Things that are a high priority
in our lives are the things we spend money on
or give money to; things that aren’t, we don’t.
Neopagan Authors, Fame, and
Fortune
Most readers have only the vaguest ideas of how authors earn
our livings, often assuming that we published ones are all wealthy.
They get these ideas in part from news stories about “best
selling” authors getting huge book advances and/or selling
movie rights for millions of (US) dollars;
unaware that only one writer in ten-thousand ever sees more from
her or his writing than the original book advance of a few hundred
or a few thousand (US) dollars.
My best known book, Real
Magic, has been in and out of print for thirty years,
generating a trickle of royalties three years out of five. Yet
with roughly 250,000 copies sold around the world, in three languages
that I know of (English, Dutch & Russian), my total direct
income from the book during those thirty years has been less
than US$25,000 — or about ten
cents per copy. How many Westerners could live on US$800
per year?
Even the most famous and best selling authors at Llewellyn
and Weiser/Red Wheel barely make ends meet financially, despite
being “household names” in thousands of Pagan and occult
households. The biggest of our Big Name Pagans is only a micro-celebrity
by mainstream standards and very far from sufficient fame to
generate much of an income “just for being famous.”
Another source of the myth that published authors are rich
is the fact that, for centuries, only those who were wealthy
(or subsidized in some other fashion) could afford to
spend their time writing. This has been true even throughout
the last several decades. I remember being told often during
the 1970’s by my friend Randall Garrett, author of the wonderful
Lord Darcy novels, that the three things a writer
most needed were, “A tweed suit, a briar pipe, and a spouse
with a steady income!” The situation has not changed since
then.
“Ah, but what about those huge speaking fees authors
get?” I hear someone asking. Steven King, Danielle Steele,
or New Age superstars may receive thousands of (US)
dollars for speeches or seminars, but lesser known authors receive
much smaller fees (for mine, see my Fees
page). The reason you see so many Pagan and other authors dragging
books to festivals, or doing psychic readings there, is because
the usual Neopagan festival or speaking event pays far less than
the author would have earned staying home and cranking out a
few more pages (or going to their day job). So the little bit
of extra income from selling books or giving readings can make
a big difference. Without them, at the end of most festival seasons,
Neopagan authors and speakers usually find ourselves having spent
or otherwise lost far more money than we’ve
received. “But you have so much fun going to festivals all
the time,” you say. Well, the first two or three festivals
in a year can be fun, but doing ten or fifteen is work!
Some of the reasons why Neopagan authors and speakers make
so little money at their careers are rooted in the “poverty
consciousness” so popular in the Neopagan community. This
is the attitude that poverty (at least for others) is morally
superior to wealth or even sufficiency, and is, of course, another
leftover from the hippy era (and another typical example of dualistic thinking).
After all, if we Big Nosed Pagans started earning as much money
as our audience members, we might get corrupted!
Other reasons have to do with the basic anti-intellectualism
of American, English, and Australian culture. After all, a speaker
is “just talking,” and “anybody” can do that!
The idea that printed or spoken words could have any real
monetary value is alien to most people, in large part because
they do not perceive the years of effort that go into learning
the craft of writing and speaking well, or the hours of painful
sweat that can go into writing a single chapter or one-hour speech.
So why do Neopagan creators keep writing and speaking? For
most of us, it’s because we love our deities, our planet,
and our communities enough to live at a lifestyle level far lower
than we could earn otherwise if we were, for example, holding
down the kinds of blue-collar and white-collar jobs that most
Neopagans have. Many Neopagan clergy who aren’t writers,
teachers, or musicians make the same decisions, literally sacrificing
comfort and financial security for their vocation.
Members of most mainstream religious communities, whether
rich or poor, would be deeply ashamed if their clergy were significantly
poorer than the average member of their congregations. I can’t
imagine the average Baptist, Lutheran, Jew, Catholic, or Buddhist
going to their minister’s/rabbi’s/priest’s house
to find an empty pantry, children wearing sweaters because the
heat has been turned off, or a dead vehicle in the driveway,
shrugging their shoulders and going home without taking action
of some sort. Yet I’ve seen Neopagans do just that. The
fact that many mainstream religions abuse their fundraising process
is all the excuse that many Neopagans need to ignore the fact
that our own clergy can’t even pay their mortgages or buy
groceries, let alone go around wearing furs or driving BMWs like
televangelists. This begins to get us into the larger issue of
clergy abuse, however, so I’ll go back to the topic of authors
and speakers.
The Free Information Movement
Over the last few years, I’ve read articles in magazines
and online about the “freeware” and “shareware”
movements among computer software writers, as well as the arguments
pro-and-con concerning the downloading of music and video files
on the Net. There are now major controversies over the very concepts
of “copyrights” and “intellectual property,”
with creative artists, consumers, and corporations taking different
and often strident positions.
“Shareware,” for those of you new to the Net, refers
to computer programs that one can download and try out before
buying. The assumption is that users who like the software will
be willing to pay what they, or the software authors, consider
“a fair price” (or a small donation to a worthy nonprofit
cause), which is usually much lower than equivalent commercially
produced and distributed software would cost. Shareware originally
worked on an “honor system,” and some still does. “Freeware”
refers to programs that are put out on the Net with no return
expected, other than perhaps postcards, user feedback, and opportunities
for programmers to improve their skills and earn reputations
with which they can later build professional careers.
Freeware authors generally had and have no complaints about
a lack of money for their efforts, and I suspect that most were
and are subsidized in some fashion, by their parents, schools
or employers. Shareware authors, however, quickly learned that
honor systems didn’t generate much income, perhaps because
individuals have such varying ways to define “honor.”
So they gradually began to offer multiple versions of their shareware,
with additional functions, documentation, or technical support
requiring users to pay varying fees (I don’t know if they
got this idea from commercial software publishers or vice versa).
Based on the concepts of freeware and shareware, as well as
political and philosophical theories (such as those of Richard
Stallman) of free information exchange, some people on the
Net began to say that all information should be freely
available, including digitized audio and video information —
hence the controversies over the online trading of copyrighted
music and video files. These mirrored in many ways the arguments
about photocopying of books and periodicals in the 1980’s
and 1990’s. Publishers weren’t too thrilled about the
invention of the photocopy machine back then, while students,
researchers and collectors were delighted. Similarly, cassette
and video taping technology were controversial, at least until
the music and film industries figured out how to make money through
using them. It’s been suggested that the music industry
and its big name performers will stop fighting audio file sharing
technology as soon as they find a way to make significant money
from it.
Left out of most of these controversies, at least once they
were “settled,” were the non-superstar creators whose
books, songs, and performances were copied by individuals, without
a penny going to those creators. Some creators weren’t bothered
at all, considering unpaid copies to be free advertising and
promotion that could build a following. Others felt that while
they weren’t making any money, at least their out-of-print
works were still reaching an audience (as I did during the years
when Authentic
Thaumaturgy was available only in photocopies).
I strongly suspect, however, that most of us felt just a little
bit “ripped-off” each time someone copied our work
because they were simply too stingy to buy it. (As distinct
from being genuinely poor — something the vast majority
of Americans have no knowledge of compared to people elsewhere
in the world). That quarter of a dollar/pound/euro of income
lost per book, or half that per tape, isn’t much perhaps,
but multiply it by hundreds or thousands of readers/users and
it begins to have a real impact on a creator’s life. That
missing money could have paid for new research materials, new
instruments, classes to gain new skills, travel to gain new insights,
or simply blessed time to think and create. For us “minor”
authors, artists, speakers, and performers, tiny losses add up
over time to big setbacks, some of which kill careers and all
of which limit the amount of work we accomplish over the course
of our lifetimes.
Getting back to philosophy for a moment (away from that messy
“real world” stuff), it seems to me that many of the
ideas now being discussed about freedom of information contain
some (deliberate?) confusion between the different kinds
of information that exist, some of which (a) should be openly
available to all, and some of which (b) needn’t be or even
(c) shouldn’t be. As examples of just these three categories
(of the dozen or so categories that could be delineated), I would
offer (a) basic scientific or historical information, or evidence
of corporate or governmental or military crimes, (b) medical
techniques, plumbing methods, poetry, fiction, or personal memoirs,
and (c) instructions on making weapons of mass destruction. Remember,
“all or nothing” arguments are rooted in dualism, not
the real world. The fact that subtle distinctions may need to
be made between differing kinds of information and audience does
not justify tossing those distinctions out of your philosophy
because they’d require work to define and teach, or worse
yet might cost you some money if you accepted them.
Putting the Theories to a Test
At one point, a reader and I were discussing the Freenet
and its system of decentralized, distributed file storage on
the Net. That system essentially makes it impossible to ever
suppress information once it’s been uploaded. Unfortunately,
it also makes it impossible to ever enforce a copyright or patent
anywhere in the world. As an author, this means that any of my
work on the Freenet would never go “out-of-print,”
and I would never again have to deal with a publisher’s
commercial judgements in order to get my thoughts shared with
the world. It also means that anyone can plagiarize me and I
have no recourse. And, oh yes, I would probably never see a penny
of payment for my works, no matter how many people downloaded
and used them, and no matter how much effort it had taken me
to produce them. (When I first published this essay, it also
meant that anyone could impersonate me and publish items under
my name, but this has since been partially addressed with private
“namespaces” on the Freenet.)
As I told the reader I mentioned earlier, “Letting the
authors get ripped off by readers instead of by publishers isn’t
much of an improvement. From what I know of the Freenet idea
so far, it provides no financial incentive at all for writers
to write, and thus is a backward step to the days when only the
idle wealthy could afford to write.”
To which he replied, “I have optimism and faith in humanity.
People will give you $1 when they read an essay (I would). Of
course, it’s my faith in humanity that gets me in trouble…”
So I decided to take his suggestions and give them a try. In
early October of 2000 c.e., I gave visitors to my website the
option to click a graphic and donate small sums of money to me,
assuming that they had found something on my site that they thought
was worth that amount to them. This required them to have an
account with the PayPal
system, but the account set-up process takes very little time
and they could always snailmail me a small sum if they preferred.
With over 1,500 visitors to my site daily in October (200+ visitors
daily after Halloween) that year, even a one percent response
rate would have generated more than enough income to justify
setting the system up.
How well did it work? From October of 2000 to September of
2001, my website received over 200,000 visitors. The overall
response ratio during the first year was something like 0.05%
or five-hundreths of one percent (one donation per 2,000+ visits),
with an average donation of less than $5 (with a couple of shining
exceptions). During that time, my website generated a little
over US$80 per month of income from direct donations and Amazon
referrals. This was about enough to pay my hosting and net access
costs, but certainly not enough to let me spend the many hours
I would have liked to devote (and have in the past) to researching,
writing, and adding new material while keeping the older contents
current. Since my self-employment efforts from web design and
freelance book editing yielded (and still yield) an income putting
me well below the official “poverty line,” you can
see how this was less than satisfactory — but it got much
worse.
Donations to my website after September 11, 2001 dwindled
to nearly nothing. Various nonprofit organizations noticed the
same pattern and have attributed it to people giving most of
their spare money to the disaster-related charities. While the
organizations collecting funds for the victims certainly deserved
all the help they got, this loss of funding to other worthy causes
had a devastating effect on the entire nonprofit sector of our
economy. The effect was worsened when Bush’s trillion dollar
giveaway to his rich friends combined with the economic fallout
from 9/11 to put the American economy into a tailspin. Website
income in the time since 9/11 dwindled to an average of US$35 per month. With over 35,000 visitors
to my special Halloween pages in 2002, all of 13 people made
donations, for a response rate of one donation per 3,500 visits!
Somehow I doubt that all 35,000 visitors that month were welfare
mothers or street people… In 2007, over 100,000 visiters
came to read my Halloween pages, less than a dozen donated anything
at all.
Obviously there are some unseen holes in anti-copyright theory.
Most modern people now use money as the rock-bottom measure of
all value. Things that are a high priority in our lives are
the things we spend money on or give money to; things that aren’t,
we don’t. I’ve often suggested that we could build
or buy Neopagan temples in every city in the U.S. and Canada,
for example, if we simply collected one piece of silver jewelry
from every Neopagan at every festival for one year. This is in
keeping with my suggestion that the magpie (“Oh look—shiny
stuff!”) is the right totem animal for the entire movement.
The very same people who “can’t afford”
to donate to a Neopagan temple, community center, website, or
other organization on a regular basis have no problem finding
the money to buy science fiction books, videotapes, DVDs, game
cartridges, music CDs, comics, beer, pizza, cigarettes, movie
tickets, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, crystals, robes, capes,
etc. This is not a pattern unique to Neopaganism — almost
every nonprofit organization or movement tells the same tale.
People in the West generally have money for those things that
bring comfort, pleasure, and ego-gratification. Everything else
has to wait in line and hope for the best.
The Impact on Neopagan Creatives
and Other Leaders
We Neopagans like to think of ourselves as smarter, more creative,
and more complex than those who belong to more conservative religions,
and by and large most of us are (another un-P.C. fact). Multi-model
theories, pluralism, ambiguity, and polytheology are not easy
for most Westerners to grasp, which is yet another reason why
we frighten Fundamentalists of all persuasions. But the dualism
which underlies mainstream Western culture still influences our
daily thinking and feeling patterns. As I often say, Christian
Dualism is the invisible water we fish swim in. We still
fall into habits based on the fantasy that matter and spirit
are separate, and that creative and spiritual activities happen
in a different universe than rent checks, car payments, and grocery
bills. So “obviously” creative and spiritual people
“don’t need” money to survive — or certainly
not as much as we need new toys!
I’m not the only Neopagan leader or author to notice
all this. Fritz Jung, who with his partner Wren Walker runs witchvox.com,
spoke about this in an essay called “Community
Support, Does it Exist?” a few years ago. As he said
in a 2000 update, “Not much has changed… We all still
struggle to find the cash to do this kind of work. As predicted,
several good folks that used to do this work, simply went away.”
I remember back in the 1980s, I burned out on the poverty
experience and dropped out of the community for several years
to earn my living doing secular work — years in which I
wrote no books, did no teaching, wrote no songs, and led no public
rituals. If I die tomorrow, those years will have represented
a quarter of my career lost to the community. Now multiply my
experience by the scores of other Neopagan creatives struggling
to survive in an unsupportive environment!
(Goddess! A few years ago one of the founders of the entire
Neopagan movement in America was living homeless on the streets
in the Southwest. If he hadn’t been literally stumbled over
by a good Wiccan woman and taken care of by her, he would have
died hungry, alone, and unnoticed.)
Also on the witchvox.com site is an essay by author Maggie
(Benson) Shayne called, “Writers,
Farmers, Witches and Copyright”, in which she focuses
on the casual plagiarism that so many Neopagans engage in, saying,
“I would like to see the Pagan community take a stand against
the wanton abuse of its own best and brightest.”
Prolific Neopagan author Patricia Telesco wrote me:
“It amazes me that people forget we work for every cent
we get in royalties. They don’t see us in front of our computers
or scouring over research books for upward of 500 hours to write
just 200 pages of text. They’re not in our kitchen when
we blurily make coffee after being up late so we can write when
the little ones don’t want fruit snacks or a story. Our
families, friends, and co-workers often give up a great deal
of time with us just so we can persue this passion — and
give something lasting to the community. … The bottom line
comes down to serving those that serve before we lose our teachers,
our leaders, and our elders to burn out. If we value their wisdom
and insights, we will begin to share the load.”
Sisters and brothers, your authors, musicians, speakers, webmasters,
organizers, and clergy can not live on blessings and goodwill
alone. Try to remember that no matter how bad the economy
seems to you, it’s worse for most of your community’s
creative artists and clergy. Please buy our books,
tapes, CDs, and videos instead of stealing copies. Give money
to those groups and websites who provide valuable services to
your community. Go to your high priestess’ house and do
her dishes once in a while, bring her some healthy food, watch
her kids for an evening, or in some other fashion give her the
gift of free time. Go mow your Senior Druid’s lawn, or weed
his garden, or fix his car. If you are lucky enough to live near
an author or artist, go help them with their housework or slip
some cash under their keyboard. Gifts of artwork or magical tools
are lovely, and usually appreciated, but they can’t buy
groceries and most Neopagan leaders already have all the “pretty
stuff” they need. Finally, it never hurts to remember your
community leaders and creatives in your prayers and prosperity
spells — after you’ve acted in the physical world,
that is!
People who can afford toys for themselves can afford
to donate survival money to others.
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