Enlighten Someone Daily Productions - Frequently Asked Questions

Enlighten Someone Daily Productions

Frequently Asked Questions

(And Our Answers!)

1. Why does your website suck? Thanks for asking and thanks for the polite phrasing of your question! Our website is well-below industry standards for two simple reasons. First, we believe very strongly in paying talent what they are worth and our capital reserves are nonexistent. So, we put money into our art and products and figure that people who appreciate our style of work and anticapitalist advocacy would be more open to accepting "We're poor and didn't want to exploit a professional" than "We're poor and we found some sucker who desperately needed the job and was willing to work on the promise of *snicker* future income from us. Look at what they made! HA!" That's the truth.

The second reason our website isn't vastly superior to what it is now is corporate greed. See, back in the day, there were a TON of "What You See Is What You Get" website programs. They were easy to use, intuitive and came with no strings. Someone who is decidedly not a computer programmer/website designer like yours truly could easily use them and generate websites that looked like what you'd expect. Times have changed. There are a crapton of services out there that offer "free" website design... unless you already own your own domain name. We own "www.enlightensomeonedaily.com" and so the current WYSIWYG services are all about exploiting us for money we don't have. Our website sucks because we're not programmers and we don't have the money, time or easy ability to both improve the site AND produce our art. Are you happy now?!

2. Why are your books not available on Amazon.com? Why don't you have eBooks? Why don't you have audio books? Great question! All three are related and tie back to the answers to question #1. But it's also a little more complicated. Pull up a seat.
We are essentially a start-up. We're scrappy, we don't care if we're cool; we aim for significance as opposed to flash. Why don't we do business with Amazon.com? Very simple reason: Amazon.com demands books be wholesaled to them at a specific rate that makes it unfavorable to presses like ours that print in smaller batches (initially). To meet Amazon.com's wholesaling discounts, we would have to produce in much greater volume than we do... until then, we would literally (not figuratively, this is the actual definition of "literally" here!) be paying Amazon.com to stock our books. We would lose money on every book we sent to them and they would make all of the profit. Why do you want that for us?!
The secondary answer is that we stand against virtually everything Amazon.com currently promotes. A.I.? We're firmly against it. Worker's rights? We're firmly for them! Artist rights? We're so amazingly firmly for them that Amazon seems evil in comparison. Uplifting the poor? We're for that! Generating profits for billionaires? We're against that. So, you see... if you don't like what Amazon.com stands for, we offer a difference. Yeah, we're not as convenient... but having morals and backing them up with your dollars isn't always easy or cheap, especially when those who stand counter to your stated values try to make it easy and cheap to sell out your fellow human being. At Enlighten Someone Daily Productions, no worker has ever had to urinate in a bottle because they couldn't leave their post.
Why don't we have eBooks? See above, plus... technology. If you like eBooks, odds are one of the aspects you like is the convenience of the eBook, especially as it relates to sharing. That's great for consumers, terrible for artist/producers. We value our books. They took us time to make, time to edit, time to sell, they cost money. We love libraries and we will continue to enthusiastically sell to libraries and sell at libraries that host us. We love libraries! But eBook technology has a lot of sharing or pirating options that screw artists out of royalties. We don't have a good system to ensure that our works aren't shared with people who did not pay for them. And for those who want to point out that places like Amazon.com have statistics that show usage, I would like to point out that you're trusting a company to audit in favor of the artists and royalties they owe when they treat workers so poorly that they cannot use the toilet without being penalized. This is the same company that screws over artists for royalties for their streaming services, is actively generating shitty a.i. materials, and has shown utter disdain for humans in general... you think they can be trusted to provide artists with accurate sales and distribution data of an untraceable digital product? Simple answer: there's no external audit that ensures we would be fairly paid and no technology that prevents unpaid sharing.
Why don't you have audio books? Same as all of the above, PLUS lack of ability to pay audio talent. And lack of time for us to do the readings ourselves (we have audio recordings of prior works and let me tell you, me trying to present the accents I've written is hilarious to listen to!) and edit. Do you know how much time it takes to edit an audio book? Especially when you don't have a proper booth or mixing board and are just doing it by the seat of your pants, audio book presentation is a whole lot of money and time to invest and we just don't have that. There are some amazingly talented audio book readers and given all of the stuff we've said above, we wouldn't hire one on spec with the promise of "future profits" because we believe in ethical distribution and that cuts into them getting what is rightfully theirs. We'd love to enter this lucrative market... but not at the expense of our values and how we treat talent that works with us.

3. Why are your books so expensive? Why is the crochet you sell so expensive? We're going to disagree on this one. The day we wrote this, the Blu-Ray of The Last Of Us Season 1 was priced at $27.99 - $39.99 at major retailers. That's a production from a premium service (HBO) and nets the buyer 9 episodes (10 hours) of television. Our books are $25/ea and will provide many more than 10 hours of entertainment. Over and over again, they can be reread all for only that initial $25. It took us a long time to write, edit, print and sell these books... all without the backing of capital like HBO or other production houses have. $25 is a steal. Please don't steal our books. We deserve to be paid for them. And when you do, the mind that created the current thing that made you think can keep producing more!
Similarly, the crochet is painfully underpriced. Our artist does AMAZING things with crochet. If all you consider is "cost of materials" and what the final product looks like, you have absolutely no conception of the amount of labor, creativity and time that goes into the crochet. If you want blanket yarn products that everyone else is making, that's fine (they should be charging more for their stuff, too! It's handmade artwork! Your time and life are WORTH something! Charge for it like it is!). Our artist makes high-quality fiber art statues unlike what anyone else is producing. She makes them with love and more talent than other artists working the medium (this is especially evident when other crochet artists visit our table to drool over our artist's work!). Other artists look at ours and try to figure out how she did what she did in order to replicate it. That's kinda douchey; like hearing a musical artist perform and saying, "I think I can make a knock-off brand of that sound." The difference is: they're creating trying to eat into a marketshare - our artist does her own thing, produces amazing works based on what she's passionate about and the results are incredible. Pay her what she's worth! That's our philosophy. And so if you're looking at a piece that took six days of labor to make, why would you think - no matter what size it ultimately is - that it is not worth a fair wage for that labor (on top of the materials)?! Women working in the fiber arts get screwed in the marketplace, including by others working in the same marketplace. We take pride in our artist's work and we value her, her labor and her art. You can show you value it, too, by paying for it on par with other forms of art. If you want a slave labor-made plush, we are not the company to do business with. If you want a unique work of art made of yarn (and sometimes additional accouterments), our artist takes commissions and delivers results that are superior for the medium (but also within what the medium is... expecting a photorealistic plush in a 12" yarn sculpture is unrealistic). Use that "contact us" thing below.

4. Where Does Enlighten Someone Daily stand on generative a.i.? We'll field this question until Tales From Our Current Apocalypse comes out, then refer readers to that. We will proudly stand over the cold, dead corpse of the a.i.s when the time comes. FUCK A.I. We are firmly, 100% against generative A.I. See our covers? We made them ourselves. They came from a human mind. Don't like 'em? We don't care; they are part of our creative process (yeah, there are marketing people who want to say a cover is more a marketing piece than part of the art and they're entitled to their view, but ours is... the cover is part of our work and the art and we make what fits the book, not what sanitizes it for the masses). But yeah, our work is not intended to be fed to the machines, we explicitly revoke - here and at any opportunity - all companies from stealing, using, or otherwise taking our copyright-protected works and utilizing them in any form for any artificial intelligence technology, now and forever. Fuck a.i.

5. Do you go out of your way to drive customers away? No. Most certainly not.
Here's the thing... Enlighten Someone Daily Productions was founded, in no small part, because W.L. Swarts recognized that the big production companies truly are about generating wealth for their companies. They bet on talent in such a way that they look to get their investment back and then grow wealth on top of that. That's a business model.

W.L. Swarts is resigned to not being a bestselling author. That's not in the cards. When you have niche ideas, when you have unpopular opinions, when you're not afraid to talk about things that offend people, when you want to provoke discussions... that's a terrible model for courting the broadest possible market in the world. It's great for cultivating a niche audience. It's great for challenging people who want to be stimulated and think about things they never have before. And here's the kicker:

If we accept that we're never going to be a bestselling author/mainstream artist, we can either spend our life fighting that or embracing it. In this context, that means that we can either continue producing what we want and hope it finds its audience or try to produce something we think might be more palatable for consumers on the hope that it brings in more customers. Given that latter is not a guarantee by any means, we'd rather stick to our principles and do our thing than sell out those values to become like everyone else. And it that sounds like company you'd like to support, please buy from us. Thank you.

6. Why does your website currently only offer PayPal as a payment method? Paypal has an automation tool we're able to use to accept credit cards. We have just learned about Zelle and we can accept payments through Zelle, but so far, we have not found an automated tool to do that. If you want to pay via Zelle, just e-mail us! (Because there aren't fees, it's actually less expensive to buy from us using Zelle).