Chris Clarke should just suck it up and make up the shortfall with volume.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Chris Clarke should just suck it up and make up the shortfall with volume.
So, did you ask for 450 free books?
Glen Davidson
The link won’t load for me. You broke it, PZ!
Unbelievable, but after working retail and the postal service for 3 decades, I realize that there isn’t any depth people won’t sink to, or what they’ll think they’re entitled to.
Can’t view it, either.
Chris Clarke? No context, as the link doesn’t seem to work.
I got the link to work, with patience.
I’ve read recently that there is a new business model for authors, because of the rise in self-publishing. Authors can no longer expect to be paid for writing.
The reason is that there is lots of self-published writing that is very cheap. It might not be of high quality, but much of it is good enough for readers, who then don’t need to spend big money on established authors.
As a consequence, the business model now suggests that new writers should publish for free, to build up a fan base. When that’s established, then they can start charging money, but probably not much.
I guess that’s bad news for budding authors, although getting published under the old system wasn’t easy anyway.
The link worked for me, but it took an incredibly long time to load; maybe because it has an embedded tweet instead of just a screenshot. The gall of some people never ceases to amaze me.
For those who can’t get there, Clarke (a writer) got this email:
Oh good, it’s not just me who can’t get to PZ’s borked link.
What is this “patience” you speak of?
Rather reminds me of the current expectation that young adults, or adults changing careers, should just intern for months on end to get “valuable job experience.” What do you mean, you can’t work for free? Don’t you know how lucky you are to be running errands for us? Hundreds of other people would do that for free, too!
The interning thing just makes me so mad because it’s yet another way to stealthily discriminate against the poor. :-\
I tried to have patience once, but it took too long to download and the vendor refused to return my payment.
*shudders*
Never again.
I got lots of patience–they just don’t last long enough.
In Spanish; paciencia; from pac=peace and ciencia=senses.
as in peaceful senses.
Once again demonstrating that some wealthy people (“affluent” presumably = “has quite a bit of disposable cash”) get to be wealthy by simply having the gall to ask people for free stuff, and sometimes receiving it.
This makes them no better than the guy on the street corner asking for spare change. The only difference is that guy is too polite to think of asking for more.
Though honestly, my first reaction to this is that there is no book club, just one asshole who’s going to attempt to sell the books online or to a used book dealer.
Found myself some patience and got it to (mostly) load after about 10 minutes. It’s really too bad he redacted the sender’s name and address. Judith Griggs comes to mind.
Oh, oh. So I’m not going to get rich from my novel? Darn!
I agree with frog. This looks like a scam. Has anyone ever heard of this highly influential book club of 40 members? Or any highly influential book club of 40 members? I don’t know of any book club that expects free copies for its members. A very large book club might negotiate a special rate from the publisher, but not free copies. A review site might ask for 1 or 2 free copies to give to a reviewer, but not 45.
A good resource for literary scam issues is the <a href="http://accrispin.blogspot.com.au/")Writer Beware! blog, but it has no specific listing on this matter.
I will put the question to my cabal of professional writing friends and get back…
Whoops. Sorry about the broken HTML.
Nope. Spanish paciencia has the same origin as English patience, namely Latin patientia, a noun derived from the verb pati “suffer”
/nitpick
The “expedited shipping is a must” was a nice touch. Personally, I’d be tempted to reply and string them along for a few weeks.
[OT]
Well, if Pelamun is gonna weigh in, so shall I.
Spanish for peace is ‘paz’ and derives from Latin ‘pax’.
…sigh…
That’s not a professional writer. And frankly, I’m offended that anyone would think that such a person is a professional writer.
I’m a professional writer. No kidding. Since the mid-1970s, I’ve made my living one way or another writing professionally. It’s paid my mortgage, bought me everything I’ve ever needed, has enabled me to travel around the world (most often on someone else’s dime), and resulted in a net worth well in excess of what most people on this forum would consider as being “wealthy”. That’s from a baseline of zero — nobody gave me anything starting out. When I graduated college, my entire net worth fit inside an old Dodge Dart.
The way to earn a living as a writer most definitely is not by self-publishing fiction. Journalism, technical writing, and other forms of specialty nonfiction writing — that’s where the bucks are.
I’ve never published a book. Don’t want to. Don’t need to. I earn my living by working. Dilettantes need not apply.
To be blunt: if he wants to be a professional writer, he’s doon eet rong.
Please don’t insult real professional writers by comparing us to this poseur.
Kevin, nice try, but (as the old joke goes) a proffesional is someone who gets paid to do something.
(Says little about how well they do it, there are always dupes around)
That’s the point. He’s not getting paid. He’s paying to have someone else read his drek.
It’s anti-professional. The exact opposite of professional.
People pay me to write. Not the other way around.
I remain insulted to be placed in an inclusive set that includes him.
[OT + meta]
(Heh, there goes a perfectly good typo — wasted, it was)
But yeah, your wounded pride at such confusion betweeen an amateur and a professional is duly noted.
huh, for someone who supposedly writes for a living, Kevin seems to have surprisingly bad reading comprehension. Also, an interesting hatred for artists, what with the whining about dilettantes who want to write fiction; which isn’t work, of course, since fiction writes itself.
I don’t hate artists. I have great respect for artists.
This guy – not an artist. And not a professional, in any sense of the word.
A whiny self-absorbed pissant. That’s what I see. Someone who can’t hack it and/or doesn’t have the talent or the discipline to really work at his craft. And who thinks that just because he’s written something, that it’s worthy of earning him a more-than comfortable living. Tweed jackets with leather elbow patches worn in the wood-paneled den where the men smoke cigars and sip cognac, while the women folk gaggle in the parlor about their greatness and prepare to swoon in the bedroom.
Consider me not impressed.
After that post, you expect people to believe that statement? Interesting.
Oh, do get down from that badly constructed cross, Cupcake. You’re leaking sticky drama all over and making a mess.
Well, Kev, in your eagerness to take a dump on another writer you appear to have missed Chris Clarke’s credentials as a professional communicator.
of course not, what with him not having written any fiction. you are the one who went off on “dilettantes” who want to write fiction, and implied that writing fiction isn’t work.
buy a new dictionary. a dude who has spent the last 13 years earning money by writing is a professional writer.
says the guy who spend most of his post talking about how rich his own writing has made him.
good thing you don’t ever want to write fiction. you suck at it.
Jadehawk:
Indeed. He also seems to specialize in missing the point. Kevin also seems to be blissfully unaware that writing as if you’ve swallowed a thesaurus does not make up for being an unintelligent douchetart.
now now, let’s not be hasty. It’s entirely possible that Kev didn’t do his research, sure, but it’s equally likely that he’s a soulless money-snob who thinks people who don’t get rich in their jobs don’t count as professionals.
sorry, 23 years. I appear to have misplaced a decade somewhere in post #32
See, van Gogh wasn’t a professional because he didn’t make money off of his masterpieces.
Now the people who design wallpaper, they’re professional artistes, just like ol’ Kev.
Glen Davidson
…Woooow.
You make money for writing?
Of course! I hadn’t considered that, Jadehawk. I should have picked it up from Kevvy’s desperate attempt to impress us with his huuuuge pile of dosh. A claim that is perilously close to bragging about Mensa membership or (my favourite) possessing a “three digit IQ”.
desertfroglet:
Ah, a classic. Perhaps Kevin will adopt it, putting a snobby Victorian tone to it.
The OP looks very much like the world of design. The key is to weed out the clients who think they are entitled.
If the person says something like “You know, some people talk about how much money they have and then don’t pay you. I don’t work like that.” – if the person says anything even vaguely like that, “other people”, then get up from the table and leave immediately.
Here is a simple analogy of another ruse. It is tried by two-bit developers the world over. Be warned:
Nobody gave you libertarianism? You invented it?
I find that hard to believe.
But was it bigger than a breadbox?
hmm…
Hi all. Sorry for the site slowness today: turns out squid-dotting and the “Hello Bar” script don’t mix. We should be back to what passes around my place for normal now.
– Chris C.
“…nobody gave me anything starting out. When I graduated college…”
Reminds me of the person who said that to counter this sort of thing, you remind them that countless ancestors have lived and died to plop them out inches from the finish line surrounded by food, clean water, education and amenities.
Nobody gave you anything starting out, my arse.
[meta]
Kevin wrote:
1) The writing is fine, and certainly provides no evidence against its claim.
2) Obviously, the referent metric (aka context) for the achievement claim is net fiscal worth, the which makes the claim hardly unlikely.
Hence, I think that to expand the scope as some have done is sophistic and therefore meritless.
—
(I additionally note that the UID is not unfamiliar to me, as clearly it ain’t to others. Doesn’t change anything.)
Now listen up you internet folk.
I have an extremely high IQ, at least four digits, and am a member of Sigma Sigma Sigma the REALLY high IQ society. Not only that I done get paid cash money for the writings and stuffs, unlike those dillingers who write things that is not true.
When I gradutumated from the univu…univhu…uniuvar…kolij it was on roads I laid, in buildings I built, by teachers I taught, in disciplines I founded. And it was uphill to and from kolij. In the snow. And there was bears.
At that time all my things could be conveniently stored in my rectum. Now I have more things and have had to move them out of my rectum to make room for my head. I have things because I has done the writings. Have you things for the writings? Does this dilbertante have things for the writings? No. I am better. I have things.
It is very important for you internet people to know I have things because I have decided you do not have things. I am a professional because I have things. The very idea that anyone else might have things and be a professional is very hard for me to accept, so I won’t. This is because other people have not done the writings or had the things I have had which were not given to me. I will now use a flowery adjective, whatever that is, to prove my writingness.
Don’t make me angry. I’ve just read a copy of “Jack and Jill” which has primed my super brain enough to make me want to fist a monkey.
Louis
P.S. I LOVE the dribblers we get here. They are so eminently mockable. I think all comedy must include at least one Datasolution mash up.
@ Crimbly #44 – In The US there’s a baseball analogy for someone like Kevin: “Born on third base, but thinks he got a triple. When he scores after someone else gets a hit, he declares he got a homerun.”
Kevin: yet another idiot who confuses value with monetary reward. I suppose that all the interns out there, slaving away for nothing, are “unprofessional” because in this economy no one will fucking pay them? Why couldn’t they have had the foresight to have been born in the same era Kevin was, when college was much more affordable, jobs weren’t impossible to find, and there was a solid safety net?
I’ve only ever looked at Faultline.org once in a great while, and I’m sporfling at this. Because, really. So not Clarke’s aesthetic.
Cassandra Caligaria beat me to it but your writing sucks bowling balls through a bendy straw. “Gaggle” as a verb doesn’t mean “gather”; it means “to cackle.” I guess your skills are adequate for earning a living in today’s mass media, however, as the bar is pretty low nowadays.
If you are a white man (very few American men of color old enough to have graduated college in the early 1970s are named “Kevin”), and especially if you are a white straight cisgendered man, you started out with a lot in this society, much more than most. Editors of technical publications have taken you seriously from the 1970s onward, which is much less likely to be the case for someone unlike yourself. You probably also had fewer problems applying for a credit card back then, if you did, and fewer issues traveling alone across the world. You probably did not take out a mortgage until some years after graduation, but if you had happened to have the money in the 1970s, you wouldn’t have had banks refuse you on account of your gender.
Oh, and yes, being a baby boomer you almost certainly went to college on the taxpayer’s dime, though possibly on mommy and daddy’s instead.
That’s pretty much Donald Trump’s entire business model right there.
Ms. Daisy Cutter @ 42 —
I have a four-digit IQ, too!
. . .It’s just that two of the digits are AFTER the decimal point.
The vast majority of “professional writers” do not make their primary living on book sales, which is a sad state of affairs. That anybody would expect a writer to offer up a load of books entirely at their own cost and insist on expedited shipping is obscene.
Kevin notes that he has earned his living through writing. Good for him. But I have to ask, what does that mean, exactly? Is an advertising copywriter a professional writer? Well, sure, but it’s not the same as being a novelist. Or a journalist – they write for a living, too. Or someone who specializes in textbooks. Or ghostwriters. The definition of “professional writer” is so broad as to be meaningless. It’s my considered opinion that Kevin’s criticisms are pretty much meaningless, too.
I am a writer/producer of documentaries (I guess that makes me a professional writer, too) and have run into similar attitudes to the unreasonable request made of Chris Clarke. My last project was a commissioned documentary for a Canadian broadcaster on a medical issue. Because we are hoping to sell the project to broadcasters in other territories, it is only available online in Canada. I had someone email me last week demanding that I forgo any profits I might make on such sales and post it on YouTube so everyone can see it free of charge. Spreading the word would be more important to me than making a living in this fellow’s view. That’s just the most recent example. It is amazing how many people will think you are greedy for wanting to be remunerated for your work.
Writers and media creators are asked for freebies all the time. There are a lot of people out there who have no conception of how much time and effort it takes to make something like a film or a book or a painting and they are reluctant to acknowledge the value or worth of that time, effort and skill.
I don’t know Clarke’s work, so I can’t say whether his writing is good or not, but that isn’t the point. The point is that if you want a copy of his work, open your wallet.
Kevin might be a professional writer, but he is certainly not a professional reader.
I have a fair amount of art training under my belt and encounter tightwads like this a lot.
They labour under the illusion that to work for them is such a privilege we should be begging them to forfeit our paycheck.
One of the first I encountered on graduating from a 3 year sculpture degree was a Cathedral who wanted to commission a sculpture for their west wing but “could only pay for materials… but it’ll look great in your folio”.
Yep… food would taste nice in my mouth, a roof would look great over my head and money would look fucking fantastic in my bank account.
When they go to the dentist do they say “I can’t pay you, but I’ll grin at everyone I meet to show them what wonderful bridgework you did with your costly 3 year dental diploma”? Just try getting out of that surgery for gratis with your teeth still intact.
If you can afford to pay and you choose not to you’re a capitalist dickwad. If you can’t afford to pay you shouldn’t be asking in the first place. If I’m good enough to be commissioned, I’m good enough to pay.
Flapjack:
Yes.
He’s a poseur because he hasn’t made the kind of money you claim to have made grinding out mercenary boilerplate?
And you know that–how? You haven’t read anything he’s written (except some e-mails). Personally, I consider Clarke’s writing to be among the very best to be found on the internet generally. And I’m not kidding. I also happen to know that he’s worked very hard indeed at his craft, even though he has sufficient conscience not to go stright for where the bucks are.
To be blunt: you’re an oblivious asshole.
Kevin obviously thinks that anyone who has a blog can’t possibly have any other kind of job. Yeah.
Louis, can I be fake married to you too even though I’m already fake married to Josh? I’m pretty good at sharing most of the time.
Also, I’ve gotten a lot of education on college budgets lately. Know what, Kev? Even if you “paid your own way through college” with no scholarships, you totally didn’t. If you went to a public school, your costs were heavily subsidized by taxpayers. If you went to a private school, you were subsidized by their endowment, and depending on the state you were in, you still got some taxpayer money added onto that too.
[Dreamily] Ooh, ooh…
Tell us much you can bench, Kev, I’m almost there.
Carlie:
Louis is our brother-wife (or sister-husband), as he’s also fake married to Josh.