From now on when people who don't get it ask me why I'm giving my writing away, I'll say: "Because the people I give it to appreciate it."
Don't let me stop you from selling your writing.
I, for one, would gladly pay for any book by George Potter - preferably a signed first edition so I will be able to put it on Ebay after you are famous or dead or both. 
The people who stop me from writing for money are editors. LOL. I've had very few summary rejections, but almost all of them want to tinker with the story. "I feel you need to flesh out the relationship between..." stuff. Umm. No. This story is done. I'll correct happily for grammer, vauge language, etc. but the damn story is DONE. I'm writing 3,000 more. Stop making my life hard.
It's not like there's some grand payoff at the end. 5 cents a word is about the best you can hope for. My stories are really short, for the most part. I write so slow that I'd never be able to make a career of it. So...I choose to let the stories be stories and give them to people who appreciate them.
What I
might eventually do is have a writing only site and a tip jar. Those who tipped better be aware that sometimes it's a long haul between stories, though. And sometimes the stories go away. I would, of course, expect no tip if no new story material showed up. Hell, I wouldn't even expect a tip anyway. That goes against the very nature of the
tip.
In fact, I was going to list your http://lulu.com book Micropiece, but couldn't find it anymore.
I removed it. The (wonderful) lady who did the cover art wanted a new version put in place (actually, what she considered a finished version) and it failed every time I tried to upload it. Lulu tech support was unresponsive. I've tried a few other times to upload it and failed. What I'll probaly do is redesign it, expand it, and do her cover art up from a new account. I'll keep you posted.
The problem with getting good writing for free is that every time I go to the bookstore or the library, I have to trip over piles of unreadable shit ghost-written for politicians,"celebrities", and other unsavory people. The only reason I even go to bookstores anymore is so I can dig through the discount pile of recently-obsolete computer books. Those are darn-near unreadable too, but my profession is such that they are handy to have around sometimes.
Yeah, the sheer VOLUME of crap is overwhelming. I've been reading since I was four. I was reading 'adult' books by the time I was seven. My choice pattern for literature is (to my mind) ancient and well oiled. I go to my sections and sometimes wander into other sections. Once chosen, a novel has 100 pages to interest me, or I close it.
A short story has 1 page to interest me, or I skip ahead.
I'm much more hardass about short stories.
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Topic: The Best of George Potter (Read 153502 times)