Notes from the Void: The Art of Monetization of Art

  About ten years ago one of the smaller networks tried a fan promotional incentive. They would pay fans to write sponsored pieces about their shows and the fans would post them on social media and personal blogs to get the word out. Using the fan base writers made a lot of sense. Fans of the shows selling the shows?  It’s a win/win, right? At the time I was writing for a Supernatural fan site, and I also started writing for a general tv fan site. That fan site was really interesting in that it was fairly known and I had access to conference calls with some actors. This was before Zoom, and they weren’t private calls— I was on the line with other people writing for other fan sites, but it was still really cool. I got to be on a call with Sam Witwer back when he was on Being Human (US), and *gasp* Christian Slater, when he was promoting Breaking In. What I really remember about the Christian Slater phone call was that one of the guys from another fan site was fan boying hard core about Christian because he was such a huge fan of the movie Pump Up the Volume.

Ah, Pump Up the Volume.  I don’t think I’ve seen that movie since I snuck in to see it at the Calvin back when it came out. It was dollar Wednesday night (yes, I know. I’m old), and I paid—that isn’t what I meant by snuck in—it’s just that Pump Up the Volume was rated ‘R’ and I wasn’t 17… It was actually the first ‘R’ rated movie I saw in the theater.  Literally the only thing I remember about that movie was when Christian’s character (IMDB tells me the name is Mark Hunter) was making noises on the air meant to sound like he was jerking off, but he wasn’t really.  Now I need to find that movie—or at least Google it—to verify that scene was even in the movie and that my early teen memory didn’t just morph into something that wasn’t there. Although how I remember the movie—if there wasn’t a scene like that, there should have been. And I just checked—yes, the fake masturbation scene exists. Did I ever think I would write that sentence? I did not. But here we are…

But on the call I had some second hand embarrassment for Christian. I worried that maybe fanning over a movie he did 20 years ago might be a little off putting.  Also, it was reminding the dude that he was (at least by this guy’s standards) best known for something he did 20 years ago, and wow, doesn’t that make him feel old? I mean I could have fan girled HARD CORE about him being Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh in Young Guns 2, but I didn’t. Of course if it had been Emilio Estevez on the call instead of Christian Slater, I may not have been able to help making a total fool out of myself…but I digress. Especially since this call was over ten years ago now. So we are another ten years away. Pump Up the Volume (and Young Guns 2, for that matter)  came out in 1990. These movies are older than much of the cast of Cobra Kai. 

But getting to work for that fan site, I had the opportunity to speak to actors about their craft and their upcoming projects in between writing up posts reviewing the shows I wanted to review. I was able to go in depth where I wanted to on shows like Supernatural, Being Human, Friends with Benefits. The Supernatural ones, because I wrote the reviews for Supernatural fan sites, the comments did get scary a few times. Some fans do not like anything that can be remotely construed as negative in the reviews. The more general fan sites are typically easier that way. But you also don’t get the volume reading your posts either. The more people read your pieces, the more people can like or hate your writing. It goes with the territory. And with quite a bit of writing in, I was getting a feel for it. So when that fan oriented program started, I couldn’t jump on it fast enough. That’s the goal, isn’t it?  To get paid to do something you love?

The first time I was published was back in college. I wrote a paper my professor liked so much he wanted my paper in his book on research papers.  But here was the thing—he had already paid for a research paper for an English class written by another student.  So he paid me to write a science research paper. I had to write a whole research paper, including doing all the research—I didn’t need to do it for a class.  I chose astronomy because I had an interest, and I was tutoring in it. I wrote a full length paper on Black Holes, which I then had the professor I tutored for read and grade it to make sure that I was giving my English professor an ‘A’ science paper for his book, then turned it in to my English professor. I got paid very little for that but I was excited to see my name and my writing in print.

This new fan incentive thing was a relatively easy process. You had to have certain types of social media that you could make #Sponsored posts and you needed a blog for your reviews. They provided even pictures that you could use. But like so many things, the idea was better than the actual experience. As soon as I started, I realized it was a bad idea. I would have to say I felt not entirely unlike Lando Calrissian with his “this deal’s getting worse all the time”. It wasn’t like they told me exactly what to write, but there were things I was asked to bring up, and the general atmosphere was one in which I felt compelled to write only positive things. Now they say that everyone has their price. I’m not sure who “they” are but I was not happy finding out how low my price was. I probably should have known considering what I was paid for the paper in college, but still—this time I felt cheap. And on top of that, I felt like I wasn’t really writing anymore. I felt I had sold out my art.

And this is where my problem lies. I would love to write for a living. I’d love to be paid for what I write. And I follow tons of artists and inspirational speakers for artists and they all talk about the nobility of the professional artist. They talk about that goal that I mentioned—how your talent is important enough to get paid for. But when is it just selling out? Where is that line? When you are being paid to do something, the person paying has a level of control over what you are producing. It makes sense that someone who is purchasing a product wants the product they intended to purchase.

When I was in high school, I remember a friend of mine getting really aggravated about a bad grade she got. But it seemed pretty clear to me that she got the bad grade because she didn’t do the assignment. She did what she wanted instead. At the time, I thought that writing what you wanted was something you could get away with in college but in high school, write the way the teacher instructed. Then when I was in college I learned that there, too, you really needed to write the way the teacher wanted it written. Then you get out in the real world and to get paid you have to write it the way the person paying wants it done there, as well. Literally there is no time when anyone cares what you actually want to say. They want you to tell them what they want to hear.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been very good at playing “the game”. I want to say what I want to say, yet still there is that feeling out there that you aren’t really a writer unless you have “monetized” your craft. Are people willing to pay for your stuff? Are you published? And we define ourselves by those terms, even though the writing that we have done to be published was writing someone else wanted us to do for their own gain.

I haven’t written reviews on shows in a long time. But this idea translates into writing plays as well. One of my short plays was put on virtually, but I know the full length play I wrote isn’t the right kind of play to be done by a local community theater—so do we sell out to be seen, hoping that some day we become so known that we can finally write what we want and people will continue to pay us for it? I imagine that day doesn’t come easily, or often.