Jason Fry on Writing for Free

Interesting. Of course as a fanficcer...I have to write for free. I don't want Mickey Mouse's lawyers on my doorstep.

That was pretty interesting that some people expect writers to work for free. I don't know how anyone makes it in the business with all the competition.

I think Fry's article makes a great deal of sense within the specific context of attempting/conducting writing as a paid career. If writing is your primary profession and the thing you expect to pay the balance of your bills, then yes, you have to be very careful about attempting to maximally monetize almost everything you do.

On the other hand, if writing is some you do because you write, and something else pays the bills, then I believe the calculus changes. Speaking for myself I love writing, and I would certainly love to be able to write full time, but I have long since accepted that is simply not going to be my career path - not because of talent as a writer, but because I don't have a talent for the relentless self-promotion, jobbing, lobbying, and all the other non-writing stuff that takes more time than the actual writing invovled monetizing one's work.

As a result, my calculus is almost the reverse of Jason Fry's. I'm not attempting to monetize my writing, I'm just interested in telling the stories I wish to tell and getting them exposed to the maximum audience I reasonably can with a minimum of effort on the publication/marketing side. So if I was asked to do something, and it was something I wanted to do and felt would be good for me and for readers, then I wouldn't expect even the suggestion of monetary compensation - rather like participating in a board contest here.

With regard to the specific Atlantic action in question though, that was obviously ridiculous. Either you're an entirely non-profit enterprise and nobody gets paid, or everybody gets paid. it's particularly crass in the current era, where a only tiny fraction of quality people who publish material on the internet that's worth reading are going to reasonably get paid for it, for one of the few organizations with connections to the elusive purse strings to ask for a freebie.