The Creator’s Dilemma
(draft) Impact or profit?
You're a creator in modern Western society. You create novels, paintings, songs, poems, screenplays, librettos or other things. You've just made your latest work, and you love it. Right away, almost automatically, you face the following dilemma:
- On the one hand, you would like your new work to find its way to the most humans it could please or influence.
- On the other, you'd like to make a living from this work.
See the dilemma? Open access vs paywalls, copyright, and digital rights management. Has the dilemma troubled you before?
The "normal" answer is to sell access to works like sticks of bubble gum, which then requires taking measures to make sure that any one instance of the work isn't replicated endlessly for free, or otherwise copied.
In 2013 I posted this video explaining the dilemma:
Creative Industries. Lewis Hyde's The Gift, then Common as Air.
Hyde convinced me that artists are gift-ed, and that their gift is for the world. Yes.
Some creators don't want compensation. They're writing because they're compelled to, or because they're expressing beauty, anguish, or the overwhelming emotion of the moment. Emily Dickinson didn't expect to become famous for her poems.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.