{"id":5265,"date":"2014-04-22T10:26:50","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T18:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5265"},"modified":"2014-04-22T10:26:50","modified_gmt":"2014-04-22T18:26:50","slug":"free-books-inverse-power-laws-new-paradigm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/22\/free-books-inverse-power-laws-new-paradigm\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Books, Inverse Power Laws, New Paradigm"},"content":{"rendered":"

I made a new \u201cFree Books<\/a>\u201d\u009d page with links to five of my books that are in free Creative Commons licensed ebook editions, plus five more books that can be read for free online, either as webpages or as PDF files. Ten free books! Go get \u201d\u02dcem.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As I say on that page, I release free editions of my books for several reasons. One is to keep the books alive and in circulation far into the future. A second reason is to allow those unfamiliar with my work to sample it for free. A third reason is to allow open access to my books for research and teaching. A fourth reason is that giving away books builds an author\u2019s \u201cname brand\u201d\u009d and may ultimately bring in book sales, speaking engagements, and commissioned story gigs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We\u2019re seeing a new paradigm for how creative artists support themselves. I\u2019m thinking about writers in particular, but some of this applies to musicians, painters, photographers, film-makers and other kinds of artists as well. I\u2019m thinking in particular of the writers and so on who aren\u2019t in the tiny top one-percent of their field. There will always be money at the top\u2014but surprisingly little on the bottom. The \u201clong tail\u201d\u009d doesn\u2019t do artists much good once the tail is only a hairs-breadth above the zero axis.<\/p>\n

This phenomenon has to do with the pestiferous inverse-power-law curve, also known as the scaling law. if you\u2019re the hundredth-most popular writer, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand bucks. Or maybe just a thousand (the law may have a scaling exponent). That\u2019s how nature is. It\u2019s not anyone\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The scaling law applies across the board\u2014to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books. The Nth biggest one racks up something like 1 over N as much as the number-one biggest dpes. Or there can be a scaling exponent, and maybe the Nth-ranking person only gets 1 \/ (N-squared) as much. It\u2019s a natural phenomenon, and you can\u2019t exactly be mad about it. Instead you have to deal with it. <\/p>\n

I go into this in some detail is section \u201c5.3 Commercial and Gnarly Aesthetics<\/a>\u201d\u009d of my nonfiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul\u2014here\u2019s a link to that section of the book, which is currently living online as a huge PDF file. And shown below is a graph, with explanation, having to do with various ways in which author advances might be skewed.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[Drawing by Isabel Rucker for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/em>. Caption for this figure is copied below.]<\/p>\n

The curve shows the inverse power law Advance = $1,000,000\/ Rank. The double lightning bolt indicates where I had to leave out six or seven miles of space so as to fit in the point marking where the most popular writer gets a million bucks. Despite this big spike, the total area under the curve between one and one thousand is only about six million, which represents the total in book advances that society hands out to the top thousand writers. The two straight lines show a couple of options for how a central committee might allocate six million dollars to a thousand writers in a \u201cmore equitable\u201d\u009d fashion. The horizontal line depicts the possibility of giving each writer a flat six thousand dollars, irregardless of popularity. And the sloping line shows the option where the most popular writer gets $l0,000 and the thousandth most popular writer gets $2,000.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Why is <\/em>nature filled with inverse power laws, also called scaling laws? Oddly enough there doesn\u2019t seem to be any really clear explanation\u2014I\u2019ve seen attempts, but none of them quite add up. My personal opinion is that the explanation has something to do with the fact that natural processes are, as Wolfram has it, universal computations\u2026you can see my conjecture to this effect buried in the text of my Lifebox <\/em>tome here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So what-frikkin-ever<\/em>, that\u2019s the computation-theoretic underpinnings of why artists have it hard. The practice is that, in order to make it, it helps to have patrons, whales, special gigs. Kickstarter is part of the answer here\u2014asking your fanbase to directly support you and, yes, fishing for a few deep-pocketed whales in the fanbase.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And having the name recognition can impel people to ask you to give talks, or do some kind of consultation. Early on I might have been so flattered that I didn\u2019t ask for money when some business was asking me to give a talk or a reading to their employees. \u201cYou\u2019ll make it up in increased books sales,\u201d\u009d was the belief. But now it\u2019s backwards. Your income from book sales is in the toilet, and it\u2019s gonna be staying there for the foreseeable future. So you ask the businesses to pay you to speak.<\/p>\n

But what if the people inviting you say, \u201cOh, we don\u2019t do that.\u201d\u009d That can be tough. If it\u2019s something like a small SF gathering, and they clearly don\u2019t have money, then there\u2019s no use pushing. But schools will pay, and businesses can pay. Always ask. If people with serious money want to stonewall me, there\u2019s the building-the-brand and egoboo temptation to knuckle under and speak anyway. But I\u2019m doing that less than I used to. I get a bad feeling when I knuckle under to a fat cat. They gotta give me something<\/em>, even if they want to call it \u201ctravel expenses\u201d\u009d instead of \u201chonorarium.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The street performers in Manhattan pass the hat, of course, and to make sure you don\u2019t melt away, they pass the hat just before their best and final trick. I\u2019ve never actually been in a position of literally <\/em>passing a hat after a talk. Sometimes you do it indirectly, like in a book store where people are supposed to buy your book, or at a more informal gathering where you try and sell some of your books directly from the podium, books that you brought in the trunk of your beat-up traveling-snake-oil-salesperson or country-musician-type car.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But on my new \u201cFree Books<\/a>\u201d\u009d page I am, for about the first time, electronically passing the hat, that is, I put a \u201cMake a Donation\u201d\u009d button the page.<\/p>\n

In the same vein, I\u2019ll be launching a Kickstarter for my next project on May 1. It’ll be called “Transreal Trilogy + All the Visions.” But that’s another story. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rucktronics, Inc., marches into the future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I made a new \u201cFree Books\u201d\u009d page with links to five of my books that are in free Creative Commons licensed ebook editions, plus five more books that can be read for free online, either as webpages or as PDF files. Ten free books! Go get \u201d\u02dcem. As I say on that page, I release […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5265"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5272,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5265\/revisions\/5272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}