![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pixel-stained technokulak
Apr. 23rd, 2007 10:13 pmAlthough I found Howard Hendrix's criticisms of professional writers who put work online for free a little misplaced, I'm not really interested in being part of the gang lined up to make organized ridicule of his phrasing. I think he raises some interesting points that are worth discussing, however overblown his language.
The evidence that putting one's work online for free increases one's sales income is plentiful, but entirely empirical. Theory doesn't seem to have caught up to it, and I wish it would. Are these works loss-leaders? (That certainly helps, and was a known technique long before the web.) Do readers prefer their fiction on the printed page so much that they're willing to pay for things they could read for free on their computers? (I would, and sometimes have. I don't like reading anything longer than a long LJ post online, particularly creative writing - as opposed to journalism - that's dependent on serious nuances of style - as opposed to wit.) Or are they just book collectors?
But I'm happy to see a flourishing literary culture online too, and spend a lot of time here. I do not put all of my published writing online, but then neither do the self-proclaimed "pixel-stained technopeasants". I'm happy to see some of it, though. In fact I started my own home page merely to collect links to writings of mine that were put online by their publishers. (At that time I was offered a free site by my employer, and I wasn't doing anything else with it.) Then I added some more items on my own: reviews, databases, bibliographies ...
And these days my main paid writing gig is the concert reviews I do for a website that gives them away for free. I even have a small fanbase. (A new review appears tomorrow afternoon, and no, it has nothing to do with the musicology conference.)
When the publishers dumped most of my appendices to Dr. Glyer's book on the Inklings because they objected to so much backmatter, did we despair? No! I took the booklist which should have been central to the short appendix we did publish, and put it on my webpage. And made sure its URL got in the book.
The other appendices, though, I'm turning into a book of my own, a chronological history of the Inklings as a group with a more detailed bibliography. (Further research on that bibliography is what I was doing at the Yale library last month.) I'm in talks with the publisher who produced my previous book (I love being able to say that: it makes me feel so ... prolific), and I hope the Inklings book will be out next year.
But you'll have to read it in print.
The evidence that putting one's work online for free increases one's sales income is plentiful, but entirely empirical. Theory doesn't seem to have caught up to it, and I wish it would. Are these works loss-leaders? (That certainly helps, and was a known technique long before the web.) Do readers prefer their fiction on the printed page so much that they're willing to pay for things they could read for free on their computers? (I would, and sometimes have. I don't like reading anything longer than a long LJ post online, particularly creative writing - as opposed to journalism - that's dependent on serious nuances of style - as opposed to wit.) Or are they just book collectors?
But I'm happy to see a flourishing literary culture online too, and spend a lot of time here. I do not put all of my published writing online, but then neither do the self-proclaimed "pixel-stained technopeasants". I'm happy to see some of it, though. In fact I started my own home page merely to collect links to writings of mine that were put online by their publishers. (At that time I was offered a free site by my employer, and I wasn't doing anything else with it.) Then I added some more items on my own: reviews, databases, bibliographies ...
And these days my main paid writing gig is the concert reviews I do for a website that gives them away for free. I even have a small fanbase. (A new review appears tomorrow afternoon, and no, it has nothing to do with the musicology conference.)
When the publishers dumped most of my appendices to Dr. Glyer's book on the Inklings because they objected to so much backmatter, did we despair? No! I took the booklist which should have been central to the short appendix we did publish, and put it on my webpage. And made sure its URL got in the book.
The other appendices, though, I'm turning into a book of my own, a chronological history of the Inklings as a group with a more detailed bibliography. (Further research on that bibliography is what I was doing at the Yale library last month.) I'm in talks with the publisher who produced my previous book (I love being able to say that: it makes me feel so ... prolific), and I hope the Inklings book will be out next year.
But you'll have to read it in print.
