Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: A money-quality connection, even if you can download the novel for free
The TeleBlog in many ways is Freebie Central. We love to point people to Gutenberg classics, good free Creative Commons books and the ad-supported offerings of Wowio, including one I’ll recommend now, in case you haven’t read it—Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade, novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece inspired by the bombing of Dresden, where he was a prisoner of war.
Slaughterhouse-Five blends history, black humor, satire and sci-fi. You needn’t pay a nickel for a digital edition of the novel if you live in the United States—just go here—and Wowio hopes to expand worldwide. I’d rather that an ad in it not come ahead of the cover. But I’m glad that Vonnegut’s heirs are being compensated, just as he himself would have been during his lifetime. Adless e-versions, moreover, are available at Amazon Kindle Store, BooksOnBoard, Diesel eBooks, eBooks.com, Fictionwise and elsewhere, including Wowio, where you can buy a gift edition for a friend.
A few thoughts on P2P and Hollywood-style PSing
Will literary quality suffer if authors don’t get paid properly, one way or another, especially the live writers? Yes, in many cases. That’s one reason why—although there are many positives for e-bookdom in the HarperCollins experiment with profit sharing instead of the usual advances—writers should be on the lookout for Hollywood-style PSing. I’d also oppose unlimited distribution on P2P networks against the wishes of authors and publishers.
Not all titles lend themselves to being offered online as freebies to promote sales of printed copies, and, furthermore, many a book is better because its writer received cash. That would include best-sellers. If you want to appreciate the prodigious labor that can go into them, check out Writing the Blockbuster Novel, by Albert Zuckerman, the founder of the Writers House agency, whose clients include such megasellers as Ken Follett. It took more than 11 books before Follett became a household name.
Not Gecko, but still in need of money
At a more literary level, Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, just might be an example of the benefits—to readers, not just writers—of compensating authors fairly.
“I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time,” Vonnegut wrote in his introduction. “When I got home from the Second World War twenty three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least would make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.” Yes, as is clear in a Salon piece citing a newly released collection of Vonnegut’s papers, he started the book without an advance in hand. But would he have persisted through several drafts if no possibility existed of appropriate cash rewards?
And remember, this is Vonnegut—not exactly a Babbitt or a Gecko, in life or in his books—speaking. Vonnegut wasn’t a greedster, just a man with a family to support.
I doubt that posthumous royalties obsessed Vonnegut when he was writing Slaughterhouse-Five. But the possibility of his children receiving them was almost surely part of the equation, just as life insurance would be for many non-novelists fretting over their own financial destinies, and their families’. Yes, the chances were slim that Vonnegut would enjoy substantial income from his writings. But he persisted; call it The Lottery Factor. Academics, including Rufus Pollock, may not fully understand The Factor, but then, as a group, they tend not to be the biggest of financial risk-takers.
An invitation to speak up, however you feel
As much as society needs books online for free, not just the bookstore model, this mustn’t come at writers’ expense, because the end result will be fewer Slaughterhouse-Fives out there. Whether through traditional advances and royalties, fair profit-sharing, ads, public libraries or other means, we need to pay future Vonneguts and Folletts as opposed to simply hoping that they can prosper through teaching, speaking and the rest. Many members of the TeleBlog community may disagree, and, however you feel, I’d encourage you to read the Salon article and speak up in our comments section. Let all sides in this debate continue to educate each other.
Related: Five other Vonnegut novels for free at Wowio.
Detail: Wowio’s version of Slaughterhouse-Five will convert beautifully into Mobipocket format for reading on small screens—or on the Kindle. Use Mobipocket Dekstop.
And a reminder: No, I don’t consider advertising to be a panacea for publishers. It’s just one model to consider in an era when millions of Net users are accustomed to freebies.
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