The piece that follows is more a cry from the heart than a rigorous treatise on the use of social media by artists. Who am I to make any sweeping statements about art and social media? I’m an independent author, who’s put an energetically and financially expensive investment into a plethora of social platforms and seen precious little in the way of ROI for book marketing. I’m an introspective, risk-taking, creative, and money-minded person, who sees that while social media can and has helped to rocket some to fame, the vast majority of authors, traditionally and independently published, have enacted vigorous acrobatics on these platforms to the tune of very little actual return on our sometimes substantial investments.
I recently read a piece that reminded me of what’s to follow, written passionately by traditionally published, self-identified midlist author Kacen Callendar, entitled “Social Media Expectations.” Callendar’s piece and mine speak to the same losing battle that is the author’s supposed duty of selling their books and building a readership on social media. They speak of having left social spaces for mental health reasons—as have I. While they’re currently in a toe-dipping returning phase, their scathing examination of the way publishers have foisted the supposed responsibility of bookselling on social platforms into the laps of the least qualified and most vulnerable individuals—their authors—is an important read.
What you’re about to read is part op-ed and part personal essay. If you are an artist of any kind, but particularly an author, I hope my words leave you with food for thought. They certainly have for me.
Art makers, your use of social media is not serving your art.
After dinner, homemade pasta and red sauce garnished with aged Asiago and fresh basil, I set down the book my partner and I are reading aloud together and lift my eyebrows.
“She was way ahead of her time,” he says.
“I have this book to thank for my not being a gay-phobic Christian,” I agree.
“Do you think it would’ve gotten published today?”
“As her first book? I don’t know…” I shake my head. “I mean, LGBTQIA+ is super in right now, so maybe?”
“But by a straight female author?”
“Yeah, #ownvoices would be unimpressed.”
“Twitter is always unimpressed.”
We have just finished Magic’s Pawn, the first in the Last Herald Mage trilogy by Mercedes Lackey. The battered mass paperback published in 1989 about a bullied gay young man coming into his incredible mage powers through heartbreak—and then learning to trust again—is starting to look like the Velveteen Rabbit. If the titular plush bunny were a book. The cover has been ripped off and repaired with Scotch tape countless times. Corners are bruised, pages finger-greased and tear-stained. Barely legible, its corrugated spine bears the story of my love for this book. It has been with me since late elementary school, when I first found it in the dusty sci-fi/fantasy corner of a used bookstore.
But this is not a love story.
Several nights ago, in the same room of my home, which I have rarely left this year of the global pandemic, I watched for the third time Leslie Odom Jr. and Lin-Manuel Miranda do vocal battle on the Broadway stage—a stage brought to me by my $6.99 monthly subscription to Disney+. Before settling in on the sofa, I had Googled “how much does a Broadway actor make” and learned at the top of the search that a weekly minimum wage was $2,168 in March of 2020, amounting to over a hundred thousand US dollars a year—if an actor could work steadily, every week, for 52 weeks.
Still, I thought, this isn’t a bad wage—though the labor, talent, and skill of the Broadway actor far outpace those of the corporate CEO or successful real estate broker.
But I wasn’t satisfied with the answer at the top of the first page of Google. Digging deeper, I discovered on Money.com that the union-mandated minimum salary for Broadway actors is $1,900 a week, with $500 a week bumps for lead actors in a cast for a performance that receives Tony nominations. That made me happy; the Hamilton actors were paid well for their stunning performance.
I went on to learn that Miranda himself took home an estimated $6.4 million from the play that year, in 2016. And three producers split a 3% royalty share, allotting each producer 85% more than the take-home of any individual non-lead cast member. Income for the original cast, meanwhile, was much lower than that of award-winning cast.
And what of the light and set designers? And of all the rest who made the award-winning performance possible?
Tunneling in this Google rabbit hole, I was unclear what I was searching for. Something about the value of art. Something about the work of the artist. Something about what it means to create, and what is required to put food on a table and a roof over one’s head. Something about a gift—the artistic gift, yours and mine—to humanity, and what that gift means in terms of US dollars in 2020.
With these numbers in my mind as a kind of semi-permeable membrane through which I watched the performance, in awe and often in tears, for the third time, I asked myself why a Broadway show streamed with my app subscription should cost so much less than, for example, the 10-hour audiobook I’d been listening to that morning, which cogently and viscerally exposes the cost to humanity and to the planet of mined technology metals. I knew that the audiobook rights holder would be paid, generally, a quarter of the selling price, and that the author would probably see far less, and that the number of listeners would be far fewer, in total, than those who subscribe to a streaming service.
Was the price difference for art related to the size of its audience?
I watched the actors lift each other, their taut arms muscled, foreheads shining with sweat, their voices demanding attention, their precision and energy sublime. What of her? That female actor, there in the back—would she make more per view than the audiobook author ever bring home? If not…if less…then why? Was that actor’s part in the Hamilton production so much less important?
I wondered, what is art worth? Why is music streaming so inexpensive? Why do certain paintings or sculptures cost so much I could never afford even a reproduction?
Pausing at Intermission—a cup of hot chocolate, a homemade ginger–molasses cookie, cognizant of my own carbon footprint and the comparative wealth I enjoy that makes it so large—I considered again the words of Hamilton to Aaron Burr: “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”
The words rebuked. I felt them acutely. But I wasn’t sure what I wasn’t standing for. Or, I thought, I am already falling—as an indie author of science fiction and fantasy—but am I falling for something I don’t have the courage to stand against?
These thoughts harried me throughout the rest of the performance.
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In the back of the 1989 paperback is a one-page invitation for readers to join a network of pen pals. Interested readers may send a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope to the P.O. Box listed and await further instruction. The publisher makes plain that they have no connection to the notice, which is inserted “gratis as a service to the readers.”
Like a late-80s Facebook Group, I thought when I read the notice, charmed.
As a child and young adult, I’d written to so many authors, scrounging the backs of library books to find home addresses or to learn to which publishing department I could send correspondence that might actually reach the author.
Here, then, was another strange question about the value of art: Was art more valuable if you knew or could interact with its maker?
A signed copy of a book is more valuable than one not signed, I considered. So wasn’t the answer obvious?
But it wasn’t, not to me in that moment. For, I thought, who conferred that value on the signed copy? And was I somehow conflating the definitions of value? One philosophical, a question of intrinsic worth; one practical, a question of dollars and cents?
No one can contest that art, at least in the United States, is a product. An art maker—a first mover—sells their work to an art champion who acquires it for a cut of royalties, packages it, writes copy for it, and sells it again to an art producer, who for another cut dusts it with glitter and sets it on a box as very high up as money can lift it. The producer then sells the kit and kaboodle to a distributor who launches that box into view of the consumer—dangles it, flashing and eddying in the tides. Waits for the nibble. If they are all lucky, the line soon goes taut.
But that’s the old way, you say. Exposure has always been difficult for the artist, but today independent artists have opportunities that don’t involve these kinds of gatekeepers. How many times have I heard it, with today’s tools of self-serve advertising on algorithm-driven distribution platforms coupled with social media influencer marketing, “There’s no better time to be an artist!”
Yet, I believe the exposure challenge is no less difficult today, only different, in our art-saturated landscape.
If the definition of art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power,” as Oxford Languages suggests, then capitalism, which controls industry including art, for profit, is at odds with the goals of art.
For here, in the eddying tides of free-market capitalism, the art product is on display, contoured, glossy, poreless. And the transaction is not complete until the product is not only consumed but publicly judged: “Five stars! Would buy again!”
We call the product art only because we haven’t come up with a better name for it. But when the bottom line is the dollar, commodified art is orthogonal to its own vector and thrust, its own intrinsic value and purpose.
Which puts art makers in an unsettling tug-of-war between those entities which hold the key to the patrons of their art and those patrons themselves.
Enter the social media solution, which allows the artist to speak and sell directly to their patrons.
Here now is a way an artist can upend the desperate gameboard and spangle their art with their own glitter and set their work on their own pedestal.
And this art seller’s tool has become so unimpeachably powerful that use of the tool is no longer a choice for the artist. Fans and gatekeepers alike require artists to populate these platforms, require their instantaneous responses to fans and competitors, expect constant and public genuflection, require artists to generate a new product irrelevant to the art (but not to the art product, perhaps) that is their platform persona’s raison d’être.
Or am I mistaken? For the writer, for example, is the art not the author’s brand personality, but their story, the words, the characters, the journey, the heart, the clear and resonate message of the text?
I live with a man who builds and maintains wilderness trails, who must wield ancient wood-and-steel technology to saw and fell a tree, to cut a bench through loose soil and transform a sidehill into a footpath, to lever sleeping stone from its bed and haul it into shoveled-out holes to form rocky steps. Watching him, sometimes working with him, I know intimately that just because a tool is powerful, it is not also perforce all-purpose. For some purposes, when we use the wrong tool—a large sledgehammer to drive a small spike into a footbridge—we damage both the tool and the object we use it on. We might bend the nail, dent the board, or smash a finger.
Unintended consequences like these await the artist using the powerful tool of platform building on social media. In the name of fostering connection and creating a fan base, artists today are asked to produce a new product that is not part of the original job description. This product is their persona, their brand. They commodify their humanness and skill, wedding themselves to the platform on which the industry requires them to perform day in and day out. Their pedestal is not their own; it belongs to yet another party that doesn’t mind that its “cut” is infinitesimal—for the sum value of the slice they take out of every art maker’s smaller and smaller income is great, indeed. The cost to the platform is its transformation from a community of humans interacting in a virtual space to a network of consumers browsing the market, while peddling their own wares.
What you see, then, from artists in 2020 is feverish generation of content for these platforms, and an allegiance to the algorithms that drive the choices of wealthy private company owners—who are in no way beholden to the often legless art products that struggle to put food on the table or a roof over a head, or, perhaps most dangerously of all, the seed of hope or compassion or equality or conservation in the hearts and minds of its consumers—for fear of an ultimately poor final transaction: “One star! Don’t recommend!”
I understand that trade-offs are the mark of choice and action in a world where, to our perception, the arrow of time thrusts in only one direction, in a world where there are no redos.
So we have choices.
As artists, we can give our work away, we can sell it wholesale or for royalty shares. We can perform it and livestream and record it. We have access to technologies that give us great power and vast reach. But with these new technologies have not come new evolutions for us as a meaning-making, art-making species. We still have the same human bodies with their different but always limited capacities; the same emotional bandwidth, for some higher, others lower, never the same from day to day; the same number of hours on the digital, no longer analog, clock.
What I want to know is whether, in 1989, an author who was asked to generate weekly or even daily content for her niche audience would’ve found this endeavor beneficial to the work of her art making—or detrimental.
What I want to know is whether the answer is still the same in 2020.
I find myself looking in the backs of other books on my bookshelf. With almost all books published in the last decade, author biographies contain calls for the reader to join the author on their social platforms or to sign up for their newsletters: an email in exchange for a story, a simple, easy transaction.
I have not found a notice similar to the one in the back of Magic’s Pawn, an invitation to a community built by the audience, composed of the audience, existing for the audience, requiring no additional work of the author.
In 1989 and following, the notice in the back of Magic’s Pawn must have been valuable to many readers, for the group is still extant today as a not-for-profit website featuring excerpts, FAQs, fan fiction, role playing, music, newsletters, and other fan club creations dedicated to the series.
I reiterate, however, that although the club exists with the author’s permission and at-will oversight, she does not run it. The author herself is not spending her time generating fan-club content for readers. The readers are doing that work themselves.
Art makers, I propose we leave the work of our fans to our readers, listeners, and viewers, even if, at the onset, our audience is small—and apply ourselves to our vocations. We squander our birthright and education when we sell our personas in an attempt to garner an audience for our art. We sweat and bleed over the form and function of what we create. Must we also commodify our faces and smiles, our hobbies and intimate dinners, our pets, gardens, and children, our most tender and vulnerable moments, and most egregiously, our time on social media platform-building efforts that, more often than not, only serve to maintain any momentum our art has already been lucky enough to experience through networking and ad spend?
And to those who are still watching the gates, when you turn over your keys to the social media platforms, when you demand that the artists you nurture pour themselves out at the dispassionate feet of these technologies, you are inhibiting the production of the work you profit from.
In 2014, Ursula K. LeGuin rebuked art makers and publishers during her National Book Award acceptance speech. She saw the sharp drop ahead, the cart and horse barreling at full speed, heedless of the cliff, and cried out: “Hard times are coming…We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of art…Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.”
Art makers, we are in the midst of hard times. Be wise to the demands of capitalism on your time and creative energy. We need your art, not your poreless, smiling face, not even your storified vulnerability. We need the fruit of your genuine struggle with the spirit of our times.
And if the gatekeepers tell you that access comes only to those who will bend to the pressures of the market, who will transform their being into the shiny cellophane-wrapped packaging around which their art product must be wrapped, then those gatekeepers have fallen prey to capitalism, which is in conflict with your sacred work.
No, this is not a love story. Or, if it is, it is a story of love nearly lost. We art makers, with best intentions, have waded into the morass and lost our focus. Are we—our faces, our daily lives, our children’s crafts and lovers’ candlelit overtures, our snowy vacations and midday park outings—are we ourselves the product we wish others to consume? Are we?
Art makers, I call you to return to your first love and to remember that in hard times, we need artists for your visions of a better future, for your clear and cogent mirrors that reflect the present wrongs in need of correction, for your vivid and prescient recordings of histories we are destined to repeat if we don’t learn from them.
Our frenzied, platform-building use of social media is not serving us, nor is it serving the world we have been called to uplift, inspire, and change.
River K. Scott holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arizona and a double major in English and Philosophy from Texas State University. She works, writes, and falls off cliffs (rock climbs) in Tucson, Arizona.