Hello Friends, This post is superficially about me & my books, but its real subject is Creative Commons, remix culture, and writing for money.
My books (novel, novella, novella) => (Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices, The Pains), have been available for free download since (2003, 2003, 2008) under the Creative Commons "non-commercial, no derivatives" license. I have no idea how many times my books have been downloaded or copied. Because virtually all my book sales for the last 4 years or so have been of ebooks, I stopped advertising their free availability years ago and instead started directing people to pay sites like Amazon, where the books sell for about a modest $2.99 each. Recently I got together with the Creative Commons site Unglue.it, which enables me to make my books available for free download while requesting a donation at the time (and collecting email addys from people who want to be on my list, etc). I also put my new book Biodigital, with is kind of a remixed Acts of the Apostles, up on Unglue.it under their "buy to unglue" program, according to which the book will be released under Creative Commons BY-SA (share-alike, basically a remix license) as soon as I hit my target sales number or April 2016, whichever comes sooner. Everybody knows that giving away books & encouraging fan-fiction and derivative books works for big-name writers like Cory Doctorow. The question is, what about us regular folk? If you have any interest in the subject of writers trying to earn a $$ from their work in the digital age, you might find interesting either or both of these posts about my remix experiment. Eric Hellman: The Future of the Book is Unfinished: John Sundman's "Biodigital Alan Wexelblat: What Do "Real" Authors Do? http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2014/06/01/what_do_real_authors_do.php ( By the way, I got invited onto this august list after writing a long review of Chris Kelty's book Two Bits about free software & open culture: http://www.wetmachine.com/my-thoughts-exactly/on-the-cultural-significance-of-the-cultural-significance-of-free-software-part-one-my-review-of-the-book/ ) Comments welcome. Thanks, jrs
