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by averagewall 3352 days ago
Why has every response to my comment misinterpreted it? Do you all have an axe to grind against someone and you thought I was that someone?

I'm simply saying that many writers produce work with very little value to other people, and that those writers shouldn't expect to be paid for their "work". Nobody pays me to eat food, even though I enjoy doing that.
1 comments
Raphmedia 3352 days ago
How is going to school, starting up a career and writing books is any different than going to school, starting up a career and writing code?

Do you think that the code we write add that much value to society? Unless you are a computer scientist and pushing the boundaries, our code will simply rot away in 4 years and nobody will remember one line of it.

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douche 3352 days ago
The equivalent in writing for what most programmers do would be marketing, PR, journalism, or technical writing. You can get a paying job to write, it's just going to be that kind of writing - not for your Next Great American Novel. Likewise, I get paid a salary to bolt together shitty enterprise software and automate call-center workers out of jobs - not to tickle my fancy writing video games or exploring the corners of computer science.
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Raphmedia 3352 days ago
Aren't we talking about technical writing? The problem in the OP's post are about writing a book on SVG.

I would be more likely to agree if this thread was about the issues encountered while writing a children's story book.

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douche 3352 days ago
Writing a technical book is, as far as I was aware, well known to be a losing bet, where it's exceedingly rare that authors make back their advances. e.g. http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/technical-writin...
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zmaks 3351 days ago
Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow. It's way more efficient than reading huge book.

So, such books are needed by very small group of people. And this defines the pay.

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Raphmedia 3349 days ago
> Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow.

The people out there who pride themselves into being able to do their work without relying on googling everything? What if you have an idea or a requirement that has never been done before?

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