For love or money. re: the "pay me for my WIP" wank
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| Title: | For love or money. re: the "pay me for my WIP" wank |
| Creator: | sydni-64 |
| Date(s): | August 11, 2005 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | For love or money. re: the "pay me for my WIP" wank, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
For love or money. re: the "pay me for my WIP" wank is a 2005 essay by sydni-64.
The post was in direct response to the controversy regarding cousinjean who'd recently solicited money so that she could take a year off of her paid employment and write Buffy fanfic instead.
Excerpt from the Post
What struck me most about cousinjean's original post, though, is that she actually suggests that anyone who has ever enjoyed her work already owes her a monetary debt. She asks that anyone who has read and enjoyed her work PayPal her the cost of a hardback novel. "So here's my proposal," she writes, "if every reader who has read and enjoyed my fan fiction over the years will donate the amount that they would expect to pay for a hardback novel (and I've written the equivalent of several novels in the course of my fanfic career), then I will be able to take a year off to write full time."(the rest of the original post is over at fandom_wank, as well).
The questionable legality of this aside, it seems awfully cynical to imply that any reader who enjoys your work and fails to give you money for it is somehow failing to give you your due. Fandom is a community that depends on a spirit of sharing and generosity to survive. When I read and enjoy an author's work, I feel that I ought to let them know that, and that I have a positive duty to do so. But that is just about where duty ends, although this doesn't mean that I won't feel moved to do other things, like recommend their fic to others, encourage them with more thorough feedback, etc.
When we get involved in fandom, it's largely so that we can surround ourselves with other people who love a source material so much that they are moved to use their time, energy, and resources to do creative works inspired by it, engage in meta about it, or just plain be fannish about it (there's a reason it's not called being "mercenaryish"). So when a fanwriter all of a sudden declares that she hasn't gotten enough out of her involvement in fandom, that she needs money, too, it seems like a betrayal. One of the things mundanes find so incomprehensible about us is that we don't do it for the money--we do it for the love of a source text. If we lose that, we're hardly even fen anymore. I know if someone in one of my fandoms made such a statement, I would feel like I had been sharing my fandom with a wolf in sheep's clothing.
On the other hand, perhaps cousinjean's post was not so different from what we hear in a public television fund drive: "You enjoy our programming all year, and if you want to keep enjoying it, you had better pledge generously, and soon." And public tv does make appeals to feelings of "community" in order to legitimize those requests. But there's a disanalogy there, because in the case of public television, there truly is one community resource that we may all wish to preserve through financial support. Fanfiction, for the most part, is not like that. Any number of fanfic writers give their time and energy in order to pursue the hobby and make it available to their fellow fen.
The biggest problem with cousinjean's post, to my mind, is the arrogance of it. She seems to think that her readers owe her money, but she does not seem to generalize that to other fanwriters and readers. I wonder how much, by her calculation, she would have to pay out in order to give all the fanwriters whose work she's ever enjoyed their due.
I do get that people have times of financial hardship (believe you me, I get it), but the way her post was phrased was likely offensive and hurtful to her readers who probably thought they'd been supporting her already, with feedback, kind words, and possibly their friendship.
Excerpts from the Comments
[elmyraemilie ]:When we get involved in fandom, it's largely so that we can surround ourselves with other people who love a source material so much that they are moved to use their time, energy, and resources to do creative works inspired by it, engage in meta about it, or just plain be fannish about it (there's a reason it's not called being "mercenaryish").
There. You finally said what I have tried and tried to put into words. Though many of us are writers, artists, betas, web designers and so on, at its source fandom is not about production; it's about consumption of a thing we adore unreasonably, and the desire to find others who can identify with the need to watch one amazing episode of a TV show over and over again.
[nitebird]: Eeek! I can't decide if I want to venture over there to read her original post or not. She feels that fellow fans owe her! As you said amd much better than I, I like to send feedback and encouragment when I can. I mostly send out short notes telling the writer I enjoyed their work. I have never felt I owed someone the cost of a hard back novel for enjoying their fic. Legal issues aside, when your are writing fan fic you are using a set of variables some what configured for you. That does not equate to establishing your own world.
[ivy03]:I find it so interesting how quickly and completely cousinjean has been censured for violating the unspoken rules of fandom. We may look like a docile lot, but woe be the fan who stirs us to anger.
... this reminds me of an article in a sociology book at the office here. It was on mechanisms for social regulation in the online world. In this case, it was written in the 90's, so it was about a chat room. It was talking about the fact that, while many of the normal social conventions do not apply (or can not be applied) to online culture, there are still mechanisms by which members of the culture reprimand those who have transgressed. It was kind of interesting, proving that online culture is really no different than any other social group. It has its rules, spoken and unspoken, and it has mechanisms to ensure that everyone plays within those rules.