I happened to be reading Mark Bertil’s post on risk taking and funding and he points out Kickstarter — a funding platform for artists, designers, etc. — not unlike Kiva, except they focus on alleviating poverty through partnerships with micro-financing institutions and by encouraging people to make small loans to entrepreneurs to fund their endeavours.
A fine example:
Mark being Mark, thoroughly discusses his thoughts and ideas in the context of publishing. He points out that publishers take the risk, but I’d disagree because publishers play it safer than we think. Dan Wagstaff a while back (probably around BookCamp Toronto, feel free to correct me Dan) made a point of emphasizing that publishers should make small investments in many different initiatives to play it safe and experiment.
An argument that I’d like to put forth is that so far the major investor and “risk taker” in all Canadian books has really been the government and thus the people who pay taxes in this country. I had a conversation earlier today with a friend who said to me that the formula to publishing is about balance. My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when I saw that statement.
A while back, a friend of mine and I were throwing this idea around. The general goal of the Canadian government or at least part of it is to ultimately ensure the survival of Canadian culture (because Canadians are somehow consistently feeling insecure about their identity). This means the Canadian government must do something about investing in culture which then brings about the grant system that subsidizes the production costs of books in order to make them affordable.
Complex City visual via ffffound
The problem is that for many publishing companies, they have essentially integrated this grant formula into their business model and combined it with the idea of investing in many initiatives (in this case, books).
Let us unveil a giant machine that is pumping a massive output of “Canadian culture”. This massive output will hopefully reach a few readers across the nation with the “bestsellers” playing their role, each as a success story of how Canadian identity survived and perhaps even thrived.
I don’t think the question is, as Mark puts it, the platform and who will run it because anyone can set one up in a free and democratic society. The key is choosing where to place the funding. The question is that if we keep talking about better books, better interactions, better communities — shouldn’t we focus on ourselves? We ironically, are the people who continue to allow Canadian culture to be diluted and the real gems to remain hidden.
If anything, perhaps the Canada Council will set up a platform where the people can decide on an individual basis how much of their portion they want to dedicate to a form of art and culture be it a book, film, music, theatrical performance or video game (etc..). Pushing it even further, perhaps individuals may even decide on the specific initiative.
The old formula may have been similar to Pareto Principle (the 20/80 rule) — although I have my doubts. I might even suggest that further fragmentation and or segmentation is the future.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Ehren,
I think the Canadian government's goal is to do gap financing for Canadian culture. The grant system is supposed to support the bottom third of Canadian content — theoretically that is content that can't find a mass audience because there is no mass in the Canadian audience. I am not saying this is a good thing and I am not saying it works, but I think it is intended to be a welfare type system. If you set up a platform for taxpayers to allocate their own tax dollars then they would act in their own self interest wouldn't they? I mean you wouldn't want tax payers dolling out grants any more than you would want taxpayers allocating funding for soup kitchens. The incentives are all wrong.
Mark, thanks for commenting. I’m actually not suggesting that taxpayers have the ability to allocate anything and everything. I’m merely suggesting that on some level, the Canada Council should allow tax payers to allocate for a particular genre inthe arts.
I don’t agree with the argument that something needs to be in the interest of a mass audience in order to be successful. In my opinion, art is subjective and it requires investment of not just monetary, but more of an personal and individual interest. Currently, this interest is dictated by a small number of individuals.
For a more direct approach, why not have artists to individually promote their own project on a platform that would encourage individuals to really buy in and have a vested interest? This is definitely not the only way, but I felt that if we are talking about platforms and how authors (and other artists) can really take their projects to a higher level and really own their project, we should not only be looking at profitable businesses, but also the impact of philathropy and how tax dollars are spent.
Hey Ehren,
Interesting post as always!
Just to clarify — I think I was saying two separate (if related) things about small investments/diversity/experimentation.
Firstly I was saying that, based on William Goldman's premise that no one knows anything, publishing is basically gambling. So if every book is some kind of bet, it makes sense to publishers to make lots and lots of small bets with a large roster of authors, covering the widest possible range of genres and subjects. Publishers will — of course — occasionally place big bets with expensive authors and titles but only when they think (correctly or otherwise) that other factors (author profile, the quality of the writing) lessen the risk.
My second point was about experimentation. We don't know exactly what works when we are marketing books, especially when it comes to marketing them online. Currently we spend lots of money on co-op in bookstores, advertising and tours. What I was saying was that the internet allows us to do lots of interesting new things relatively cheaply and so we should experiment by exploring these different options, and do it really really frequently. I'm beginning to think of this approach as "micro-publicity".
Does that clarify a bit?
Thanks for the clarification Dan. I just felt that the two statements you had made were excellent ideas to build upon — especially in the larger context of art, investment and risk-taking, the idea of individual vested interest, and direct democracy. Yea, I tend to mesh a lot of ideas together…