busyYou can see something similar in my work. I write poetry rather fast, so I can afford to sell it at reasonable rates. You could buy a whole magazine for the $10 it would cost to sponsor a medium-short poem -- but you'd be getting what someone else thought was good, not necessarily what's to your own taste. My sponsorable poems are mostly based on audience ideas, so this is stuff you folks are interested in. Plus, you get nonexclusive reprint rights if you sponsor a poem from me. This is the kind of place to find bargains in homemade stuff: anything the creator can do quickly, easily, and offer to a variety of folks.
Now look at my custom work. You can commission a scrapbook page of a poem. Prices on those include my assembly time and modest art skill, and the very high price of archival scrapbook materials: typically $5-10. Custom poetry typically runs about twice the rates for fishbowl poetry -- so for instance, it starts at $10 for short poems. Basically you pay extra to get exactly what you want from an expert who will work to your specifications.
When you buy something, you're paying for someone's time, skills, and materials. Buying direct from the creator gives you the best deal. Buying from a distributor or retail shop means there will be markup -- sometimes a huge amount -- for all the middlemen. But the economy of scale often compensates for that, so mass-market stuff tends to be cheaper. The quality is almost always lower, because that's a way to cut costs and maximize profit. When I buy a garment at Wal-Mart, I'm lucky if it survives a few years' of wear and tear. When I hand-sew one, it's built to last. I just can't resist rolling the seams to keep them from fraying. Much of my homemade Renaissance/fantasy/Pagan garb could be washed by beating it against a rock, and survive. Similarly with my poetry, it is built with a solid grasp of linguistics and comes in topics the mainstream rarely if ever broaches.
In other words: you get what you pay for. Shop Main Street.
Re: Thoughts
October 20 2011, 00:05:54 UTC 9 years ago
Re: Thoughts
October 20 2011, 00:13:51 UTC 9 years ago