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*historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they\'re *rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners). The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled. 
 
Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to *not* sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here\'s a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by \"A reader from Redwood City, CA\": 
 
[QUOTED TEXT] 
 
> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are 
> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But 
> regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever 
> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn\'t 
> waste your money. Download it for free from Corey\'s 
> (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in 
> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan 
> Brown\'s Da Vinci Code is great writing.  
 
Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage: 
 
[PULL-QUOTE] 
 
> Download it for free from Corey\'s site, read the first 
> page 
 
You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I\'m thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, \"a surprisingly bad writer,\" no less, whose writing is \"stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!\" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind. 
 
You don\'t get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities -- \"all these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because they\'ve read the negative interweb reviews!\" But the flipside of that is the ego: \"If only they\'d give it a shot, they\'d see how good it is.\" And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!). 
 
5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook\'s distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader\'s ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don\'t beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can\'t match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or
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