My suspicion was that in a digital era where self-publishing is taking an increasingly larger piece of the traditional publishing’s pie, writers are valuing the worth of their intellectual property a bit more than they were twenty years ago. Or, to be more precise, writers have more and easier options to independently extract value from their intellectual property (e.g., online self-publishing).

But, unless you have the means to extract that value on your own (i.e., the time and knowledge to successfully self-publish, which includes marketing, technical, and other considerations), money may still be the priority. Someone’s got to make the cheese sandwiches, right?

Responses on twitter were mixed: @HoppingFun and @vforvoice came down on the rights/it depends side, while @davisac1 and @jchutchins opted for more money.

So, writers, I put it to you: which do you prefer? More money or more rights? More importantly, why or under what conditions?

UPDATE!

I moved some of the twitter responses over here so they wouldn’t be lost. Reviews are mixed, but “depends” seems to be the front runner so far…

@jchutchins: More money, less rights.

@vforvoice: More rights, less money. Media is too expansive to not retain rights for derivatives of original material.

@davisac1: I’d totally sell more rights for more money. That’s what I’d be trying to do with them anyway.

@HoppingFun: Depends on the biz plan and people involved. If I have creative freedom, I’d likely go for a split.

@BFree63: It’s a short term vs long term choice. With more rights comes more money down the road. I call it “investing in yourself”.

@chrisw10: With regards to writing, I think it depends entirely on the long tail. For my 1st story, I want more rights, less money for it, cause I think its too good to let someone tie up rights to it. But for anything I’m doing career-wise, more money, less rights.

[I then asked @chrisw10: "So, career/professional project= money, personal project = rights?"]

@chrisw10: For me, that’s probably how it breaks down. Though any commerical book that I think may be big I’d want to keep e-book rights. Unless giving them up will get me more in the long-run. It’s all about the long run. :)

@JolleySezStuff: Depends — is this a project I’m passionate about? Or did my car just die?

@gmskarka: For most writers, that’s a false dichotomy — More RIghts EQUALS More Money (in the long run).

@floerianthebard: Depends on the piece of work. If I want to do more with it b/c I see potential, I’d take less pay. If it’s a one-off, more pay.

@andrhia: More money, less rights.

@simon_staffans: Best of worlds? More $ first with a buy-back-in-option in the future. Likelihood of happening? Will there ever be world peace?

The panel was moderated by Emily Williams and also featured Richard Curtis of E-Reads and David Marlett of enkHouse.

The article’s focus is an introduction to the considerations involved in creating or extending an entertainment property into the collaborative commercial space. I am pleased to see more properties being launched that are natively collaborative as well as commercial (in dollars, high-profile names, or both). The article takes a more detailed look at the collaborative commercial entertainment model used by Brain Candy, LLC.

I believe the upswing of transmedia storytelling is helping usher in a new mindset regarding how much and how effectively audiences can be invited to participate in commercial entertainment (canonically, monetarily, or both). This article lays out some of the fundamental questions that need to be addressed when you invite fans to the table of canonicity.

Here’s the .pdf download of issue 2.1.

Maureen McHugh’s ‘ARGS Don’t Work: The Future of Transmedia Stories‘
Jay Bushman’s ‘Transmedia Artists Guild: New Media Needs New Representation‘
Brooke Thompson’s ‘Documenting your Transmedia Project (how to & why)‘
Andrea Phillips’ ‘Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction‘
Steve Peters’ ‘Audience Engagement in the Transmedia Age‘
Jenka Garfinkel’s ‘Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience‘
Behnam Karbassi’s ‘Transmedia Production: Making The New Frontier‘

I’ll update with more as appropriate.

Update: Evonne Heyning’s ‘Causebuilding Games: Fundraising & Social Gaming Streams‘

Update: Gareth Skarka’s ‘+5 Sword of ePublishing: Lessons from Tabletop RPGs‘

Additionally, I have had the pleasure of being asked to be a speaker on a proposed SXSW Film panel being organized by Ross Pruden. The panel is called, “Profiting From Piracy: Selling Your Digital-Age Content.” While tangential to the topics of transmedia and collaborative commercial entertainment, this panel strikes at the core of my personal beliefs about the challenges and opportunities for those creatives operating in a digital world. Issues covered include business models designed to address digital piracy, monetization of digital goods, addressing the economics of artificial scarcity and the infinite goods found in a digital world, copyright considerations, etc. Very excited to be a part of this panel!

Very grateful to Martin for giving me the opportunity to discuss Brain Candy, LLC on his show.

Discussions about digital piracy, transmedia/crossmedia, whether user-generated content (UGC) can ever be ‘good,’ and whether coffee beans really do voluntarily roast themselves in the presence of Chuck Norris tend to quickly devolve into polarized arguments, not open exchanges where the intent is to have your opinions challenged by facts (what normally happens is you find your facts being bludgeoned by someone else’s opinions).

This is often the result of a one-size-fits-all approach to the issue, a blind focusing on only one particular aspect of the topic that ignores salient facts, or an induction of biased selections/examples as the grist for a general theory mill.

So, having set the stage for my own public flogging, allow me to propose the following: “Collaborative transmedia storytelling with audiences does not always equate to an anything-goes morass of poor quality, choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) fan fiction.”

Sort of.

I’ll start with the reasons why it’s not, then back track (a bit) and explain the sort of.

Collaborative entertainment certainly can be awful, but it doesn’t need to be. Specific executions and implementations of the model may be good or bad, depending on how they are produced. When well-managed, co-creating value with audiences will tap the benefits of collaboration without damaging either the property’s branding or its narrative continuity. Done poorly, the result is a soup of content without structure, quality control, or coherence.

We don’t damn the entire movie industry because Deuce Bigelow 2 got made, and we don’t slam every television network studio because yet another reality show was greenlit. It’s equally wrong to summarily dismiss all UGC as having no proper place within commercial entertainment properties.

It’s not as if access to talent, money, resources, and distribution channels guarantees success. The studios, networks, imprints, and video game companies consistently provide us with many examples of bad entertainment, often with mind-staggeringly high budgets attached to them. Neither money nor control over production/distribution are guarantees for quality.

Further, there are many ways to build a bridge between canon and fandom, several methods for shaping the collaboration, and the invitation for fans to take a seat at the table of canonicity can be tailored to generate the desired participation. There is a spectrum of options between the binary options of traditional commercial entertainment and ‘do whatever you want with the content.’

Lastly, from a numbers perspective, the absolute amount of poor-quality UGC is easy to explain: there’s an incredibly high absolute amount of UGC compared to traditional commercial entertainment. Independent creatives tend to experiment and take risks. They’re willing to express themselves creatively, multiple times. And it’s never been easier to create and distribute content than now.

Little wonder YouTube turned out the way it did.

All of this, however, does not automatically lead to the statement, “All UGC is bad.” Or even, “UGC has no place in commercial entertainment.”

Having torched that particular straw man, let me delve into why I think a CYOA-type structure for transmedial properties is not necessarily bad (and why it is most likely inevitable).

Image by woodleyworkshop, Creative Commons BY 2.0

As I posted earlier, creators have lost control over how, when, and where audiences find and experience content. And if it’s impossible to control this with a single piece of content, imagine the challenges involved with a transmedial property.

Content creators can control when content is release. They can control the initial medium of publication, the initial format, and the initial distribution channel. They can even start out with an intended consumption platform. That’s it.

Once a piece of content has been released, there is no concrete way to force consumers to experience that content in any given way. Furthermore, as soon as more than one piece of content in an entertainment property is published, the creators can no longer control the order or sequence in which audiences experience the content, much less the presentation of the content.

Your film may find its way to bittorrent, your art may be copied and published on someones’ personal blog, your TV show credits may get remixed, heck even your commercial may become an Internet meme. But I digress (and I have also touched on the benefits of piracy and transmedial advertising in a post from last year).

The lack of control over entry points into a property and the narrative sequencing of the content within the property are both the challenge and the opportunity for storytellers playing in the transmedial sandbox.

Audience members may enter your entertainment property via your comic but then discover your video game, which leads them to the novels. Or they may play your ARG, which prompts them to see your movie, and they may never read the comic or play the game.

Image by Ethan Hein, Creative Commons BY 2.0

Creators can coax, guide, and hint at the ‘proper’ entry points and narrative paths through a transmedial property, but they cannot enforce them.

In this sense, audiences members can, within a transmedial property, choose their own narrative paths through the world. But that does not automatically equate to such transmedial properties as necessarily being sub-standard storytelling experiences, nor does it follow that a loss of control over plot/narrative for the property as a whole dictates a rudderless storyworld for audiences.

In other words, don’t confuse the loss of control between transmedial content pieces (e.g., the self-created sequence of narrative paths between the content pieces) with the loss of control over the experiences of the individual content pieces (the movie, the TV show, the ARG, etc.). Most audiences still tend to consume discrete media the same way they always have: by beginning at the beginning and ending at the end.

The freedom for audiences to choose how they want to interact with your entertainment property, coupled with the ability to reach wider audiences by offering more than one medium/experience, is powerful indeed.

The challenge for transmedia creatives is to figure out how the individual stories (books, films, etc.) can be integrated and related so that multiple narrative pathways and content/narrative sequencing can still produce an enjoyable entertainment experience. To the degree that properties support multiple coherent narrative sequencing with multiple entry-point medium opportunities, they can engage a larger audience and provide a richer, deeper experience.

At this point, you should be thinking something along the lines of, “Man, I bet Chuck Norris can’t even get a cup of coffee at a Starbucks without screwing up the inventory of coffee beans.” Or you might be thinking, “Transmedial properties are hard to do well.”

You’d be right in both cases.

Native transmedia properties (v. franchise extensions or transmedia marketing) require an inordinate amount of energy and time to pull off properly. They demand not just a mastering of story but a mastering of medium. Individual stories must be matched to the mediums that best presents them to the audience.

But these challenges should not hinder creatives from shouldering the mantle of transmedia storytelling, nor shirk the opportunities inherent in co-creating value with audiences because it’s more work. We’re just beginning to map this new territory, and there’s a lot of treasure waiting to be found.

For anyone creating a transmedial property, I encourage you to ask yourself two questions: (1) what are the benefits to inviting audiences to the table of canoncity? and (2) what are the creative possibilities when you trust audiences to chart their own narrative pilgrimage through your entertainment property?

Given the company’s reputation for a heavy-handed approach to copyright enforcement, I harbored few hopes that my ideas would meet with a warm reception. I was, then, pleasantly surprised by the forward-thinking views of so many employees regarding the future of entertainment in an increasingly digital and connected world.

In fact, Disney’s interactive division has a great example of how some entertainment can be opened up to include a higher degree of collaboration with consumers. Disney’s online arm, Take180, has been up officially for over a year, and I discussed Take180 during my presentation.

Take180 produces content where fans can affect ‘what happens next.’  Here’s a description from the take180 website:

“Take180 is a new website featuring shows made with audience participation. Members of the site’s community contribute videos, stories, photos and artwork in response to specific challenges from the show producers. The community also provides feedback by commenting and voting on submissions from other members. Winning submissions are then featured in future episodes and the winners of each challenge receive various prizes.”

I was mildly impressed, based on the description of how the content was structured, to hear just how collaborative the project seemed.

After taking a look at the site and reviewing the terms and conditions, I’m both disappointed and optimistic.

Take180 has created a great foundation for deep engagement and true participation with consumers, but it has not embraced the full potential of the site. Take180 seems to be quietly waiting for someone to recognize how it could become meaningfully collaborative and engage and sustain a larger, more loyal audience.

Take180 creates produces a handful of online video series across a broad range of topics (including the obligatory vampire story) and genres. Occasionally, each series will post “challenges” for its fans. One current challenge for the “I <3 Vampires” show is, “Pick Your Prey: Would you turn people into vampires? If so, how would you pick your prey?”

Fans upload text, video, or image submissions, with the winning submission earning the fan a gift certificate (usually $100-300).

Other examples include more traditional choose-your-own-adventure type questions (“How should character X find character Y?“) and requests for content that can be directly placed into an episode (“Please upload a video of a real-sounding news story“).

Some are outright solicitations for ideas (“Tell us what TV show or movie you’d like to see spoofed and how!“).

Many are little more than invitations to share personal experiences and do not directly influence the series (“Share your deep thoughts,” “Tell us about the nicest thing you’ve ever done for someone,” etc.).

Submissions are posted on the site for fans to vote and comment on them (and each other – the site has the basics for facilitating peer-level fan interaction).

I’m encouraged by the quantity and quality from fans in response to challenges. There is clearly a lot going right at Take180, especially in how they use the challenges to drive peer-level interaction and appeal to people’s desire to share their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and beliefs with others (in this case, within the context of a popular show that has a communal appeal). They have set the submission bar fairly low, meaning fans can quickly jump into challenges without needing to spend hours researching characters, mythologies, etc. And they offer many ways to play.

And a recent challenge involving Fran Drescher was the equivalent of a public-service-announcement about early detection of cancer mashed up with a challenge about living healthy. At the end of a short comedic video, Drescher asks viewers to visit cancerschmancer.org and then issues a challenge to submit ways viewers live a healthy lifestyle.

Leaving aside the jarring dissonance (one minute I’m watching Drescher’s recently “found” Avatar audition tape, which is funny and features Jon Landau, and the next minute I’m being told that cancer’s a dangerous thing), the result of the challenge is that viewers are submitting their thoughts and actions about living healthier lives. And giving each other positive reinforcement. And voting on their favorite entries.

This challenge has consumers talking amongst themselves, sharing stories with each other, and helping boost their individual self-esteem.

Points to Disney for all of the above.

But I think there’s more it could be doing both on the collaborative side and on finding additional value in the submissions.

1) Make the Submissions Reusable

The kinds of calls to action Take180 issues are fleeting and finite in nature. Anyone stumbling into season three of a series is unlikely to care much about the submissions from a season one challenge (especially one that has limited applicability to the story, such as the request for fake news reports – how many of those do you want to sit through?).

Instead, Take180 could design the calls to action so that submissions have sustainable valuable that can be ported beyond the life of the series.

Content that takes a lot of time to create is one way to achieve this, though it obviously requires a higher degree of commitment by fans. A good short story takes time to create, but it has a longer shelf life than “Come up with a really cool nickname for this character!” For shows entering their second or third season (theoretically on the basis that they have a large and growing fanbase), this isn’t out of the question, however.

2) Facilitate Self-Directed, Peer-Level Collaboration

As far as I can tell, the collaboration is limited to Take180 and its fans. Fans are not given challenges that prompt them to collaborate amongst themselves.

Take180 should mix in challenges that don’t request specific pieces of content but instead point to specific types of actions/behaviors that let consumers determine for themselves what the end product (i.e., content) should look like, as well as self-direct how it’s made.

3) Your Submission Didn’t Win, But It’s Still a Winner

Quality isn’t limited to the winning submission. Take180 should pull the gems from the submission inbox and bundle them in ways that create a new value offering (i.e., remix/repurpose/recontext them).

Also, Take180 should find ways to rebundle submissions from within a show that spanned different challenges. You probably won’t want to sit through 129 fan-produced versions of a particular song, but you would want to easily view the most popular submissions that centered around your favorite character. This would involve a little UI/UX and functional work to make the content tagging support easy discovery/navigation, but that’s not a Herculean effort.

4) Legal Limitations

The Take180 Terms of Service appear to prevent any content, including submissions by consumers, from being used anywhere except on the Take180 site and the consumer’s home computer. While the reasons behind this are obvious (both from a business standpoint and a legal standpoint), I’m struck by the inconsistent message this connates.

This attitude of “Come play at Take180!” grinds against the “All Your [Submission] Are Belong to Us!” legal conditions for playing.

Yes, I understand that walling off your content theoretically drives up your page views since the content only lives on your website. But this approach towards ownership of content is akin to inviting your friends to bring their toys when they come play in your cool sandbox, then informing them that any toys they bring have to stay in your sandbox.

In a time when discovery trumps both content quality and piracy as the biggest hurdle to engagement with audiences, why limit your marketing reach to those already on your site? Why not let at least the submission content be posted on other sites and act as beacons back to yours?

5) Expanded User Narration

The overall feel of the site is that viewers actually have very little say in exploring the worlds created in the series. Certainly, not every series lends itself to this (“I <3 Vampires” is a far better candidate for this than “electricspoofaloo“), but for those that do, Take180 should carve out areas where it’s safe for fans to build out the world.

There are lots of implied spaces for fans to fill in world narrative holes. Done correctly, exploring implied spaces actually sets the stage for asking more questions about the world than it answers.

And this is all the more applicable if Take180 maintains its all-rights approach to submission content.

Conclusion: I <3 take180

Overall, I like Take180′s premise.

It’s got momentum and the platform for building a really engaged audience.

It also has fantastic advertising opportunities (traditional, branded and sponsored).

However, it could push the collaborative envelope more. It could shift the legal lines of content ownership to construct larger creative spaces for fans to co-create additional value with Take180. By taking a slightly different focus for the challenges, Take180 can find a lot of sustained value in the user-generated content.

With the Disney company behind it, Take180 could become a great example of how to explore new licensing approaches to collaborative commercial entertainment and develop new intellectual properties at the same time.

Not what it cost you to produce or acquire it.

Not what you feel or believe it is worth.

Not what you sold it for yesterday, last week, last month, or last year.

After watching a series of comments on a “hey, here’s how to make free content work!” post yesterday, I was reminded of two things:

• no demand means no money (simple economics)
• for a business to be profitable, it must bring something to the market that sells for more than it cost to produce

If the market you operate in changes, especially due to external conditions (consider IBM, Kodak, newspapers), you must change and adapt if you want to remain relevant. If the market no longer values your product/service at a level above your expenses, you have a problem.

There are lots of opinions and statements surrounding the concept of free, but at the end of the day, you have to adjust your business model to accommodate both intra-industrial and external market conditions. Legislated subsidization, complaining that no one understands your value to the world, and suing your customers do nothing to better position your business in the long run.

Yes, for many companies, these are incredibly tough, scary times. Dropping prices, attention fragmentation, and increased competition are a serious combination of challenges to deal with. If companies don’t adapt, some of them won’t be around next year, or they’ll be a former shadow of themselves. But only if they stop adapting.

Change brings both risk and opportunity. You can play defensively and manage risk, act progressively and reach for opportunity, or use a little of both strategies. But ignoring the realities of economics and fundamental business concepts is a recipe for obsolescence.

The first was meeting Faris Yakob at Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling class at USC. Yakob talked about his experiences incorporating transmedial approaches in his job as the EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson New York and gave this presentation about transmedia storytelling in a converged culture.

The second thing was seeing a post on techdirt.com about Kevin Smith’s take on digital piracy of his products. When asked, “How much money do you think your projects have lost to piracy?” Smith replied:

See, I think “How many more converts did I get from piracy?”

Smith’s comment echoed my own thoughts about digital piracy: it’s a never-ending game of Internet whack-a-mole. I was pleased to see that someone who had achieved success in the entertainment machine agreed with that view.

So, what does transmedial advertising and digital piracy have in common?

I’d like to suggest that piracy is advertising (I won’t go on record and say the reverse is true).

People can’t buy what they’re not exposed to. Piracy gets your product exposure.

Now, the catch is determining whether you make up your “lost” sales (the people who consume the pirated content and never buy) with the “found” sales (the people who purchased your product because they were exposed to it through piracy). There are no hard numbers either way (though there’s some initial research that appears to indicate digital piracy isn’t the death knell of books), but the reality is that if content is good, it will be digitized. If not by the creator, then by someone else.

Even if you don’t buy my argument about piracy and advertising, you’re only alternative is to pick up the mallet and start whacking.

As Rushkoff points out, consumers of content often move from simple, passive consumption to an interactive mode over time. This leads to consumers using content in ways not desired or even envisioned by the creator/owner. As a result, owners of content are increasingly losing control over how their content is consumed/used, particularly if they release it over the Internet.

There are many implications to entertainment creation/consumption as a result of technological advances, but I want to focus on one aspect that I believe will become critical to media companies seeking to engage and retain interaction with fans of entertainment franchises: how to encourage and support the shift from passive consumer to active co-creator.

By active co-creator, I don’t mean posting forum comments on a website or being allowed to make mashups without being sued. I mean having a seat the the Table of Canonicity that comes with monetary and legal benefits. I mean being able to truly interact with the franchise content in a way that lets everyone benefit. I mean participating in a business model that leverages the inherent qualities of the Internet, harnesses the creative community’s passion and abilities, and takes a collaborative approach to world narrative. I outlined one such new model, the renewable entertainment franchise, in an earlier post.

There are lots of reasons why media companies eschew the idea of letting fans sit at the Table of Canonicity. Content owners view each additional seat at this table as being both expensive and fraught with legal risks.

However, most of these arguments stem from a mindset that believes (a) digital content piracy can be realistically fought, (b) fans are incapable of producing quality content, and (c) all revenue dollars must come from direct monetization of digital content. This mindset is based on business-as-usual presumptions which are no longer necessarily true.

Digital content piracy cannot be realistically fought. Content owners would be better off removing the reasons for piracy and finding ways to engage their audience than wasting millions of dollars on whack-a-mole approaches to stamping out digital piracy on the Internet.

Fans are capable of creating quality content. Where else does all the new talent come from except from former fans turned professional?

And the idea that digital content must be directly monetized in each and every case is out-dated. Pure digital content is shifting to the realm of advertisement. Sure, the markets for plastic discs and books (even television) are showing signs of decline, but they’re not going to disappear altogether. Sure, advertising may still be sorting itself out in the online world, but it’s not going away, either. And don’t forget merchandising. Don’t ignore the $600M industry of virtual goods. Don’t write off the potential for future revenue streams that haven’t been discovered yet.

The digital content landscape is still shifting, and it’s unclear where traditional media companies will be standing. But one thing is certain: companies that continue to pretend they can lock up their content, criminalize the consumers who are their most ardent fans, and dictate the terms under which fans interact with their content will find themselves fighting for attention. As Tim O’Reilly wrote back in 2002, obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than piracy.