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sourcejedi · 06-30-2010, 04:25 PM

I also doubt my ability to contribute anything constructive to this thread :-).

My answer to the question is that yes, it's hard to make money from writing novels, but it has always been so. That's the impression I get from published authors, like the recent post "The Full-Time SF Novelist: Probably Not as Endangered as You Think" on Scalzi's blog, or Stross's "common misconcetions about publishing" series of blog posts. Also Diane Duane's podcast (specifically the one on fanfiction).

For more general glass-half-empty vibes, see "1000 True Fans. I found the original article very appealing, but followups by the same author (and elsewhere) indicate massive caveats as to how relatively few people have made real money in this way.

It may be very disenchanting to find your work on a torrent site, but you can't assume that's why you're not selling.

<rant mode=on>

Spoiler:

06-30-2010, 04:25 PM	#66
sourcejedi Groupie Posts: 155 Karma: 200000 Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Britania Device: Android	I also doubt my ability to contribute anything constructive to this thread :-). My answer to the question is that yes, it's hard to make money from writing novels, but it has always been so. That's the impression I get from published authors, like the recent post "The Full-Time SF Novelist: Probably Not as Endangered as You Think" on Scalzi's blog, or Stross's "common misconcetions about publishing" series of blog posts. Also Diane Duane's podcast (specifically the one on fanfiction). For more general glass-half-empty vibes, see "1000 True Fans. I found the original article very appealing, but followups by the same author (and elsewhere) indicate massive caveats as to how relatively few people have made real money in this way. It may be very disenchanting to find your work on a torrent site, but you can't assume that's why you're not selling. <rant mode=on> Spoiler: As for the rest - 1) I don't believe in DRM. 2) The laws are strong enough to support DRM already. 3) If your idea is that someone else should be pursuing enforcement action for you - I just can't see where the resources come from. Perhaps DRM can be made to work, once it's supported in hardware. I'm biased; I'm politically opposed to it. If you really want DRM that makes sure no-one can upload your work to a torrent, you need to control the reader software. You can't do it without imposing lock-in. You either have to have multiple incompatible systems, which is bad for consumers - or a monopoly (ditto). And even then I can _still_ point my webcam at the screen, put a brick on the "page down" key, and OCR the lot. Ebooks are just about the easiest media to copy. If you genuinely want to prevent that, what you want to do is actively filter the internet - i.e. the torrent itself. And again, that is perhaps possible, but I would be even more strongly opposed. Restricting "innovation" in ebook readers and the ebook market is one thing. Demanding that any internet protocol which could violate copyright must have filtering designed-in would impose a massive freeze on innovation. More realistically, you target the directories / search engines that let complete strangers browse and search such torrents. Guess what - that's already happening.