Donate, Liters and copyright. Total
Some time ago I wrote a short article with a survey about the fate of donate as a way to finance writing. It's time to take stock.
Short. The story with Liters for the week did not end with anything. The contract has a clause on the automatic extension of the contract. It also contains clause 2.7 “The Agency undertakes to pay remuneration to the Author in accordance with clause 1.1.3 of the Agreement”. According to our data, no payment has been made over the past 4 years. LitRes did not react in any way to the letter with this information. Books continue to be sold (72 works in total).
UPDATE: after this note, LitRes contacted us with a request to provide details for the transfer of money.
The article was read by 52,000 people. Of these, 90 transferred a thank-you payment (for which they deeply bow and sincere thanks from Svyatoslav Loginov and from me personally). This is 0.17% of the audience. The average payment amounted to slightly more than 300 rubles.
Thus, in order to provide income from gratuitous payments in the amount of 30,000 rubles (slightly less than the average salary in St. Petersburg), in addition to directly to creativity, you need to write articles asking for donations that will be read by 650,000 smart, educated people a year .
Despite the rather depressing statistics, 49% of all respondents said that they believe in donate as a means of financing writing. What is surprising and managed to convince me. Yes, not here and not now, but I agree - it is possible. But first things first.
In the structure of Donate itself, two rather different entities are hidden.
The first is patronage, characterized by significant payments from those for whom the author has become something important in life. There are few such people, but for them it’s not just a payment for the book, for them it is primarily a personal gratitude to the author. For example, out of 90 people, 20 transferred more than 500 rubles, and 5 - more than 1000. By the standards of the cost of electronic books, this is more than a complete works.
The second part is closest, in essence, to the tip. This is a deferred payment, the amount of which depends on the quality of the service. And here a difficult moment arises - tips as a way of paying for someone's work require a social contract. Namely:
1. Everyone understands how much it costs
In the USA, many receipts immediately show how many tips have to be paid to get 15%, 18% or 20%. Everything is very simple - 15% - ordinary service, 18% - good, 20% - outstanding. Pay more - splurge. Paying less is indecent. The size of the minimum payment is generally clear - as much as the work in the store. If you like it, you pay a little more.
2. Payment is a natural, normal behavior.
At the same time, 15% are paid not when you liked it, but when there are no things that you clearly did not like. That is, if you haven’t poured soup onto your knees and the fly didn’t swim in coffee, pay.
I started reading - I read it to the end, it seemed not disgusting - pay. This thank-you payment is not made when you admire, but when it was not a “dull fertilizer”.
3. The society has instruments of coercion for “renegades”.
Every time you have to pay, the standard prisoner dilemma is triggered . To pay for what you can get for free is irrational. After all, there are a lot of places where to spend this money. And in the end, the whole society suffers — writers don’t write, and readers lose the legal opportunity to decide independently whether the work was worthy or not.
While there are few egoists, the losses from them are not noticeable. But if there are too many of them, the theory of broken windows works. It is very difficult to be good if everything is bad around. This is corny is not profitable. To prevent this from happening, society usually uses sanctions against egoists. From public contempt to prohibitions and coercion. I downloaded 20 films, I didn’t pay for a single one - get a ban on ip. Something like this. In the case of tips, the user knows that if you don’t pay, you don’t pay the second, and then you find a comb in a borsch or the girl will look at you like a shit.
If these three things appear in our society, donate will become not just a topic for discussion, but a real way to finance the creation of high-quality creative works.
In addition, there are a number of technical parameters that can help the development of donate:
1. Information propaganda. First of all, inside the works of art themselves. In the middle of the novel there is an inset - “about the benefit of donate” with the details.
2. Ease of making payments. But we must admit that modern systems (PayPal, Webmoney, Skrill, Yandex.Money, Qiwi) cover 95% of all possible payments, as they allow you to pay not only with virtual money, but also with regular cards, providing a high level of security and convenience of payments. Objectively speaking, paying with the donate button is not more difficult (but in general even easier) than buying in an electronic store. So this item is rapidly losing its relevance.
Well, the last thought - the money received by a person - is an assessment of his usefulness by society. I understand that we do not have an ideal world, and there are a lot of distortions (theft, corruption, lack of information and other delights of an imperfect market). But in the general case, if a famous writer makes money as a janitor, then his work is valuable to society just as much.
Short. The story with Liters for the week did not end with anything. The contract has a clause on the automatic extension of the contract. It also contains clause 2.7 “The Agency undertakes to pay remuneration to the Author in accordance with clause 1.1.3 of the Agreement”. According to our data, no payment has been made over the past 4 years. LitRes did not react in any way to the letter with this information. Books continue to be sold (72 works in total).
UPDATE: after this note, LitRes contacted us with a request to provide details for the transfer of money.
The article was read by 52,000 people. Of these, 90 transferred a thank-you payment (for which they deeply bow and sincere thanks from Svyatoslav Loginov and from me personally). This is 0.17% of the audience. The average payment amounted to slightly more than 300 rubles.
Thus, in order to provide income from gratuitous payments in the amount of 30,000 rubles (slightly less than the average salary in St. Petersburg), in addition to directly to creativity, you need to write articles asking for donations that will be read by 650,000 smart, educated people a year .
Despite the rather depressing statistics, 49% of all respondents said that they believe in donate as a means of financing writing. What is surprising and managed to convince me. Yes, not here and not now, but I agree - it is possible. But first things first.
In the structure of Donate itself, two rather different entities are hidden.
The first is patronage, characterized by significant payments from those for whom the author has become something important in life. There are few such people, but for them it’s not just a payment for the book, for them it is primarily a personal gratitude to the author. For example, out of 90 people, 20 transferred more than 500 rubles, and 5 - more than 1000. By the standards of the cost of electronic books, this is more than a complete works.
The second part is closest, in essence, to the tip. This is a deferred payment, the amount of which depends on the quality of the service. And here a difficult moment arises - tips as a way of paying for someone's work require a social contract. Namely:
1. Everyone understands how much it costs
In the USA, many receipts immediately show how many tips have to be paid to get 15%, 18% or 20%. Everything is very simple - 15% - ordinary service, 18% - good, 20% - outstanding. Pay more - splurge. Paying less is indecent. The size of the minimum payment is generally clear - as much as the work in the store. If you like it, you pay a little more.
2. Payment is a natural, normal behavior.
At the same time, 15% are paid not when you liked it, but when there are no things that you clearly did not like. That is, if you haven’t poured soup onto your knees and the fly didn’t swim in coffee, pay.
I started reading - I read it to the end, it seemed not disgusting - pay. This thank-you payment is not made when you admire, but when it was not a “dull fertilizer”.
3. The society has instruments of coercion for “renegades”.
Every time you have to pay, the standard prisoner dilemma is triggered . To pay for what you can get for free is irrational. After all, there are a lot of places where to spend this money. And in the end, the whole society suffers — writers don’t write, and readers lose the legal opportunity to decide independently whether the work was worthy or not.
While there are few egoists, the losses from them are not noticeable. But if there are too many of them, the theory of broken windows works. It is very difficult to be good if everything is bad around. This is corny is not profitable. To prevent this from happening, society usually uses sanctions against egoists. From public contempt to prohibitions and coercion. I downloaded 20 films, I didn’t pay for a single one - get a ban on ip. Something like this. In the case of tips, the user knows that if you don’t pay, you don’t pay the second, and then you find a comb in a borsch or the girl will look at you like a shit.
If these three things appear in our society, donate will become not just a topic for discussion, but a real way to finance the creation of high-quality creative works.
In addition, there are a number of technical parameters that can help the development of donate:
1. Information propaganda. First of all, inside the works of art themselves. In the middle of the novel there is an inset - “about the benefit of donate” with the details.
2. Ease of making payments. But we must admit that modern systems (PayPal, Webmoney, Skrill, Yandex.Money, Qiwi) cover 95% of all possible payments, as they allow you to pay not only with virtual money, but also with regular cards, providing a high level of security and convenience of payments. Objectively speaking, paying with the donate button is not more difficult (but in general even easier) than buying in an electronic store. So this item is rapidly losing its relevance.
Well, the last thought - the money received by a person - is an assessment of his usefulness by society. I understand that we do not have an ideal world, and there are a lot of distortions (theft, corruption, lack of information and other delights of an imperfect market). But in the general case, if a famous writer makes money as a janitor, then his work is valuable to society just as much.