You, too, can be an Author! (was Re: [rescue] Cheap 4/6xx RAM)

[Chris Byrne]

When I was writing magazine articles and features for the Gartner group they
gave me a sweetheart deal. $0.35 a word with a 2000 word per week minimum
(One week I did 24,0000 words. I bought my first brand new car that week
;-).

I was making enough that I actually thought about doing it full time, but I
realized that if I wrote all the time I'd never learn the new things that I
would want to write about and thus would turn into an un-orignal hack in a
fairly short time period. Gee kind of like most of the full time tech
magazine writers out there today.

What I really couldn't stand though was how editors will do absolutely
anything to an article without talking to you about it. In several of my
pieces they re-arranged words, sentences, pragraphs and sometimes even whole
sections of the doc without asking me about it. Now with literature you can
get away with this and not damage the piece. The problem with technical docs
is when you change the position of two words you can change the entire
meaning of the article.

More than once I read what I was supposed to have written and said "I didnt
write that, I dont think that, in fact that's dumb". If the editor had
consulted me about it before they printed it the original intent could have
been preserved.

Thankfully most of those pices didnt go out under my by-line (contract
pieces written for a particular customer for example) but a few of them did,
and were published in actualy print and paper national magazines with my
name and in one case phtotograph in front of them, thus marking me for all
time as thinking these totally idiotic things.

Chris Byrne


----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Bradford" <mrbill at mrbill.net>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 20:08
Subject: Re: You, too, can be an Author! (was Re: [rescue] Cheap 4/6xx RAM)


> On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 02:15:35PM -0400, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> > Two things to consider about being an "arthur," as Molly Ivins says:
> > (a) No one cares.
>
> Yep.  My name isnt even listed on the chapter I wrote for the Sol8
> book; just in the list of authors.
>
> > (b) It doesn't pay.
>
> Yep.  I made $350 for writing the chapter; they paid me per-page as a
> contractor, basically, and I dont get any further royalties.  I'm unlikely
> to do this again unless someone asks nicely, and then only for the "cool
> I'm published" factor and not as a way to make money.  I can make $350 in
> six hours or so doing consulting work locally, and I spent way more than
six
> hours on the chapter.
>
> Hrm.  SunHELP Press... 8-)
>
> People on the list could write stuff, we could "publish" it in PDF...
>
> Bill
>
> --
> Bill Bradford
> mrbill at mrbill.net
> Austin, TX
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