Web Ban Circumvention: Go Free
Oct. 6th, 2025 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: In my post about a physical newsletter, I forgot another thing we’ve been considering doing to circumvent the bans: make our digital work free and run it on donations like LiberaPay.
This would likely solve the payment processor problem, because the connection between money and art would be severed; the donations would just keep body and soul together while we make stuff, which people would then vote on to get posted. There would be no, “this costs such-and-so.” The money would be about my my survival, not my wares, and that’s unlikely to piss off a payment processor. (Though nonprofits, like guns and porn, are also considered “high-risk” ventures sometimes, so who knows? But I haven’t seen sweeping bans of THEM.)
(None of this would change how we sell our paper books or do cash sales, by the way. The only ban of our paper books was during the Cultiples backlash, and making the works free and pirateable axed that! So I do have a precedent for solving problems by making my work free.)
Going free with my digital work would still require a host willing to have my work there, but text is among the easiest and cheapest things to host. My fiction could go on Ao3 or Squidgeworld. My essays, if relevant, could go on theanarchistlibrary. Hell, I have an archive.org account, I could slap together ebooks of my writing and shove ‘em up there! I been meaning to do that with my sketchbook PDFs, since what else is there to do with them? Visual art and comics may be harder, but I believe in me! Hell, itch.io still seems to allow that stuff as long as it’s free!
No, the big trouble with the “going free” plan is trust. Can I trust my fans and readers to keep paying me if they don’t “have” to? Other folks have tried and had it not work out. (RIP cohost.) Sad as it is, in America we often have a competitive idea of customers wanting all the free stuff they can swindle and sellers gouging every cent, making “winning” or “beating our opponent” feel important. People can be shockingly entitled about things they haven’t paid for, as though the makers of said things can live off sunlight and air alone. Like city dwellers who think bacon comes from the grocery store, people like this think art comes from the Internet, completely disconnected from the financial realities of life. (You could argue that all-devouring artbots are the logical conclusion of this attitude. If art comes from The Internet, why have an inconvenient artist involved at all?)
Fortunately, our fans haven’t been like that. We have worked hard to encourage an understanding that when you pay us, you’re buying us library research time, toothpaste, pants. We just posted an essay about what we make and where it goes, in part to demystify all that! The people who do pirate our work are generally doing it because they’re having a really, really bad time, because we’ve explicitly told them to, or they want to spread stuff they find useful and are willing to pay in barter rather than cash. All of these are totally different situations than pirates who just want to “beat” the artist. (Those kinds of people, I disapprove of. Stealing from a disabled person on welfare will curse your raisin soul.)
It would admittedly kill me to no longer be able to sell AllFam or Multi Orgasmic as ebooks; that money has made so much difference in my life. But if the option becomes giving it away for free or having no ebook at all, I’ll take free.
This would likely solve the payment processor problem, because the connection between money and art would be severed; the donations would just keep body and soul together while we make stuff, which people would then vote on to get posted. There would be no, “this costs such-and-so.” The money would be about my my survival, not my wares, and that’s unlikely to piss off a payment processor. (Though nonprofits, like guns and porn, are also considered “high-risk” ventures sometimes, so who knows? But I haven’t seen sweeping bans of THEM.)
(None of this would change how we sell our paper books or do cash sales, by the way. The only ban of our paper books was during the Cultiples backlash, and making the works free and pirateable axed that! So I do have a precedent for solving problems by making my work free.)
Going free with my digital work would still require a host willing to have my work there, but text is among the easiest and cheapest things to host. My fiction could go on Ao3 or Squidgeworld. My essays, if relevant, could go on theanarchistlibrary. Hell, I have an archive.org account, I could slap together ebooks of my writing and shove ‘em up there! I been meaning to do that with my sketchbook PDFs, since what else is there to do with them? Visual art and comics may be harder, but I believe in me! Hell, itch.io still seems to allow that stuff as long as it’s free!
No, the big trouble with the “going free” plan is trust. Can I trust my fans and readers to keep paying me if they don’t “have” to? Other folks have tried and had it not work out. (RIP cohost.) Sad as it is, in America we often have a competitive idea of customers wanting all the free stuff they can swindle and sellers gouging every cent, making “winning” or “beating our opponent” feel important. People can be shockingly entitled about things they haven’t paid for, as though the makers of said things can live off sunlight and air alone. Like city dwellers who think bacon comes from the grocery store, people like this think art comes from the Internet, completely disconnected from the financial realities of life. (You could argue that all-devouring artbots are the logical conclusion of this attitude. If art comes from The Internet, why have an inconvenient artist involved at all?)
Fortunately, our fans haven’t been like that. We have worked hard to encourage an understanding that when you pay us, you’re buying us library research time, toothpaste, pants. We just posted an essay about what we make and where it goes, in part to demystify all that! The people who do pirate our work are generally doing it because they’re having a really, really bad time, because we’ve explicitly told them to, or they want to spread stuff they find useful and are willing to pay in barter rather than cash. All of these are totally different situations than pirates who just want to “beat” the artist. (Those kinds of people, I disapprove of. Stealing from a disabled person on welfare will curse your raisin soul.)
It would admittedly kill me to no longer be able to sell AllFam or Multi Orgasmic as ebooks; that money has made so much difference in my life. But if the option becomes giving it away for free or having no ebook at all, I’ll take free.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-06 10:39 pm (UTC)Yeah, a lot of people who are being squeezed in multiple directions look for someone they can "win" against so as to not feel powerless. And the person they target is usually not actually one of the people squeezing them, but someone who they can get away with hurting.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-07 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-07 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-07 03:15 pm (UTC)So indeed, I COULD just keep moving my products around different sites every time they’re banned, and I do think AllFam was truly banned in error... but I can’t actually prove that or even find anyone to talk to about it, because “depicting children in sexual situations” is true for a book about Raping Kids Is Bad! So for all I know it really is adult content this whole time and thus unsellable by Paypal standards!
(By this metric, Maus and Game of Thrones would also be unsellable by Paypal standards, but you may notice big sellers get lenience that small fish do not.)
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 06:30 pm (UTC)I’m also frankly unsure my work would be considered sellable. I did get somebody for AllFam, way back in the day, my #1 book, and nothing happened, I think because it was so dark. I kinda just focused on selling directly to my customers after that.
I’m not sure how to begin.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-07 09:56 pm (UTC)I just checked, and my upload of cultiples is still on archive.org
no subject
Date: 2025-10-08 03:27 pm (UTC)Rogan: I’ve also seen a “share your log-in and a bot will insta-scrape everything and upload it to a third-party website” thing. Now that’s just bad behavior and not the kind of audience I want.
I am glad to see those books weren’t taken down! So that trick looks to have worked!
no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 06:32 pm (UTC)