Technopeasant Wretches?

[alanajoli]

I'd been seeing a lot of people posting work online as part of the Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch movement, and had no idea what spurred this on. (If I had something I wasn't still planning to submit laying about, I would have posted it as well--though I don't currently have a website to call my own where it would be convenient to post it. Also, the vast majority of my short stories hover around the 7500 word mark, making them, in my mind, too long to read in one computer sitting. Of course, I've been dedicating spare moments online to reading the novel or novella Sherwood Smith [sartorias] posted, so I suppose if people love your work enough they'll sit for the duration.)

At any rate, thanks to Brandon Sanderson (mistborn), I now know where the term originated! Apparently the current/soon-to-be-former VP of the SFWA Howard V. Hendrix called authors who post their work for free online "webscabs" and coined the phrase Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch. The large number of free fiction postings was in response to this. Here's the original SFWA post, if you're further interested.

Comments

[dmoonfire.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm a scab. :) Then again, I don't have that many stories on my website, much less published. However, I have planned on setting up most of my novels as being free on the web, as part of their "end of life" efforts. Kind of a one-last chance. In what I do have published, I have pretty much always given 1-2 chapters away.

Personally, I don't have a problem with giving away things or people who do it. Yeah, there is a case of cow verses milk, but I believe in gift communities and I donate to web comics and buy their books, even though they are free. There is a balance act, what you give away for free means you won't get as much money, but in some ways, the tradeoff is worth it. Free books (or obscenely low-cost ones, i.e. "one random person posting will get a copy") will get you known where you won't unnecessarily be otherwise. In building a "brand" it could be very useful.

But, if you are in this for the money... it isn't the right approach.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I think in some ways it's very similar to used books--or libraries. Those things can be treated as marketing, in the right mind frame. The more people are reading what you write, the more likely they are to buy your books in the future.

I think it's a win-win, no-brainer (as to scores of techno-peasant wretches, apparently).