>but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

“but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.”
I have mixed opinions about this, bearing in mind the number of people who expect artists, designers and other creatives to produce work without being paid. The Arts Council of England’s ArtsJobs list is full of it, to the extent that it has become nearly useless to artists who have the temerity to try and make a living from their work.

The problem here, to my mind, isn’t the ‘giving it away free’ part, but the ‘trying to get publishers to pay’ part. By pandering to existing publishing structures, he is just helping to delay the arrival of a sustainable economic model that bypasses them. But, until that economic model exists, how indeed can professional writers make a living against a tide of free, high-quality content?

I’m shocked that you think I would stoop so low!

Incredibly this is one occasion on which I have actual experience of what you’re talking about and something resembling a valid point to make. As someone who has had a number of books published – albeit in a very different field to yours – a couple of things strike me about what “Jimi” has to say.

First off, “webscab” is a pretty stupid term that he has clearly made up in a lazy attempt to shoehorn together old and new concepts and appear clever and original. Sadly he fails. I do this too, but then I’m a puerile webmong (see what I did there?) and not a Doctor of something or other. A doctor of being bitter and twisted, it seems.

Next, “to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.” If Jimi’s hard work is characterised by spouting this sort of guff on the internet, I’m not surprised he isn’t getting paid much for it. Also, as I have found to my disappointment, unless you sell a really huge volume of books (populist fluff or something so painfully hip that you will win the Booker prize and spend years getting paid for after dinner speeches in West London) you ain’t going to make much money. Volume discounters like Amazon do greatly increase the distribution potential of your books, but they also discount the hell out of them and there’s nothing you can do unless you are in the privileged position to be able to dictate the terms of your royalty deal, or get a whacking great advance. One gets the impression that if Jimi was selling loads of books he’d be less concerned about people giving away their own work (nobody else’s, remember). Sour grapes, n’est-ce pas?

Jimi, if you were writing stuff that was popular or successful enough to make you loads of money, you probably would have done so by now. Sitting “just shy of the 5,000 foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains” and bleating about how it’s everyone else’s fault that you don’t get paid enough is frankly pathetic and demonstrates a raging bitterness that in all probability will haunt you until the day you die. You sound like the major record labels, blaming illegal downloaders for “killing” their profits, and somehow failing to see the link between falling profits and their dunderheaded tactic of giving massive sums of money to rich idiots to produce abysmal records which ought never to see the light of day. And you’re even worse than that, because at least in that case there’s something technically wrong going on in the form of people stealing copyrighted work. You’ve got your Sierra Nevadas in a twist about people exercising free will with regard to their own work, you bloody assclown.

And to Michael: “until that economic model exists, how indeed can professional writers make a living against a tide of free, high-quality content?”
Writing, like any creative pursuit is not an easy thing to make a living at. Painting, art, music, acting and so on are all much harder to sustain as a career, especially today, than managing a branch of Dixons. You probably know this – I have no idea who you are of course – but as someone who is attempting with some success to eke an existence out of journalism and producing music, I can tell you it’s not a walk in the park. The key, and it sounds catastrophically simple, is to produce something that people like, and will sell. With writing this means in my case a niche market, hence the relatively low returns, at least for the books. With music it’s altogether more intangible and involves not only being good at what you do but also a huge element of luck and perseverance. I don’t expect that if I wrote esoteric and complex articles about the nature of inter-gender relations in a Marmoset community that I’d make much money out of it, however accurate it was. The short answer to your question is that professional writers (I am one, though in a very different way to Tom) have to an extent to tailor their work to the largest possible audience without compromising on quality or feeling like they’re dumbing it down. If you write material that’s of interest to a very select group of people, it will sell only in small quantities. I suspect Dr Jimi is as scared as he is bitter – scared of what he doesn’t understand. Much as it pains me to say it, writers have no more of a “right” to an easy ride than anyone else. I wish we did, but if I wanted a guaranteed and steady income that badly I’d have stayed in my short-lived job as an automaton in a University department. As it was, I felt the strange desire to see a relationship between the amount of work I put in and the money I earned, which I now do. It is nice. It’s a little unrealistic to complain about a tide of free, high-quality content threatening your livelihood in a free society. (With my apologies if you are an avowed Marxist). If this threat is real (and I am dubious) the solution is to adapt and change, to find new avenues to make things work. It’s not an easy answer, but when was the last time you heard one that was?
There, I bet you weren’t expecting that. I had a “discussion” once on the Bristol local news website where cabbies were protesting in their broken, barely legible English about the fact that a new bus route was going to “take there bisness”. You can imagine how it went. I lasted about half an hour before I got my IP banned for using increasingly brutal terms to illustrate how much they deserved to be beaten relentlessly with hammers until they realised how stupid they were. Not bad going for me, that.