Red Hat Magazine: Wide Open Magazine

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 09:28:03PM -0800, lwj wrote:
> "By submitting any article you waive all legal rights ..."
> If the agreement holds up they could prevent you from publishing the
> article you wrote on your own website.
...
> Second, Everyone has to have a profession (that they get paid for)
> unless they live at home with mom and dad or otherwise live of the
> fruits of someone else's labors.


Randal Schwartz is a buddy.  He writes a lot of Perl books, a couple
of monthly articles, makes a lot of appearances, etc.  Well paid
author, yes?  

Nope.  Randal makes some money from his writing, but it is often a 
trickle of royalties months to years after publication.  Sometimes
he gets paid for his speeches, mostly he makes the appearances on
his own nickle.  So how does he eat?

Consulting.  Classes.  Like most technical activities, the result
of the articles and books is an unstready stream of companies hiring
him and his associates to solve problems and teach classes.  Sometimes
paying well, sometimes less well.  But ultimately, the writing activity
is paid for by the real work of helping and teaching.  And Randal is
a pretty good helper and teacher.

As a world-class writer, he gets permission to publish *some* of his
work on his own website, many months after the appearance in the
magazine.  And sometimes not, even for unpaid articles.  

That's the reality.  If these are the terms that Randal works under,
then Joe. Q. Unknown is likely to get a worse deal.  I've written a few
things on other fields, and my rewards have been about 25cents/hr from
the paid venues, and some author's discounts.  Oh, and three or four
consulting jobs bringing in a few hundreds of Kbucks.  Overall, quite
worth it, especially if you count the satisfaction of helping others. 

But if you don't get your satisfaction that way, or don't understand
that the folks publishing the magazine need to eat, too (and they
DON'T get any consulting bucks, just ad money proportional to editorial
compromise), then find some other way to make your contribution.  

And if you want to get paid without making a contribution to the
world, there is always Microsoft!

Keith

--
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs