Just the other day, Catherynne M. Valente won the Andre Norton Award for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making (
2010 Nebula Award Winners!). This is a serialized ebook that was paid for by donations. From
Circumnavigating Fairyland:
Quote:
Starting Monday, I will start posting chapters of a full-length novel version of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. I will be writing it in real time, posting every Monday. It will be free to read--but please know that the sheer calories to make my brain create it require funding, and I would very much appreciate your support. Pay whatever you like for it, whatever you think it's worth. It's kind of like an old-fashioned rent party. There's a button at the bottom of the post to start things out.
----
This is my first available YA novel, and everyone can read it for free.
|
Now we get
Addendum:
Quote:
Well, we knew this would come sooner or later, but it's coming now, so I'm letting everyone know.
As of the end of today, part of Fairyland will come off the website.
|
I wonder if this would have won the Andre Norton Award if it was generally known that the author was going to renege on her deal with donors. Perhaps she would, since the Nebula's Awards are a prize from her fellow authors.
I suppose Catherynne has received advise that agreements made on a blog have no legal standing, so when she says "free for everyone" this only means "free until someone else pays me more for the same work in the same medium". This is morally wrong and also a huge setback to the pay to write model of serialization (
The Tip Jar: Science Fiction's New Revenue Resource?). I don't know if this approach could ever be viable for many works, but it now seems that any author who proposes this will have to include an explicit legal license to back up their fanciful assertions of how "free" the ebook will be.