13 - i do not dream of labor

For MicroBlogVember

I'm no economist or anything, but if I was somehow independently wealthy, would I have the moral imperative to start some kind of small business that would allow me to employ others and redistribute that wealth?

(Granted, this is still operating in some kind of capitalist worldview where I can only give people money if they Have Jobs or whatever, obviously I could just give people money in this hypothetical scenario where I had enough money to do that, or commission independent artists or something.)

I started having this thought a few years ago when I read some article about the salaries of Hollywood actors positing that it's not as if an individual is just straight up pocketing $5-million or what have you for starring in a movie, but that it's more like this is the funding for their whole team assisting them in being a hugely popular public face. They have stylists, nutritionists, agents, PR, et cetera; a big-name actor is more like a small business than an individual.

There's a certain "lone artist" appeal when it comes to writing, but it's not quite true either if you're going through a publishing house. My understanding in traditional publishing circles is that it's still expected that you'll sell everything through an agent who takes a flat 10-15% cut from anything you make, and writers don't exactly make a lot in the first place. You get an advance from the publisher depending on your marketability - it supposedly averages about $5000, but I've heard as low as $250 and as high as $150,000 (a huge outlier probably) - and then you get royalties off sales, which are a percentage of the book's list price (something like 5-10%). Except, you don't actually get royalties until you've "earned out" your advance and effectively fully paid it back through that 5-10% sales cut.

_{(Aside: I've casually spoken to multiple authors [including some Big Name ones like Scalzi] at cons and events who said they've specifically negotiated smaller advances in exchange for bigger royalty rates, and they universally said the publishers begged them afterwards to renegotiate lower rates)}

So, if you want to make any decent money writing (hahaha), you have to A) pump out a lot of material and B) have that material sell well. A is hard if you care about quality (while publishers at large often seem not to based on some of the shit out there, the gatekeepers will fuck you up), and B is hard unless you're a Mormon and can convince the entire population of Utah to buy your books sight unseen.

The self-pub market supposedly doesn't have to deal with that side of things, but that's a whole other can of worms. The Amazon marketplace is a hellscape of algorithmic recommendations and fickle customers, no matter what Dean Wesley Smith wants you to believe; LLMs have only made things worse. Can't say I actually know any of the intricacies, but I've heard plenty of horror stories. Supposedly, if you're not cranking out a new installment every 30 days, the Kindle Crowd will straight up just drop you for greener pastures.

Knowing some of how this all works in the West while also being an anime enthusiast has made me bizarrely fascinated by the Japanese media pipeline. It feels like every other popular anime is based on something from the self-publish website Shōsetsuka ni Narō that got picked up by a major publishing label and had a manga adaptation running for several years. The physical merch tends to lag behind a bit, but there's so much of it, in a way that no Western company would ever get off the ground so quickly.

Aside: An easy example - and yes I'm getting off track here (were we ever on track?), blame the ADHD - is G-Witch. You had the viral tweets about the Aerial corn snacks being stocked instead of the Aerial gunpla kits, and the official collab happened in mere weeks, which feels unthinkably fast to me.

I'm sure whatever goon putting more isekai trash on that website is only hoping they'll become the next Shield Hero or whatever, but I find it kind of weird to think about considering that codified pipeline. Many of these mangaka are perfectly good artists, and I wonder what they feel like having to break their backs drawing what often amounts to incel fantasy bullshit. How much money do these things actually make, from original web author to mangaka to print light novel publisher to anime director to PVC figure sculptor to English translator? The number of steps boggles the mind.

I suppose the dream of social media was (is?) the ability to go viral and get big as a solo act, not having to deal with (or more cynically, split the pot with) all of the people down the pipeline who facilitate getting creative work out in front of as many eyes as possible. What's kind of ended up happening instead is that the pipeline simply leverages social media to cut back on their marketing budget and just see what gets huge on its own (often, not always, via pure random chance) so they know what to put a bit of extra weight behind.

There's another prompt down the microblogvember list ("Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood", specifically) that's intimately connected with this concept, and only time will tell if I have anything insightful to say by that point (not to imply that anything I had to say here was insightful; maybe it was, maybe it wasn't). Take care out there folks.