Am I crazy in thinking that $20,000 is actually a very reasonable figure? I mean, that's only about what parents pay for a year of art school (or dance school or whatever), and having the experience of being in one of these videos is probably as valuable. And even if the videos hadn't blown up/gone viral, having a high production value video that you can show people is better than a bunch of headshots.
It's still crazy to me that parents have that kind of money to just drop on this sort of thing, but... if they do, why not?
This is the fundamental dilemma when talking about the difference between vanity projects and self-publishing so to speak (I'm using that term just because it's familiar and what I've dealt with in the writing field).
The message we finally agreed to in the writing world was that the very basic difference between vanity publishing and self publishing was this: if you pay to have it done, you should control EVERY aspect of that process, particularly the
rights when it's completed. That's what self-publishing is all about, and if for some reason you're giving away any aspect of that, it's vanity publishing and you'll likely regret that choice.
That's the business side of the question. The artistic side is much fuzzier.
My personal opinion is that the biggest artistic danger from both methods is short-circuiting natural development. Vanity companies in particular are dangerous here because their job is to feed the delusion that using them is just as good as actually selling the work to a standard company, so they use the same language of being "accepted" and use many of the same contract terms and royalty rates. Except their royalties don't reflect that they're taking absolutely no chance on the work. I know tons of writers who are relieved that it was their 5th or 6th book that was finally accepted by a publisher, because while at the time they may have totally believed in that work, when they look at it with experience and perspective, they realize they still had a LONG way to go artistically.
A successful self-financed venture requires a very very clear idea of what the tradeoffs are against traditional paths. By hiding these tradeoffs from the client, vanity companies leave folks with a huge handicap because the client expects the promotion to come from the company, but either the company skimps because every dollar spent is a dollar less profit, or what promo they do is badly targeted and useless.
Which gets to the other heart of the matter. Vanity companies quickly get a bad reputation for putting out utter shite. I can't tell you how many copies of books from vanity presses we got at the bookstore that we immediately dumped into the recycle bin because there was absolutely no chance that the book had any merit. And we're talking about a 500-store chain where the vanity press would charge the author for promotional copies at maybe 20% off of an already inflated retail price.
We DID however end up stocking several self-published books because the author took the time to target us specifically, typically with books that had a local interest angle, and we usually did decent sales on a lot of these.
So to cut a long rant short, for $20,000 you not only get to be the boss, but you damn well better know what that means if you don't want to end up flushing it all down the toilet.
Now in these days of negative celebrity being an asset these particular stage parents may have just hit the lottery, but usually it just means being ignored, which we can all achieve for much less cash with a webcam and a youtube account.
Is that the twitter listed on that company page she's signed to? Cause I'm fairly certain that's controlled by the company.
Yeah, I've yet to see anything at all that appears to be coming from her own thoughts at this point.