On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote: > ...I would claim that most authors write > to present their ideas and visions, not to make money... > ...only a very, very small fraction of trade authors make money from > their writing. I conjecture that their motivation is more often glory or > recognition, just like academics.... > Freelance writers earn much, much less > on average than professional authors; they can't be in it for the money.
Eppur, eppur... And yet I doubt that they would want to lock themselves into giving it away for life! To start with, by way of promo, perhaps, but forever? Is that really what you think? (Where there's life, there's hope!) Whereas refereed journal article authors do not have the slightest desire to deter a single pair of potential eye-balls for their findings on the off-chance there might be gate-receipts to be made! They never have, and they never will. There is a profound and significant divide here, despite the statistics on the earnings and success of the average trade author. > ...if the rest of your > argument is right it will apply more broadly than just to academic > authors. Online self-archiving may be a means for authors to launch their trade, but I doubt you'll find many for whom it's an end in itself (apart from the ones who were only destined for a Vanity Press anyway)... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
