Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.

And, you know, incredibly common in the modern publishing industry. This is how most books release these days, now that social media is a thing and we’ve got (incredibly rare or should-be-excluded-for-other-reasons-that-made-their-data-aberrant) examples of authors making bestseller lists off of viral book advertisements. Even setting Amazon’s destruction of the book market aside (which could easily claim full responsibility on it’s own), the invention of the internet might have been the absolutely worst thing to happen to media creation. Not because of the whole “kids these days staring at their phones!” type crap but because the disappearance of the distant between creators and audiences has absolutely warped the thinking of almost everyone involved. Creators are driven to feelings of inadequacy by not having enough followers, by not getting enough attention on their posts or videos, and have attached themselves to a numerical metric that anyone who might invest in them can no judge their supposed value (follower count, if you’re missing the subtext). Fans are left feeling like their favorite artists are just a message away and have lost their minds to the sense of entitlement that has grown out of that. Publishers and distrubtors have lost their minds as well, but mostly because they want every single new work of art to be marketted to millions by viral videos so they can reap the benefit of millions of sales without having to do any of the work or spend any of the money required to actually generate millions of sales.

It sucks! This reality, watching it strike down not just my friend but authors I thought were big names or famous enough to not need to have a day job has basically destroyed every dream I’ve ever had of supporting myself on my writing and storytelling alone. And it’s not just books and graphic novels and movies and music, either! Once upon a time, you could write a few little tidbits for a paper or a magazine every month and live comfortably as a frequent visitors at cafes in Paris or weirdos bumbling about major US cities. Sure, the cost of living has gone up and that’s definitely a part of it, but newspapers and magazines don’t pay much better than they did back in the day and most of them pay much, much worse! The arts are being drained of their every single creation and not being refueled by economy they support or the societies they enrich. You don’t need to look further than the general reaction to LLMs and AI being “now anyone can make art by just clicking a button, so who needs all those stuck-up artists and writers we stole all the art from?” to see how deeply fucked up all of this is. None of that garbage would exist without stealing art, writing, music, videos, and so on from every artist that has ever existed and had their work digitized, which just makes it all rankle that much more.

There’s no easy fix for this. There’s plenty of simple fixes for this, like paying artists an ACTUAL living wage, tossing all the LLMs and “AI” garbage spewers in the trash before they destroy the environment, and funding the study of the arts like we once did, but none that would be easy to do. After all, we’re currently watching one of the largest economies to ever exist slowly (though it is rapidly increasing in speed) shift all of its wealth upward because everyone who has ever felt trod upon and adopted the “screw you, I got mine” attitude elected a fascist government into power specifically because the leader was a fascist. So much of population came out in support of that bullshit and fascism that I can no longer live by my once strongly-held belief that the average person was decent and just needed the opportunity to show. How the hell are we supposed to convince enough of that population, let alone the entire world, that creativity and self-expression have enough value that we need to drastically alter society and the various economies of the world to support them? I have no idea how any of this is going to change in any way but negative at this point and I’m the sort of person who values that crap so much that I spend money I’m never going to recover to host my own blog and refuse to put ads on it because I don’t want to subject people to that horrid, pointless shit because they decided they wanted to spend some time reading what I’ve written. I’m the most optimistic of my peers when it comes valuing the arts (because I value them so much that I give my creations away for free rather than give up on art entirely) and all I’ve got is the stubornness to keep a personal blog going long after a more reasonable person would have stopped.

Anyway. Pay an artist today. Support a creator you value. Be the change you want to see in the world because the only way ANY of this is going to change is if we start a massive movement that sweeps the world up in its wake. And, you know, even as dark as things feel, we’ve got some really solid evidence that individuals can make a difference. Look at how badly Target is doing these days, thanks to the boycott! I don’t know that they’re going to collapse or anything, but their stock prices were going down even before the rest of the market began to tank and that’s all those rich fuckers care about so who know what is going to happen if it continues to trend downward. Maybe they’ll reverse their dumb decision to remove all DEI stuff and people will shop there again. Though, that said, recent reporting has revealed that the Target corporation donated money to the Trump inauguration, so they might just be cooked at this point. Maybe it’s not pointless, after all. Maybe we can really make some kind of change if we can get everyone pulling in the same direction. I guess it just remains to be seen if we can ever manage that on people other than the ones who already cared.