Art PACT: Paying freelancers in exposure

[Radiating Gnome]

It's an interesting question from the business side of the fence -- I think that a serious business that contracts for content should pay for it, certainly.

But as long as there are people willing to write for free (or for "exposure", or access, or whatever else they see as worth the effort) there will be sites/companies that take advantage of that. And I'm not 100% sure that it's always wrong to do that -- I'd be a lot happier if promises of exposure didn't come off so much like snake oil, but the idea of putting your work in front of an audience you couldn't reach otherwise is not always a bad idea

The old fiction-writing marketplace has always had a sort of exposure-driven engine for new writers. You sent out your short stories to journal after journal hoping to find an editor who would find something interesting in it; when they finally picked a story and published it, you'd be "paid" in copies of the journal -- maybe two or four if you were lucky. Actually getting paid for a short story was something that you worked your way up to, through years of being published in smaller journals. If you held out for paid publications, you'd likely never get anywhere. Most of the small literary journals that don't pay are flooded with submissions for each issue -- if you insist on money, they can pick someone else's story pretty easily. And most of those journals aren't making anyone money, either, so it's no surprise there isn't much to spread around to the writers.

Today, of course, it's a little different, thanks to the explosion of easy self-publishing solutions, but still, most literary journals don't pay for stories. More commercial/genre magazines do, but it's not much, and certainly not usually anything like fair pay for the time you put into writing it.

Each type of expression/art has it's own realities and challenges, of course. For "literary" writers, making a living as a writer is only possible for a tiny minority of truly lucky or gifted writers; the rest teach or do anything else to pay the bills. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.

So, smarmy-exposure pitches aside (they're always creepy and wrong), I don't think there's a one-size fits all answer. Each market, each situation is different.

-rg

 

[Janx]

Another variable to this is that the people willing to work for free are damaging the pricing for professionals.

A business who can connive young talent into working for free is forcing experienced professionals to lower their rate to try to reclaim business.

Now if it was just two artists competing for a job by lowering their expenses and bidding lower than each other, that might be healthy economics.

Unfortunately, when the concept of Working For Exposure comes up, that's not what happens to the market place.

Instead, 20 candidates show up to get the free gig. All of them are inexperienced. Only 2 of them are actually talented as the professionals who snubbed the "opportunity". The rest are untalented.

The business can't tell them apart, so has a 1 in 10 chance of getting a gem for free. Otherwise, they get whatever they get. it might be "good enough" which translates into lowering the standards of quality for the industry as well as lowering the compensation value for gigs overall.

The net result of Exposure jobs is they hurt the industry as it lowers prices such that professionals can't make a living at it as businesses all take on the WFE model. The market gets flooded by lower talent attention seekers who might be "just good enough" but would have never scored a paid gig had the business been forced by market pressure to comply with.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Janx said it. I have the same objection to unpaid internships. Anytime a business can get someone to do a job for them for free, that means someone who (probably) needs to be paid for that job isn't being paid.

 

[Henry]

Speaking completely as someone not in publishing of any sort, as long as both parties understand that work for free is work for free, then what's the wrongdoing? Maybe there's a level of implied duplicity I'm missing here, because I don't see how anyone could mistake unpaid work plus the experience garnered by doing so as anything else but that. Like you said, Russ, you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor et venditor, and all that jazz. Fanzines have run this way for many, many years.

 

[Morrus]

Speaking completely as someone not in publishing of any sort, as long as both parties understand that work for free is work for free, then what's the wrongdoing? Maybe there's a level of implied duplicity I'm missing here, because I don't see how anyone could mistake unpaid work plus the experience garnered by doing so as anything else but that. Like you said, Russ, you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor et venditor, and all that jazz. Fanzines have run this way for many, many years.

The implied duplicity is a part of it. But I certainly wouldn't want to claim that everybody offering such work is being duplicitous; certainly not. But I will argue that the tendency is to overstate (or even over-estimate themselves) the actual exposure. It's usually couched in terms of "10,000 people download this free ezine!"; but that's not exposure. Exposure is putting your work in front of an interested art director - an art show is exposure.

So we have two things going on:

1) Small publishers overestimating the value of the 'exposure' they're offering; 10K downloads of an ezine is not exposure. I know; I used to produce ezines that - in the early d20 days - would get in excess of 25k downloads. Remember Asgard?

2) Beginning artists not understanding the value of their own time and craft, and thus accepting these jobs instead of requiring payment.

The answer is education. ART Pact and the like are trying to do that, but it's clearly a big job.

Now, there's another side to it. You're right in that there's *nothing wrong* with groups of volunteers (including publisher, artists, writers, editors) teaming up and doing fan stuff for free and releasing it. That's *awesome*. Those people are super cool, and super generous.

So it's important to distinguish between volunteers who are volunteering their time and effort for the love of it and freelancers who are being offered jobs which 'pay' only in exposure. They're not the same things, and it's certainly important to realise that.

 

[Janx]

Speaking completely as someone not in publishing of any sort, as long as both parties understand that work for free is work for free, then what's the wrongdoing? Maybe there's a level of implied duplicity I'm missing here, because I don't see how anyone could mistake unpaid work plus the experience garnered by doing so as anything else but that. Like you said, Russ, you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor et venditor, and all that jazz. Fanzines have run this way for many, many years.

And I'm also considering other industries than RPG fanzine publishing.

live music (bars, small venues, etc) has been hurt by Pay to Play and Free Exposure as every upstart tries to build their following instead of making a living.

There's already been court cases over interns not getting paid on certain movies, despite working their arse off.

The problem is from 2 vectors. Businesses looking to skimp and try to get free what they should have paid for and hobbyists with no need for the income or desperate newcomers willing to undercut their industry in order to get the job.

fanzines are likely not even on the radar of the problem.

 

[Klaus]

With the internet readily available, "exposure" is no longer a valid excuse for not paying anyone. Any artist can get "exposure" by putting together an online gallery and posting links on Facebook, Twitter and G+. Writers can come up with short stories, designers can put together small PDFs, etc, and gain as much exposure as a small publisher is likely to grant.

Most starting artists/writers/designers seem to have a hard time equating what they do (passionately) with an actual paying job. But that is what it is, a job, and however little, an creative deserves to be paid for it. Of course, they can do stuff for free (as portfolio pieces, for instance), but it's *their choice*. Plus, such pieces can then be used to generate income by selling prints, t-shirts, laptop skins, etc, in online stores like Society6 (shameless plug: check my sig!).

Finally, EN Publishing's professional respect is part of why I still work for them. The other part is [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] 's fabulous accent!

 

[Ace]

Unless your product is free or at cost isn't ethical or a good practice. As noted it drives wages down for professionals and in a broader sense, hurts the market.

Wages are consumption and poorly paid people buy and can pay less for what they do buy. In the end it might help your bottom line now but in the long run it makes everyone in the art community poorer. It may also dry up the pool for professional too.

I do think a serious decline in artists wages was inevitable. Speaking only for the US had we stuck to the original 28 year, well 14 years with one extension for art as we were supposed to (pre Disney corporate meddling) we would have had an enormous commons dating back to 1985 or so and todays publishers would have larded up the products with art from the 1980's instead of the 1880's . Since the art is mostly very good , it would have been plenty good for most works.

Also with the Internet and places like Deviant Art its very easy to find an artist and with wage differentials or just the desire for a hobbyist to make a few bucks even decent quality art can be had cheaply if not free. There are a lot more people with talent than gigs for them. This means the quirky homemade art of the 1970' say (like the old Dragons or DMG) is more an aesthetic choice than one born of necessity.

As unfortunate as it is for all artists, including writers like myself in any but the most physical media, there is so much art its virtually post scarcity. This means wages for most are a lot lower. Alas food and shelter cannot be CTRL-C, CTRL-P and that leaves a lot of talent hurting.

In the long run I have no idea where this will lead but in the sort run, its good for everyone to be generous if they can or at least ethical.

 

[Scorpio616]

[I'll admit that I did it over a decade ago back when ENP was Natural 20 Press and we produced our ezines, but I hope I've learned since)

Have you tracked them down and paid them fair compensation since?

 

[schrodingersgoldfish]

I've seen surprisingly little talk about supply and demand so far. I am not in the industry, but I personally have too many friends that would like to make their art their living for the need I see. Art is only your job if.....well, it's actually your job. Is the market just too saturated?