Weekly Update: April 8 to 14

Weekly word count: 5876

Two days this week where life got the better of me, but I'm still pleased with the overall total and progress.  

I got my line edits for Judgment back on Friday and now it's a mad rush to get them sorted out so that I can get the final text in place for release day.

Sunday's ORWA meeting was great despite the horrible weather.  Eve Langlais did a great job at going through the different self-publishing platforms and what authors should consider when deciding whether to self-publish or go the traditional route.

There's a lot of discouraging news coming out of the publishing industry right now.  It's hard to separate out rumour from fact but it does seem like the subscription model has drastically affected purchasing patterns.  Add in the fact that it's also incredibly vulnerable to scammers and there's a lot to be concerned about.  

It's the same trend that the music industry went through.  When songs first started being digitized, there was rampant piracy and a sense of entitlement to "free" music.  People bought less and less music and it wasn't necessarily because they were downloading free stuff.  People might buy individual songs, but they didn't want to go to the expense of buying whole albums or the time-cost of going to the record store.  It became harder for new artists to become discovered and even top level artists had their income slashed.  Add in the subscription/streaming services, and it's become even harder on the artist level.  

I understand the desire to pay less as a customer.  Money doesn't stretch as far as it used to.  But I also see it from the artist's perspective.  If companies can't turn a profit from an artist's work (be it books, music, whatever) then they aren't going to invest in it.  That applies on the individual level as well.  If artists need to have day jobs to pay the bills, there's less time to create and fewer of them are going to go to the expense and challenge of creating good products.

Lots of people have expressed the idea that it's okay to demand cheap or free entertainment  because the big global corporations are making tons of money so it doesn't really hurt them.  Paying ten dollars for something when the company gets $9.90 can seem like supporting an exploitive system.  But regardless of how you feel about the industry, the artist could probably use that dime.