“Here’s the deal, folks. You do a commercial – you’re off the artistic roll call, forever.” 

                                                                   — Bill Hicks, Rant in E Minor

A while back, I was present at a group discussion regarding the future of the business of publishing fiction – and the discussion naturally turned to the business of publishing fiction on the Web.

I didn’t have much to say because I don’t know much about the business of publishing fiction in any medium, much less on the Web.  (This may explain my meteoric career trajectory to date.)

But I stupidly opened my mouth — and, even more stupidly, said what I was thinking — when someone suggested, with a fair bit of enthusiasm, that all professional fiction published on the Web would eventually be free to the consumer because professional fiction writers would be paid through advertising subsidies.  In other words, Web publishers would make their money entirely through selling banner ads and popups for Coke, Ford, Apple, Nike, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, or whomever . . . and then pay their authors from those revenues.

And what I stupidly said was this:

“I dunno . . . I can’t help thinking of the Neil Young lyric:  ‘Ain’t singing for Pepsi/Ain’t singing for Coke/I don’t sing for nobody/Makes me look like a joke.’  I mean . . . I don’t want my work to be about selling some product.  I want it to be about what it’s about.”

So now there’s a perfectly nice, intelligent person out there who thinks I’m a grade-A jerk.  And y’know, I can’t blame that person.  Because it really was a pretty stupid and rude thing for me to say, and I’m sure it sounded like a slam . . . when all the speaker was doing was suggesting what probably would (and perhaps should) happen. 

And, really, already is happening.

Will it be such a terrible thing in the long run?  After all, creative content on radio and television has been advertiser-supported for decades — and hasn’t that worked out fine?  Why should prose fiction or any other creative endeavor be any different?

Heck, actors and musicians have sold themselves and their work on behalf of unrelated products over and over again, to the tune of gazillions.  So why shouldn’t authors get a piece of that action?  (They already have, a few times:  Here’s William S. Burroughs for Nike and Stephen King for American Express.)

Besides, it’s not as if advertisers would ever expect to have any input regarding the content of what they’re paying for, is it?

Okay, there I go being a grade-A jerk again.  Remember, irony is dead, so sarcasm is bad.  Consumers do not like it.  Write like you’re sincere, goddamn it.

The sincere truth, though, is that even though I truly do feel bad for having been stupid and rude that day –

That’s still what I think.

This is nifty. Via Cosmic Variance. A baby monitor in the Chicago area is picking up NASA mission video.