At 6:31 PM -0500 1/10/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 01:11:01PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
I hope you don't do this. There have been several of these kinds of collections--a guy at MIT has done at least a couple of them (I forget his name, though three of my short pieces are in one of his books: the books cost $40-60 or so, for a damned paperback, which is why I don't have my own copy. Even at this high price, they don't pay for submissions and they don't even give out copies to contributors!).
As someone who makes the vast bulk of his income from speaking fees, I wouldn't undertake such a project unless I could pay contributors and get a generous number of copies to hand out. Seems only fair.
"Pay contributors"...such a radical, but hokey, concept. Without going into details about my financial situation, the prospect of a dollar a word, or three, or whatever it is publishers typically pay contributors these days, is not enticing in the slightest. The phrase "I don't get out of bed for less than..." comes to mind. A share of the profits might be, though I expect there would be little in the way of profits for a non-bestseller. It's true that I don't get paid a single dime for the things I write for Usenet, or mailing lists, even for the things others choose to include in their books (which I give permission for, when they contact me). But I also don't have a schedule to adhere to, I write about what interests me, and I don't have any obligation to do extensive research of the footnote variety. If someone wants to pay me, say, $10,000 for whatever I can crank out in a couple of days, I guess I'd be willing to contribute something to such an edited book. If rewrites were called for, or more research were to be needed, then I'd want more money. Colin Powell recently got paid $200,000 for a 30-minute off-the-cuff speech on some "why foreigh policy matters" b.s. topic. Of course, it was underwritten by a Lebanese "businessman" said in news reports to have close ties to Syrian intelligence, so do the math. A legal way to buy influence in our strange society. If Colin Powell can give N of these b.s. speeches a year, my thoughts are surely worth $10K for a day or two's worth of writing. Of course, this won't happen. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns