Failed Writer's Journey: You Have to Like Art to Make Money From It

This month apparently saw one of the worst movie box offices on record. The publishing world has been in decline since the pandemic and all anyone can talk about is how difficult it is to get published and then transition, once published, to how difficult it is to sell a book. My favorite lit podcast, Publishing Rodeo, came back after about a year away to inform us that things are even worse than when they started. It’s hard out there, for a lot of reasons. But I suspect a significant reason is that the art business seems to be run by people who don’t understand art.

I generally trust the people who run the company I work for. I don’t know them personally, but I know that they all came up in various ways through the industry. They are all people who understand why consumers come to us, what they are looking for, and what we are supposed to provide. Yes, they are business people, so they have all the same potential problems as any executives — too much focus on the quarterly reports, disconnection from too much of the day to day, etc. But at their core, they get the business, they know what a well run firm in our industry produces and that helps mitigate the usual pitfalls. That does not appear to be the case in the entertainment industry.

Book publishers admit that they don’t know what sells (I don’t think that is true, by the way. I suspect they have a decent idea, but it basically amounts ot marketing, and they have settled on a model where they fund their industry off a few mega hits rather than try to build many smaller sustainable, if individually less profitable products.). Movie and television in the streaming era suffer from too much data, and the data owners appear to be driving the decision making. One of the reason we don’t get yearly seasons anymore is because these firms wait for the data before deciding to green light new production, so its years between seasons instead of months. And then when a show drifts from the public mind, everyone insists that it must be the quality rather than the fact that it broke its momentum waiting for a computer to give the green light.

Data also appears to drive what gets made. Sequels, reboots, etc. dominate the movie industry and to a lesser extent publishing (I recently heard that there were two genres in publishing today — romantasy and not romantasy) in large part because they resemble in the data what was successful in the past. Data shows that people are watching shows while they scroll through their phone? Better write incredibly simply, repetitive shows so people don’t get lost. Only a data maven (and I say this as a data maven) could come up with that little bit of nonsense. The solution to distraction ought to be more compelling content, possibly structured in different ways. The solution is not the same thing but dumber and less engaging.

People who don’t understand or like an industry cannot really ever be successful at it. Data, as I have said over and over again to the point where I am an absolute bore on this matter, is not expertise. It can inform your expertise but when you allow it to replace your expertise, you are, well, fsked. And since the entertainment industry is no longer run by people who understand and like entertainment, well, we can see what is happening.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money off entertainment. If I ever sell anything, I hope it makes me filthy rich (it won’t, but dreams are nice to have, aren’t they?) But you cannot be successful if you don’t understand your business, if you don’t understand why people would want to give you money for what you make. Numbers are not a substitute for understanding, whatever MBA schools might insist. The entertainment industry is just a very public example of this phenomenon — once healthy businesses driven into the wall by people who see the dollar signs but do not understand why those dollars change hands in the first place.

Weekly Word Count

Nothing, basically. I spent the week working with collaborators filling out applications to workshops and contests for the script. So, you know, wish me luck. Probably going to need a lot of it. Next week, back to the novel.

Have a great weekend, everyone.