"Will I give away my work?" is one of the fundamental questions that you, the creative professional, will have to decide.Because people will ask you.
How do you make a living giving away your talent for free to anyone who asks?
There is a business model for this, and there are some creators who are giving away their work and getting money. This is achieved by ancillary sales for a revenue stream.
There is more than one Webcomic that gives away its cartoons, and looks to make money from t-shirt sales, mugs, and even paper collections of what you can see online for free.
This may take years. Years to build an audience, years to create the work, push the hype, and years to convert a percentage of those thousands of eyeballs looking at your stuff into money.
But it is possible.
I think "Sheldon" by Dave Kellett is a good example of somebody who has made this business model work. He had a deal with a syndicate for a couple of years, and canceled it to go exclusively web-based because he ended up in so few papers.
ReplyDeleteOf course, he's been doing "Sheldon" since at least 2001 and had a day job until a year or two ago. But with a lot of hard work, he's able to sqeeek out a living by selling books, T-shirts, and the occasional original sketch.
You can check out his strip at www.sheldoncomics.com.