Today’s post will provide a little more information related to the whole free vs. paid content debate. Most authors would love it, of course, if people gave them quadrillions of dollars per copy sold, but Peter Cooper took a practical approach when he recommended that individuals pirate PDF versions of his book. Cooper wrote, “I [...]

One school of thought has it that, after the text of a book makes it online, the author’s screwed. Everyone will just spend a few hours in front of their computer monitors, reading it, and never purchase the novel. But – even assuming this is correct – the problem may not be too hard to [...]

For the longest time publishers have had the power over who gets known and who doesn’t. Fortunately, in this century, we have the Internet, and services like Scribd, which allows authors to upload their manuscripts, set a price, and keep most of the money from sales. Scribd touts itself as the YouTube of the publishing [...]

Not to disparage a fine in-print tradition, but I’m fairly certain published writers tell other aspiring writers to pick up a copy of the latest Writer’s Market tome as some sort of initiation process. They slyly (forgive the adverb) hide their snickers and contempt of potential competition by directing the uninitiated to wade through a [...]

Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts—those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence—then why bother existing? Fortunately, computers have yet to match us in music or writing or dancing or even drawing—the lines are straighter, but that’s not even [...]