In 2007, I released my book, Casa Del Queso, on Podiobooks.com. The Podiobooks community has a pretty active listserv for its authors, and I used to really join in. A little after I released my book, Amazon announced The Kindle. I took to the listserv immediately expressing my excitement about what sounded like it might be a great new platform for authors to get their ideas out there, without a gatekeeper. I was bemused to be met by a chorus of naysayers telling me it would never work, it would never catch on and all the reasons why a portable e-library was a horrible idea. Here we were – a bunch of creative types trying to innovatively make use of the mp3 player to advance lit and many of us were rejecting another literary-technology innovation, out of hand, for the fetish of paper books.
Yes, this is my public i-told-you-so, but it’s also a simple little story to illustrate one of the many ways that technology has opened up the entertainment business in the last few years. I’ve been excited by all of it. It feels, in many ways, like it levels the playing field, which is great for a guy like me who really wants to participate in the creative economy. On the flip side, though, from where I sat, a level playing field also means way, way more competitors in the race.
And, I never thought about it until I read Timothy Lee’s piece on Forbes this week, but I think I was also operating under the assumption that all of my fellow new competitors were also competing for roughly the same pool of eyes and dollars. It turns out that maybe that isn’t quite true. It turns out that with a growing number of rich people (which includes modestly middle class Americans, because they are, by global standards, still really rich) in the world, the economic pie of arts and entertainment customers is growing.
Reed wrote his post as a follow up to a report at TechDirt called The Sky is Rising. The basic point of this report is that all the sectors of the entertainment business that they looked into are doing great, at least in terms of the number of artists employed, the amount of content being produced and the number of people spending money on it. You hear a lot about big music or books publishers suffering and famous artists of all kinds losing lots of money to pirates, but that doesn’t change the fact that — collectively — artists and entertainers are making more money than they ever have before.
The Kindle is one of those levelling technology that has allowed a different sort of writer create entirely new markets in literature, just as blogging did before and as webcomics (seem to, maybe, be doing now). In fact, my fellow undergrounders should take heart: the entertainment industry is employing 20% more people than it has before, and that includes 43% of growth in the indie entertainment sector.
Good news?
I hope so.
The big question for me is whether or not a growing piece of that entertainment pie will accrue to comics makers. Are more and more people going to start reading webcomics when they take brain breaks at work? Will a growing number of people start buying our books and t-shirts as they become fans?
All I can offer is speculation. Who knows? Comics is not one of the sectors that the TechDirt team looked into, and I doubt they are going to. That said, if the economy keeps growing (even anemically) and making more rich people with leisure time and excess money, there is going to be more people looking for fun between their ears (that’s what entertainment is, right?). So all us crunchy artists should take heart. There will be more opportunities. Will there be more opportunities for all of us? Your guess is as good as mine.
But I’m taking this report as encouraging, and if you’re making comics (like me), then I think you should, too.
