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cory doctorow
errors
as compared to the total population of sf writers earning
some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making
more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a
stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the
lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing
has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity.
Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of
human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines
and replicated by the hundreds, thousands, or millions. They can
be googled.
Even better: they level the playing field between writers and
trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers
in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos
were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams
at their work — for, if a personal recommendation is the best way
to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best
way to
not
sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now,
the readers get to decide for themselves. Here’s a bit of a review
of
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
that was recently posted to
Amazon by “A reader from Redwood City, CA”:
[QUOTED TEXT]
> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are
> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But
> regardless of what
Entertainment Weekly
says, whatever
> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn’t
> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey’s
> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in
> disgust — this book is for people who think Dan
> Brown’s
Da Vinci Code
is great writing.
Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really
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