20/08/2025
Feel pretty chuffed that my portrait of Bob Brown is on the cover of his memoir Defiance. Bob is someone I hugely respect, like many of us do - so it’s a real honour to play a small part in keeping his story and fight for our environment in focus.
‘Our unifying purpose ought to be safeguarding life on earth, honouring happiness and securing humanity for its future in the universe. This simple and obvious pursuit, far ahead of money, offers us meaning to life on our brilliant little planet.’ —Bob Brown
This moment however, also highlights my own personal battle and defiance, over the difficulties creatives have in dealing with big business over the rights for their work.
Audible, that audio book giant, want to use the same image for their e-book version cover. They offered me $400 for the rights - that’s for use on all platforms and marketing material, forever. Not bad you might think. Except on investigating the offer I discovered the average payment for such rights is generally x5 that amount. So I’ve put a higher figure to Audible and am waiting on a response to negotiate to a fair arrangement. But this shows how big highly profitable business very often, in my experience, expect basement level fees for intellectual rights to artistic content that will make them tens of thousands of dollars. As an artist you have to value yourself and be in many ways defiant against this. I would rather they don’t use my image than walk away feeling like I’ve been done over. My name won’t be listed next to the image, there’s no direct promotional benefit to me in this scenario so a fair financial outcome is justified - but I really shouldn’t have to ask for that from those that can afford it.
Btw, the fee for the rights for the paper book publisher to use the image was $800. They are a small independent Australian owned business. So that’s a fair license fee for them and me. Let’s see if Audible respond and offer a fair fee for the usage they want.
The point of raising this is
