Farewell to Free Milk: A True and Cautionary Tale

Heather Cushman-Dowdee, creator of the cartoons Hathor the Cow Goddess and Mama Is, is a member of my local homeschooling community. We see each other at park gatherings at least once a month, and we always have a good long talk about our respective businesses. She recommended a printer for me; I proofread one of her books. We both appreciate having another indie to confer with and gripe to.

Her work has appeared in Mothering magazine. She's asked to speak at conferences and conventions. She has fervid fans the world over (and a lot of seething haters, which is always a good sign). I figured she must be sitting pretty, until we started talking and she mentioned that in a good month, her profits break three digits.

She has struggled and largely failed to get advertising for her site -- which is bizarre to me, since her hit counts are something I can only dream of. Her work is available for sale in book and print form, but it doesn't move much, because her fans can look at her work on her site. They absolutely adore her, but their philosophy is, quite literally, why buy a cow when the milk is free?

She has always been able to work against all odds. She homeschools, which means that quite aside from being responsible for the education of several children, she has said children around all the time. I have a hard enough time tapping the keys with one little questioner on the premises; she's creating actual physical art with four.

The last few weeks have been rather quiet on the Hathor front. I hadn't received any notices that new cartoons were up on either of her sites, and I heard nothing back when I sent her a link to information about a baby doll being marketed in Europe that allows little girls to pretend to nurse (trust me, it's not as creepy as it might sound). I figured that with a relatively new baby and three other kids, even the queen of concentration is bound to hit a rough patch now and then.

Then I got a notice from her site. "Big Changes!"

Everything was fine. All the nearest and dearest were healthy and still near and dear.

But the blog was, on closer consideration, "way way [sic] more work than it's worth."

Her books are still available, and she's going to put out more of them. But the people who value her work are going to actually -- gasp! -- have to buy it.

You'd think she'd announced that the only currency she'd accept was unbaptized babies.

No! Wait! Please! Let's talk about this! I asked for your book for my birthday! And if I don't get it, I might even go ahead and order it myself! Really! No, really! Just please don't stop giving us all your work for free! You can't do this to us!

It reminded me of that line in Where the Wild Things Are: "We'll eat you up, we love you so!"

One person asked if there couldn't be some kind of deal where really dedicated, adoring fans could pay a fee to have access to the blog. Well, first of all: very few sites have managed to make that kind of thing pay, and they tend to engender a lot of hostility. ("You can't read their articles unless you pay for them, can you believe!") Second, odds are good that since the reason Hathor's closing shop in the first place is that people aren't willing to pay for her work, they'll probably continue to be unwilling to pay for her work. And third, why not put aside the sum you'd be willing to pay every month to see her work, keep saving it up until it equals the cost of one of her books, and then buy the book?

I tried to be generous at first. Most of these people don't know Heather/Hathor personally. They don't hear her at the park, laughing grimly at her own sweatshop wages (we've agreed at various times that we really ought to call the cops on our respective employers), wondering aloud if her profits are going to cover her costs this month and forget about actually making money on her time and energy.

Then I remembered all the times that she has mentioned money issues on her blog. She's begged people to please support her advertisers as best they can. She's made it easy to buy inexpensive, high-quality copies of her work (is a dollar too much for that cartoon you love so much?). She's mentioned the new baby, and getting evicted when she was heavily pregnant with him.

And the people who absolutely adored her work just plain didn't buy it. Because, well, surely she didn't mean them. Sure, somebody should get their rear in gear and give her some money. Didn't she have advertisers? She really should.

It didn't strike anyone as ironic that they were expecting advertisers to give Heather/Hathor money when the advertisers' only interest in her work was whether it could drum up business for them. The people who adored Hathor weren't going to shell out a dime, and they were outraged that total strangers wouldn't pick up the financial slack.

At one point, she had some advertisers via Google. She wasn't making any money off of them, because people just went to her site, read the new comic, laughed, and left. So she asked people to please click an ad now and then.

I asked my husband, the resident techie, about this. On his advice, I looked carefully at all the ads when I went to look at a new comic. I didn't click on ads for things like nursing bras or slings, because I don't use those any more. I clicked on things like birth centers in my area (I harbor dreams of becoming a doulah or birth assistant someday) or handmade toy companies. I signed up to get on some of the mail lists that would send me promotional emails.

This took time and thought. If the rest of her readers had done something like this, she'd have made some money because her advertisers would be happy because they'd have had some meaningful click-throughs.

Instead, people had fun with it. (This isn't a surmise on my part; they posted gleefully on the comments section of Heather's blog, saying exactly what they were doing.) They went and clicked on an ad, backed up, clicked on the same ad, backed up, clicked on the same ad, backed up...

This isn't the kind of thing that makes advertisers happy. So Google, which isn't run by idiots, pulled all their ads from Heather's site. And her readers, considering themselves to have done their duty by her, continued for the most part not to pay for her work.

My husband was with his roommate at a university bookstore once. It was crammed with students getting their books for their new classes. My husband didn't need anything, but he saw a new book by a favorite cartoonist, Roz Chast. He picked it up and stood in line with his roommate. The line was huge; by the time he reached the counter, he'd finished the book.

"You're not going to buy that now, are you?" his roommate asked, shocked.

"Of course I am."

"But you've already read it. You don't need to buy it now."

I'm a rereader, so this argument wouldn't apply to me. But the fact is, my husband probably wouldn't read this book again.

If he'd read some of it, decided he didn't like it, and set it down again, he wouldn't have felt any ethical obligation to pay the money.

However, he'd basically consumed the artist's book. He liked her work, and he'd availed himself of it. So he felt, if anything, more obligated to buy it now than he would have if he hadn't finished the book yet.

His roommate was mystified by this ridiculous behavior. My husband was obviously an idiot, paying for something he'd already gotten for free.

Heather's business model was to charge her readers for, say, a year's worth of work. But they didn't have to pay until they'd already seen it. (Her books include more than just her cartoons, by the way. She has essays and articles as well.) Then, after they'd spent several months enjoying her art and agreeing that they liked it very much, they could pony up and buy the book.

The profound majority of her readers skipped that crucial last step.

Heather finally got tired of working for free and being used by people who allegedly loved her.

Amazingly (to me, at least), her old Hathor comics will still be available to read on www.thecowgoddess.com

But readers who are interested in her new work can buy it if they really want to see it.

This chilling cautionary tale isn't for the faint of heart. But in honor of the Halloween season so soon to be upon us, I thought I'd share it.