CHICAGO — Imagine you’re an organizer here at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Conference (AWP). Imagine you’ve scheduled a breakout session called “Shameless Book Promotion.” Imagine you put it in a room in which the fire marshal has determined no more than 150 people can fit.

Then imagine 350 people show up.

That was my head-count, and if anything I think I undercounted. Every seat was taken. Every spot of floor housed a squatter. The walls were lined three think with people standing. Why? Because all of these published authors, soon-to-be published authors, and would-be authors know cutbacks at publishers mean they can no longer properly promote books. And these 350 people want to make money off of their books.

A panel of four published authors — who blog on the topic at their Squad365 site — offered numerous tips so that self-promotion can help one “to make a life of this, to make enough dough to go on writing,” as novelist Marisha Chamberlain put it. Many ideas were old-school — reach out to your personal network, find established authors to write blurbs and reviews for you — and many ideas embraced the digital age, and even involved placing some of your work online for all to read for free.

But the goal of this promotion was to sell books, the oldest form of compensation in publishing, and still the only one of any substance.

At the Future of Music conference in D.C. Wednesday, a prominent Free Culture advocate was on the copyright panel at 2:20 pm. To her credit, she admitted that she was not a professional musician; actually, as far as I know, she differs from many of us in that she has never supported herself based on copyrights of works she produced. And a bit to my surprise, she actually told the audience that they should embrace the viewpoint of a tech blogger — who also to my knowledge has never supported himself through copyright — who advocates recording artists give away their works online and make money through touring and T-shirt sales.

According to a show of hands, about a third of today’s audience was a published author, let’s say there were 120 of them. How many of those authors could make a living doing readings? How many could sell T-shirts with their dust jackets reprinted on them? I’m going to hazard a guess and say zero.

I’ve had engaging conversations with dozens of authors, short-story writers and poets here. Some are doing better financially than others. Most have jobs other than writing. (When I was a freelance writer, I took on editing jobs to ensure steady income, because my writing income fluctuated ridiculously.) But EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM wanted to preserve the rights copyright gives them. THEY wanted to decide what should happen to the works they created out of their minds and their hearts. And they knew when they began writing those works that those rights would be there.

I can’t tell you how many writers said something along these lines to me: “Don’t these copyright opponents understand that writing is hard, and that what keeps me going every day as I stare at that blank screen is that, perhaps, others will be willing to pay me for the privilege of reading it?”

They want to get paid. They want to have a say in how they get paid, and who pays them. They want a say in the fate of their work. And all of us who enjoy reading their works should want that too.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 9:50 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under FTC, copyright law, counterfeit, economy, events, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.