Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

The company that owns Five Star Books has decided to take the public domain article I wrote for work (and which is freely available online at the school’s website) and sell PDFs of it–and dozens of others–on Amazon for 10$ each.

This is the annoying part of the Long Tail.  No doubt it’s perfectly legal–I wouldn’t know.  And I have no right to that article; it was created as work-for-hire, essentially, and because the one who hired me to write it was Uncle Sam, it’s public domain.  And to be fair, they did credit the source.

But still kinda smarmy to me.  Taxpayers paid the salary of every person involved in getting that article written, published, and posted to the web in PDF.  Then this outfit comes along, copies the file over to Amazon and asks people to pay good money for something that would be otherwise free.

And of course, when I submitted a review (using my real name) to the article, stating that the same PDF could be obtained free at the DISAM Journal website, Amazon elected not to approve my review.  For unstated reasons.

Sigh.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

It’s an Outrage! Ugh.

I hope like Hell Tim gets sees some kind of damn good payday out of this.

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Finding Your Voice Writing in Fragments and Pieces Workshop

And only 30 bucks!!! What a bargain.

::begins preparing next great American “Tw-ovel”::

Originally published at LonPrater.com. You can comment here or there.

Remember the good ol’ days, when the writernets were abuzz with tales of Barbara Bauer and Publish America atrocities?

I hear they’re coming back.

Here’s the latest, brought to my attention when a friend sent me this PW puff-piece on IndieReader.com:

Edelman, who is both a self-published and conventionally published author, emphasized that the site will also be selective about the books it accepts. An editorial board made up of an editor, agent, book marketer and a consumer reader, will vet each title before it goes on the site. IndieReader is nonexclusive and will charge self-publishers $149 a year to sell through the site and another $25 fee to cover submission costs. If the book is rejected, IndieReader will refund the yearly charge, but not the submission fee. Once a book is listed on-site, IndieReader will notify self-publishers of purchase requests by e-mail and the author is charged with fulfillment. Authors set the retail price and are free to add all kinds of content to their author pages.

[*In the comments, Edelman clarifies that the $25 fee is included in the $149.]