Trent, you turned around your life to become a professional writer and then you let someone person steal your work and sell it without any benefit to you?

Don’t assume that the guy will not make much money out of it, why would he bother otherwise?

Please have a little respect for your work! I do, I downloaded “31 days to fix your finances” when I came across your site, and gladly paid the little $2, it was so worth it.

Don’t be one of those starving, struggling writers because of your distate for business matters!

Since I’m in Houston there is no cheap transportation near the ballpark. They purposefully built the “new” stadium without a parking lot to give local businesses a nice little payback when they charge for parking. You pay between five and ten bucks and walk four blocks. Not too bad.

We get tickets in the upper deck (12 bucks) or occasionally the outfield bleachers (7 bucks).

If we’re smart we can see a ball game for $25 bucks including gas and parking. Going to major league games is an incredible ripoff, though. When in Austin we occasionally see the Astros’ AAA team, the Round Rock Express. Tickets there are 12 bucks for box seats, 7 bucks for the outfield bleachers (The Home Run Porch) and 6 bucks if you want to sit on the lawn. Parking is cheap, too.

As for the person who downloaded Trent’s book and is selling it, that’s a theft of intellectual property. There IS money to be made here, but that’s not the point. Why should some sleazebag profit from your work. I’d be filing a “cease and desist” order immediately.

The free market allows this guy to attempt this. That is as it should be.

It also allows us to peacefully try and influence others to limit his sucess.

In the old days, it was called shaming.

Now, Amazon and other sites offer us a handy way to do this. I have added my two cents in a review.

Actually, reading through Trent’s release of copyright, he isn’t saying “I doubt there’s any money to be made”. He’s saying “It’s more important to me for this information to get out there than it is that I get all the money made from such a distribution.”

He DOES value his own work, but he values the distribution over change in his pocket. That’s not the same thing as saying there isn’t money to be made.

What makes him a “slimeball?” If someone puts their work out there and invites people to use it however they want, explicitely including profiting from it, is everyone supposed to just politely say “Gee, that’s very generous of you, but I couldn’t possibly take advantage of you like that.” If Trent really thought there was profit to be made in that work, then he’d have retained the copyright and sold the work himself. Instead, he in essence is saying “I doubt there’s any money to be made in this work, but you’re welcome to try.”

I disagree that this is at all slimy.

It is incredibly slimy, even though in this case legal, to sell someone else’s work and I would never buy this book or anything else by whoever did this. I searched briefly for it to see if I could leave some kind of comment to let potential buyers know that this guy is ripping off someone else’s but I couldn’t find the book. Hopefully it won’t see the light of day or sell many copies.

No, I don’t expect you would get angry or POd, although I can see why many would expect you to be.

But…to take no action and just let someone in essence steal your work AND profit off it? That’s NOT what professionals do. Sorry, Trent. Everything we create is not for free. And you will, I predict, live to regret this decision to not take action. For a lot of the reasons mentioned here by others.

You either don’t understand copyright laws, don’t care or don’t get how negatively this can affect your own business and marketability.

You do a great disservice to yourself and other bloggers and writers by treating this situation– someone taking your work and repackaging it for sale– so lightly.

Seriously. It makes no sense on your part. Passive? I think it’s way beyond passive on your part and makes me seriously begin to question your professional motivation as a writer.

And your professionalism as a writer.

You’re starting to come across like an “amateur” because no professional writer in their right mind allows people to steal their work for REUSE 1/ without their permission (giving a blanket permission on your site isn’t the same as giving a blanket permission to republish and sell elsewhere) and 2/for someone else’s personal profit.

I think you, like many writers, just don’t like the messy parts of doing business as a writer.

You need to ask yourself how you can just basically roll over and play dead.

Giving away everything? For free, for anybody to do whatever? That’s just plain, well, unprofessional. (There are some other words that apply but it’s best to stick to the business aspects.)

I’m very disappointed in your response and you are, quite frankly, why so many writers can’t get money for their work and why their work is devalued and stolen by others (big companies included.)

Yea. Let’s just GIVE IT ALL AWAY. FREE FREE FREE. Not the way it works (unless you are making SOOO much money from your book that you think you can literally afford to give work away…Is this person who is selling your work a personal charity of yours? Cause that is how you are treating it.)

If you didn’t have this blog and you were writing, trust me, that would not be your attitude.

Trent, Trent, Trent, I am totally disheartened by your choice on this.

Totally.

You can’t possibly take making a living by writing seriously.

s

Too late. “Wealthy” or “rich” tends to be defined on a sliding scale, usually a scale that’s always looking to the people that make more than you. Which eventually rules out anybody not on a Forbes short list from considering themselves “rich.” I think that’s a very narrow perspective. I prefer a broader perspective.

I would consider a person to be wealthy when changes in income determine the level of comfort or luxury they can afford rather than what essentials they can afford. This definition classifies nearly all of the western world as wealthy. (This is especially true for bloggers.) Most westerners wonder how they will afford a particular square footage for their home rather than just a roof that won’t collapse. It seems to me that we have a very inflated sense of ‘wealthy’; and ‘comfortable’ for that matter.

I have no problem with people being wealthy. I just think that most people, including the author of my two dollars, have more to be grateful for than they realize.

Ingram, the big distributor most bookstores use, is listing “1001 Ways To Make Money” as by you, too. Just by the by.

This is the same argument that supporters of file-sharing use. If you have a physical CD, and I take that from your possession, I have stolen something from you. However, if you copy the CD and share it on the Internet, I can download it all I want. I am not taking anything from you. My actions do not cost you anything. In other words, intellectual property can not be compared to physical property in any way.

I think that Trent understands this.

A rock band does not make much money at all from selling CDs. The band makes the vast majority of its money doing tours, selling tickets to people who want to see them live.

In the same way, Trent does not make much money (directly) by writing for the simple dollar (although ad revenue does play a part). I would be willing to guess that Trent makes the vast majority of his money through contract work. People see his writing skills online, and they want to hire him. A publisher has already hired him to write two books. And Trent has alluded many times to other writing projects people have hired him to work on.

When people begin to understand this concept, the world will be a better place. A free flow of information is very beneficial to society. But when people fight for these imaginary intellectual property rights, this severely restricts the free flow of information, to the detriment of society.

It is unfortunate that this has taken place, and I still say that if it were me this was happening to, I’d be very upset.

Look at 90% of the self help books out there and you will see they are nothing more than public knowledge you can find for free if you search for it. Most of the time, all the author did was re-package that info into a book. But hey, if someone is willing to pay that person for information they could have found freely. Since the author did the research and packaged it into a book so the reader wouldn’t have to, doesn’t he or she deserve to be compensated?

Trent is not out any money as its info he gives freely and he has no right to it as he clearly expresses it can be re-used with this statement. “If you want to reuse an article from The Simple Dollar in your newspaper, newsletter, or anything else, go right ahead.”

I don’t see where there is a legal or ethical problem here. I am sure Trent knew something like this would happen before he ever offered up his articles as free public domain.

-Kris

Perhaps you should look into releasing your work under the Creative Commons license. I think you’d find it useful and fair.

http://creativecommons.org/