Technopeasant Wretches?
Apr. 29th, 2007 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alanajoliI'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 [![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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Date: 2007-04-30 08:09 pm (UTC)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.
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