Declan's book

[Tim May]

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 at 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