Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

You know, I was going to take the high road and leave this alone, but the more I look at this post from current VP Howard Hendrix, the more it just really pisses me off:

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.

There are lots of other people who have noted the flaws in this particular argument, starting with Dr. Hendrix's rather free adaptation of what what a "scab" is in union terminology, and moving on to his "zero-sum" approach to the publishing world, in which the success of one person equates to lack of success for everyone else. I'm not going to argue these points; go read the other thread for them. What I want to focus on are two things:

1. This formulation is gut-punchingly ignorant of both what the dynamics of online promotion are and what the benefits have been to those who have used it successfully, and to the genre at large;

2. It's appalling that a standing Vice President of SFWA is calling a rather large chunk of his constituency backstabbing scum.

Let's begin with the fact that I rather comfortably fit in Dr. Hendrix's definition of "Webscab" -- I have all manner of stuff up on my site for people to access for free, including a novel, short stories, an audiobook and an entire magazine that I've edited, in .pdf form. How have these free materials undercut my "union" wages or undercut my fellow "workers"? Well, let's see.

a) The novel, Agent to the Stars, was originally offered as shareware; people could pay if they wanted. I made about $4k off of that. Then it was bought and published by Subterranean Press, which offered me a decent enough small press advance (low four figures) and then, when the limited edition sold out, promptly (i.e., far quicker than most publishers) paid me additional royalties in the mid-four figures. The book was subsequently sold to Tor Books for a trade paperback edition that will come out in 2008; that was a five-figure deal. Which is to say that at every step of the way I got paid, at "wages" which were well in line with what our "union" usually provides. The fact that the book was bought by two separate publishers, for competitive sums, despite the fact the text is fully available online suggests that the publishers find some value in having the work available to read online.

b) The short stories were both published in venues that pay SFWA-qualifying rates (or better), because I have this funny thing about wanting to actually be paid for my work. Having these stories accessible online does not undercut the rates others receive for their work -- indeed, the links on my site go to the stories on the sites of their publishers, and since my personal site gets more daily traffic than either of those sites, I'm helping to promote those sites by driving my audience to those sites. This benefits other writers by bringing more eyeballs to their work and by bringing more readers to sites which pay their authors SFWA-qualifying rates (or better).

c) The audiobook in question was performed by a number of women SF/F writers (Elizabeth Bear, Cherie Priest, Ellen Kushner, Karen Meisner, Mary Robinette Kowal), all of whom were paid for their participation, and some of whom who manifestly benefited from performing the work -- Mary Robinette Kowal, for example, found additional audiobook work directly from having worked on this audiobook. She's a new member of SFWA, incidentally. The audiobook helped drive sales of the limited edition hardcover print version of the same story, driving a hardcover novelette into the Amazon's Top Ten SF list and helping the book get something like a 90% sellthrough in less than a month.

It is true that I took no upfront money for the novelette whose audiobook I offer for free on my site; this is because I wrote it in exchange for a $5,000 contribution from Subterranean publisher Bill Schafer to the John M. Ford Book Endowment for the Minneapolis Public Library. However, Subterranean started paying me royalties on the book once it earned out that $5k pledge; I stand to make a five-figure amount from the book when all is said and done, which is not bad for a 12,500-word novelette. If you do the math, even with the vague variables I just noted, you'll see that there's no realistic way I can be said to be accepting "less than union wages" for the work.

d) For the magazine that is available for download on my site, every writer in it was paid no less than 7 cents a word by the editor (which in this case was me), which is well above the current SFWA minimum rate. I had posted that the rate was 5 - 7 cents a word, but as editor I chose to give everyone the maximum rate I could (even though the end result is that I was paid less for the editing gig, because my editing fee was, more or less, what was left over after I paid the writers). The print edition of the magazine had a run of a few thousand copies; the pdf version of the magazine, on the other hand, has been downloaded more than 25,000 times, giving the writers a much larger amount of exposure. At least a few of the stories in the magazine have been reprinted or are slated to be reprinted. Some of the authors (and SFWA members) presented in the magazine have gone on to write short stories or books for Subterranean Press based in part on their appearance in the magazine; Subterranean Press, while a small press, generally pays above the standard "union wage".

I invite all and sundry to look at this list and tell me where, precisely, I have undercut myself as a writer by promoting this work online; I invite all and sundry to show where, by posting this material online, I have done anything but promote other writers and worked to give them fair compensation and open doors to more work. The fact is, I got paid -- well -- for all the writing on that list above. The fact is that other people got paid as well. There is nothing on that list of freely-readable work that was not paid for at a SFWA-level scale or better. Nothing. End of story. None of Dr. Hendrix's definitions for what a "webscab" are apply.

Nor would they apply to, say, Charlie Stross. Charlie was paid by two separate English language publishers for Accelerando, which he released on the Web under a CC license. It's likely that being online was not the sole reason that particular book was nominated for a Hugo, but it didn't hurt the book. However, let's ask Peter Watts if releasing his book Blindsight didn't help that book into a Hugo nomination this year; you might also ask him if making it available online didn't help push the book -- which was floundering in sales -- to a second and then a third printing. Peter Watts got paid for the book by Tor before he put it online, and now he stands to get paid even more. Ask Peter Watts if he did not see a concrete financial benefit. Has the availability of Watt's book online hurt any writer? As far as I can see, probably only the guy who came in sixth in the Hugo Best Novel balloting; otherwise no, not really.

I know Dr. Hendrix isn't going to deign to come on to the internet to offer an answer to this question, but let me ask it anyway: Who, exactly, are these "Webscabs" he's talking about, the ones who are infesting SFWA and rotting it out from the inside? They simply don't exist, or more to the point, I'm willing to bet a nice chunk of change that there isn't a single person he would point to that he can prove is undercutting themselves, other writers or the genre directly by using the online medium for promotion. I, on the other hand, can very easily show you an entire group of people and entities who are using freely-available work online to build the genre.

Let me point to Strange Horizons magazine, whose business model, as far as I know, has always been built around paying fairly for their fiction. Let me point to Subterranean magazine online, who pays well, pays fast, and has an expanding reach. Let me point to Charlie. Let me point to Peter. God forbid I should point to Cory Doctorow, because he causes people's heads to explode, but you know what? He's been paid for the work he's put online, too. Let me point to Nick Mamatas, who for his own account got paid four separate times before he put his novel Move Under Ground out online for free (let me also note there's a short story he co-wrote up online for free on my personal site; I paid him seven cents a word for it. Worth every penny, too).

Here's a fact, and it's a not very nice one: The only way you can call any of these people "Webscabs" is if, in fact, you are wholly and utterly ignorant of how people are using the online medium to promote themselves, their work, and the genre. Even a cursory examination of what these folks are actually doing shows that there's not a thing insidious about it. The most Dr. Hendrix has on any of these people, including me, is that we are happy to use the online medium to promote ourselves and our work a way that he doesn't like or apparently much understands.

That's his karma. I wouldn't want him to promote himself any way he doesn't want to; I wouldn't encourage anyone to promote their work in a way they're not comfortable with. The idea that people who promote themselves online by offering up freely-readable work would somehow force other people to do so is, well, crazy nonsense. I am happy to let Dr. Hendrix promote his work in ways he's comfortable promoting it, and I'm happy to have SFWA help explore and explain these offline options to its members, along with the online promotion options.

But the fact that he is not only ignorant of how this online promotion works, but is actively hostile to the people in SFWA who use it to expand their careers and the genre because of this ignorance, is ridiculous. None of the people Dr. Hendrix has publicly crapped on by calling them scabs and peasants who has earned that sort of abuse. These "scabs" and "peasants" are the people who are writing science fiction today, getting onto award ballots and -- Somehow! Mysteriously! -- actually having careers. Good ones. These "scabs" and "peasants" are who SFWA is now, and who it will be in the future. They deserve better than that. SFWA does, too.