As some of you know, The S.T.E.A.L. Saga was entirely licensed under a Creative Commons License, including the artwork. My idea was that it would be unfair to show the progress as I wrote the novels, only to withdraw them when completed and require payment to see the final version. In the end I think I did the right choice, but there were some matters that I didn’t quite take into consideration.
Thanks also to Too’s promotion, a fairly good amount of people went to visit the web page. Unfortunately, most of the hits were on the gallery section, rather than the novel itself. Notice that I didn’t expect everyone to rush out and buy the books, as the polls showed that a good number of visitors did not have a credit card or PayPal (unfortunately Lulu.com’s payment options are rather limited). No, the real problem was the visitors were only interested in the art. This actually escalated to the point that a minority thought that Too had done the novels.
Notice that being interested in the artwork is not bad by itself: actually that’s why I commissioned the works in the first place, to complement the writing nicely. However, this is a collaboration project between us and Too: both parts are required for it to become what it should be (not to mention that Too was even more involved in Vondrak, while creating characters. But I’ll save that for another post).
It is not a matter of sales or “lost revenue”, it is a matter of letting the project known for what it is. Therefore, (regrettably) I have to make a few changes to the policy used in The S.T.E.A.L Saga (notice that it will only apply to Vondrak: S.T.E.A.L. will stay as it is).
- The artwork will not be licensed under a Creative Commons license, but it will stay under standard copyright;
- The artwork will only be included in low resolution in the snapshots, and with a two week delay after the release (that means that newer snapshots will contain two week old artwork);
- Images in the gallery (once it’s up) will be only present in low resolution (maximum around 500×500) and watermarked. There will be exception for some images.
I welcome your input to solve these issues. This really bugs me, since I did not want to uphold such restrictions. And of course it does not mean I have any grudge against Too: on the contrary, our collaboration has been mostly prolific.