alt Hacker NewsNovelists should not be giving their work away for free like that. AI is bad enough, but writing a novel (even a bad one) is hard work. It just makes it harder for novelists to make a living.
Replies
bawolff • yesterday at 7:04 PM
Screw that. People should be able to do whatever they want with their own work. That is what it means to own something.
Are you also opposed to open source software?
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Heh. You picked the absolutely wrong author to say that. His making the book a free download tripled his sales in the first week.
Quoting from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.