4 ms·

Or nobody sells your book at all. You give it away for free on the Internet, and you make money off speaking appearances.

benologist 15y ago
It's very easy to say someone else should work for nothing and do additional work to earn money. Do you have a free-job that consumes most of your time, and a paid-job you fit in around it?
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  It's sort of difficult to say whether I have a free-job or a paid-job. I certainly do a lot of volunteering.
eropple 15y ago
Because that's very realistic (Cory Doctorow aside, and he's a special case). It's foolish besides--speaking engagements, etc. take away time from actually producing creative works. It's the sort of miss-the-point silliness often espoused by the anti-IP sorts: "spend an incredible amount of time doing X to maybe, if you're lucky, sell a marginal number of Y, where Y is totally unrelated to X." It's silly and a misallocation of a wtiter's resources to take away from actually writing to hit the speaking circuit.
- johnnyjustice 15y ago
  Well that's not fair, its not simply foolish. He prefaced his comment with "Or" meaning that its a possible business model. I think it would be fantastic to speak to my favorite writers and I know their time is valuable so I would pay to. But I am not stating that it is the perfect path. Though it would be nice if people considered it as a possibility.
  - eropple 15y ago
    It certainly is possible revenue source--once you have a big enough fanbase to support it. Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero. It is not, in the general case, very viable. Which is why nobody takes it very seriously as a good path for all, or even most, writers. Because they have to eat, too.
    - lukeschlather 15y ago
      >Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero. That's pretty much what most artists go through now, isn't it? I'm not convinced that copyright does a particularly good job of solving that problem. I'm not saying I definitely think copyright should be abolished, but it does at best a very mediocre job of rewarding artists.
      - eropple 15y ago
        I'm not so sure. Given the rise of self-publishing services, once your product is done (or even close to done, I suppose), you can immediately start generating cash flow. If you have some pleasant "free culture" person spreading the book free of charge and against your copyright, you're probably losing some sales. (Obviously not every person who downloads it for free would have bought it otherwise, but c'mon. The number of people in that category is almost definitely not zero.) It's not going to keep you in gold-plated Maseratis, but it can start to add up.
        lukeschlather 15y ago
        Yes, but can it pay rent? I guess, my concern is that it may be better to hold down a single, solid, paying job and do art in your spare time than trying to hold down enough art gigs to add up to a job. You end up doing a lot of hard work making ends meet. Making it appear like art is a generally viable career choice might be doing more harm than good in the average case.

benologist 15y ago

It's very easy to say someone else should work for nothing and do additional work to earn money. Do you have a free-job that consumes most of your time, and a paid-job you fit in around it?

lukeschlather 15y ago
It's sort of difficult to say whether I have a free-job or a paid-job. I certainly do a lot of volunteering.

eropple 15y ago

Because that's very realistic (Cory Doctorow aside, and he's a special case). It's foolish besides--speaking engagements, etc. take away time from actually producing creative works. It's the sort of miss-the-point silliness often espoused by the anti-IP sorts: "spend an incredible amount of time doing X to maybe, if you're lucky, sell a marginal number of Y, where Y is totally unrelated to X." It's silly and a misallocation of a wtiter's resources to take away from actually writing to hit the speaking circuit.

johnnyjustice 15y ago
Well that's not fair, its not simply foolish. He prefaced his comment with "Or" meaning that its a possible business model. I think it would be fantastic to speak to my favorite writers and I know their time is valuable so I would pay to. But I am not stating that it is the perfect path. Though it would be nice if people considered it as a possibility.
- eropple 15y ago
  It certainly is possible revenue source--once you have a big enough fanbase to support it. Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero. It is not, in the general case, very viable. Which is why nobody takes it very seriously as a good path for all, or even most, writers. Because they have to eat, too.
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    >Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero. That's pretty much what most artists go through now, isn't it? I'm not convinced that copyright does a particularly good job of solving that problem. I'm not saying I definitely think copyright should be abolished, but it does at best a very mediocre job of rewarding artists.
    - eropple 15y ago
      I'm not so sure. Given the rise of self-publishing services, once your product is done (or even close to done, I suppose), you can immediately start generating cash flow. If you have some pleasant "free culture" person spreading the book free of charge and against your copyright, you're probably losing some sales. (Obviously not every person who downloads it for free would have bought it otherwise, but c'mon. The number of people in that category is almost definitely not zero.) It's not going to keep you in gold-plated Maseratis, but it can start to add up.
      - lukeschlather 15y ago
        Yes, but can it pay rent? I guess, my concern is that it may be better to hold down a single, solid, paying job and do art in your spare time than trying to hold down enough art gigs to add up to a job. You end up doing a lot of hard work making ends meet. Making it appear like art is a generally viable career choice might be doing more harm than good in the average case.