Dogpile the luddite!

[chaotic_nipple]

According to the current Vice President of the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, authors who put their work online for free are "Webscabs" who are stealing food from the mouths of the children of those writers who don't chose to "give away their work".

I remember at DragonCon a few years ago, there was a panel on the "Future of Ebooks", and right after John Ringo gave a spiel about how every book that was put up for download on the Baen Free Library sold more paper copies afterwards, one of the other writers on the panel made the same argument. John's face went through such amazing contortions, I wish I'd had a video camera...

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

Seems to me that (if there's a problem at all,) it's a collective action problem.

Ain't no one going to pay me to make comics. Seriously, I've sold one item in the past two years, and that was to someone who wanted in my pants. Whopee, I made a quarter!

So I have two choices: give away content for free, and hope that someone out there likes what I draw and I make them happy, or publish nothing at all.

Now, personally, why the hell should I give a crap about anyone else? I enjoy my comic. It's actually the thing in my life of which I am most proud. I'm not giving up my comic just because some other writer doesn't want to get a fucking day job.


All that said, if the content ain't out there, people can't buy it. Increase the distribution of your content, and more people will buy it, even if some people mooch. Keeping the market artificially small and limited to benefit the elite few does not help the vast, vast majority of us, either writers or readers.