Food for thought

Hi, folks!

I came across a couple of interesting links the past day or so. This one is self-explanatory: DON’T PLAGIARIZE. It’s just plain sucky to do that to someone. Here’s one author’s experience with it. And yes, it does happen in the fanfic world. In this case, the plagiarizer posted the work on a fanfic site.

Plagiarism is theft. If you’re a writer (whether aspiring or not), show the world your individual creativity. You don’t need to steal somebody else’s work. Make your own. You’ll feel better about it. For reals.

And the second link has to do with ebooks and how they can threaten the livelihoods of aspiring writers. Award-winning author Graham Smith offers his concerns:

“The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

“I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can’t make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.”
source: The Telegraph

I think he has some valid concerns, especially when it comes to the idea that things in digital format should somehow be “cheaper” than things that are not. That’s a raging debate, by the way, in book land. The pricing of ebooks. The thing is, the same amount of work goes into creating a digital file as goes into a product that becomes a print book. That is, author time/effort, the various editors’ time/effort, the cover designer’s time/effort, and the typesetter’s time/effort. All that time and effort costs money. The only difference between a print book and an ebook is that one doesn’t go to a printer for binding. And that does save a little bit of money, but it doesn’t negate all the work and time that went into the back end. Make sense?

Anyway, just some stuff to ponder. Happy reading, happy writing!