Will Write For Free
Should authors give their work away?

As writers our main aim is to see the words that we have slaved over, in print. I find myself wondering if the Internet is not allowing us to make a rod for our own backs regarding the subject of payment. As the number of sites increases daily, then so do the calls for submissions. Generally speaking they have one thing in common, the fact that they are not paying sites. Still we send our stories off to them! For the first time in history it is possible to spend one's life reading any particular genre free of charge.

Someone, somewhere, IS making money from sites which offer huge volumes of free reading material. Are we, the people who produce the stuff they are giving away, being conned?  —Hypno 

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From Kathy
In moderation. That seems to apply to most things in life and I feel it applies here as well. Giving your work away allows you to experiment with tone, voice, tense, and all manner of style issues without worrying about how your publisher, editor, or agent will feel about it. But, you will have an audience that will let you know if it's an experiment worth pursuing.

I submit micro short pieces on various message boards and also have my own site where I post stories. My experiments are more in the comfortable genre department, though I mainly write erotica.

From Madelia
Seeing your piece in print, particularly when you write erotica, is validation. Giving it away just for the validation smacks of desperation. As you would with your bedmates, be selective, be proud, don't give it away from the sake of a tearsheet. Those publishers you court know what sites buy and what sites merely solicit. Think of your reputation!

From Avery
I wouldn't mind posting on non-paying sites as long as there is a time limit that my work is used, say for 6 months.

The point of submitting to a non-paying site should be to see if the quality of one's work is up to par for the paying sites. If a non-paying site rejects something it should tell the writer something, something loud and clear.

From ZW
I, for one, avoid non-paying sites unless I'm impressed with the quality of work they exhibit and I don't mind not being paid for the piece I submit. There are too many sites out there with writing that promotes the lackluster for the sake of web content and sometimes the really good pieces are lost amongst the dreck.

It's okay to nurture aspiring writers, but I think that before a webmaster/mistress posts some ones work that it's the best work it can be.

I've worked with a publisher who wants to encourage those who have dreams of being a published writer, but if the writing's not up to par, she won't publish it until it is. She offers editorial asst., anything to get their writing where it should be, because this isn't just the writer's name going out there, but her's too. I agree with this philosophy.

I wouldn't want someone posting my work if it needed severe editing, etc. because people may think it's the best I can do—when it isn't—and then avoid reading anything with my name on it.

However, I write because I LOVE it and I WANT payment for my work. Anyone out there who subscribes to Angela Adair-Hoy's freelance newsletter has taught me not to apologize for wanting/demanding payment for my work. I may never get rich, but I WILL get paid.

Anyone who has ever been employed expects payment for their work--even professional writers don't write for free, do they? Just because you write "on your own time" does not hide the fact that it is WORK.

From P@
Right on, ZW. This is an issue that's been troubling me for some time, and I feel very strongly about it. My personal opinion, and I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, is that when you allow your work to appear on a website that does not charge its readers to use it, and when you do not get paid for allowing it to appear there...this is not called being "published." This is called being "displayed." I don't believe free sites that don't pay for their content or charge their readers should be considered publishers. And I don't believe you should use those venues as credits in your publishing resume. Go ahead and put your work there, but don't call it being published. It's a way to get your name out, and if that's how you want to do it, go for it.

Along with that, the erotica genre in particular is rife with website owners who have absolutely no qualms about trolling the internet and stealing stories for their own sites. Some of our own ERWA members have had their work stolen. It happens a lot. There will always be that risk when you distribute your stories via the internet in a format that can easily be copied and pasted. I believe that the internet and computers will eventually become more common media than paper for our reading material, but until there are ways to make it as difficult to copy computer text as it is with books, I'll probably stick to (paid) paper publishing.

From Mike Kimera
Pat, I appreciate you point of view. I think carefully before sending anything to a free site. I send those I think have content that would make it difficult for them to be published. The big exception I make is ERWA itself. ERWA is a free site that I'm proud to put on my resume.

Other than that, I'm with you.

From Arina
I'm glad this topic is being discussed. This has been an area where I've been very confused. I haven't submitted to 'free' sites for many of the reasons P@ has stated and I have figured if someone can see my work on a free site, (yes, I post my stories on my own website, and that has been a hard decision as well.) than why would someone feel like they should 'pay' to see it elsewhere. Also, I'm not sure I want to put the work forth to send a story to a free site, when I could be sending it to a paying site and crossing my fingers that they buy it. The work is almost the same, but the outcome would be much happier if I get paid.

I think the reason I do post my stories on my own site, for anyone to see is because of my fear of submitting. I like the gratification that comes from someone sending me an email that says, "I've been to your site, read such and such story and I loved it! It really turned me on!" That was my first goal. I even wrote it down on a 3x5 card. -) That goal completed, I need to move on to the next; getting paid, and I will, thanks to a lot of encouraging words from people on this list.

From James Martin
The real problem might very well be that too many people do, in fact, make their work available for free. Everybody's writing some form of smut these days. I wonder sometimes how it could be that anyone has time to read anything they didn't scribble themselves.

Sure, from a literary standpoint, most of what's produced is rubbish. Much of it bypasses the brain and hits right at the genitals--often none too softly. It's cock, cunt, fuck in the same way as McDonalds is salt, grease and sugar. It appeals to most and it's cheap. People who've educated their palates demand more complexity, more integrity--but remain in the minority.

That's why I like the idea, or maybe it's the foundation, of the Erotica Readers Association--enabling READERS to see the working models in progress, to tease and train their erotic palates.

Maybe more discerning readers will evolve from this education, or at least I hope they will because in a small way I'm in the process of trying to amass a small library of good erotica one piece at a time on my site. Yes, as Jill mentioned, I pay a little for the gems I find myself on the web. No, I don't expect immediate return, because a smut pic I can purchase for three bucks will get 10,000 hits a day and a well- written story I've purchased for $50 will get 100. But maybe in the future, when we've educated people properly and have "figured out which end of this electronic camel is the part that works" we'll be able to look back at the problems of the early days of the web and smile knowingly.

Or maybe we'll just kick the goddam dog. But I hope not.

From Joan
For someone with ambitions to be a great writer of erotica, this is a fascinating discussion. It connects back not only to erotica writing, but to writing and to art in general—do you do this for money, or for reasons above and beyond?

Back when I wanted to become a computer trainer, I had to find a way to get some experience. I had taken a night class at a local college on computer applications in the office, and realized that I could probably teach a class just like it someday. So I went to the prof and asked him if I could be his unpaid teaching assistant for a semester. All he had to do was be a reference for me later on. I would watch him teach, I would help out, and he even gave me a chance to teach a class on my own! This led to paying freelance assignments and eventually a real career. Now I'm at the stage of my IT career where I rarely do anything for free (unless it's for a friend or relative).

I have had stories published on both paying and freebie sites. If a site pays, that's great, but if an non-paying site is one I would consider to be prestigious and good exposure, that's just as good. Maybe even better. The story I had published in Scarlet Letters, although I wasn't paid a penny for it, was great exposure, and I received some very interesting "fan mail" as a result of it. It looks good on my resume to have appeared there, better than some sites where I got paid, but thanks to poor marketing or vision or whatever, those sites soon went the way of the winds. When you're in the stage of your career where you want exposure, what kind of exposure is that, to have your story on some site that doesn't even exist anymore? Even if you did make a couple bucks on it?

Right now, I'm listening to a taped version of Natalie Goldberg's latest book, Thunder and Lightning. One of the points she makes is that NO writing is ever wasted, even if you don't publish it, even if you don't do anything with it at all. It's all writing practice, it's all keeping the hand and mind moving.

Believe me, for someone who has only published a small percentage of what she's written—and been paid for even less—that meant a lot. I don't know if I will ever make a living solely from my writing. In fact, I don't know if anyone (except perhaps for Stephen King or the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books) can make a living just from writing alone— and not from teaching, editing, doing other things.

Writing is a wonderful thing, but I put the practice of writing above mere dollars and cents. I write to pay the mortgage on my soul.

From Jean
The comments that Passion, Joan and others made about the advantages of getting public exposure, paid or not, make sense. Most writers who now get paid seem to have started out getting pieces accepted by non-paying publications such as local newsletters, websites, etc. (And as Joan pointed out, even writing which never sees the light of day is valuable as practice.)

The progression from being an unpaid to a paid writer seems parallel to the progression from being a group that produces printed material (handouts, leaflets) to being a publishing company. Back in the 1980s, I wrote several articles about the boom in presses run by women, publishing women's work (for GAY/LESBIAN STUDIES NEWS, I wrote about the lesbian influence in feminist publishing). Most of the women's presses which began sprouting up in the early 1970s (some of which didn't last) began as the information or PR wing of a feminist organization, or the offshoot of some other women's group.

The dazzling diversity of specialized presses that exist now encourages a diversity of writing. Now that piece that you might hardly have dared write 25 years ago might even get accepted for publication. Erotic writing is a case in point.

So one reason to write (one reason that I write) is because you (I, we) know there is an audience out there for something we want to say.

Another reason that I write (related to the above) is because the reader (unlike a listener who is physically present) can't shut me up by interrupting or outshouting me. If he/she stops reading, the story/poem/article still exists, and someone else will probably read it all the way through.

Writing, like role-playing, enables the writer to imagine living differently, in someone else's shoes.

Writing about one's own life enables the writer to reach a greater conscious understanding of the experience of living in one's OWN shoes.

Reading and writing are complementary. Reading other people's work stimulates a desire to answer it, or continue the story where the other writer left off, or write an alternative version.

Writing and getting read enable a writer to become known differently (and possibly better) than communicating in a mroe superficial way with neighbors, co-workers, etc. The big objection of my stepson (and others) to cyberspace relationships in general is "How well can you get to know people you've never met in person?" My answer is "How well do you think you know most of the people in your 'real life'? Is appearance (including smell, body language, etc.) more important than the expression of feelings and ideas?" Cyberspace relationships are based on writing, even outside a writers' group such as ERWA.

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