Unquiet Desperation

Earlier this week, Howard V. Hendrix, vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, allows this to be posted to a Livejournal post:

I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) — given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the “net time” they seemed to want at this point in the organization’s development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.

I could go into how wrongheaded and myopic this is, but Mike Stackpole (NYT Bestselling author, podcaster, and cool guy) just pinged me on Skype and let me know that he had already done so. While I personally think that “webscabs” are the most innovative and adventurous people I know, I think Mike’s comments are more salient, and come from a place of more experience in the industry. I recommend you listen if you’re at all interested in the future of book publishing.

Click here to hear Mike’s thoughts. (mp3)

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