishing houses, movie studios or record companies. They not only steal your soul – they don’t pay you very well for the privilege.
If anything, the proper response to corporations that try to control and distribute art should be anger and frustration. They are acting under an old model that kept artists poor, while making themselves rich.
In fact, your best bet both financially and artistically may be to turn your back on them and bring your message straight to the masses.
The Internet allows you to reach a much larger fan base – and generate considerably higher profits for each copy of your work sold than the bigwigs in the industry will ever be able to offer.
The corporations live in the past – you want your art to be part of the future.
Break free of your chains and embrace freedom.
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