Glad you found my thoughts useful. Of course, with poetry it’s an easier decision since we’re not really giving up any chance to make real money by posting it online. The kind of well-rounded and insightful essays you publish at your blog might indeed make quite a lot of money if you submitted them to magazines. One of my brothers makes thousands of dollars a year writing pieces for a political magazine; I told him he’d be a fool to blog! ‘Cause he needs the money, and blog advertising revenue wouldn’t come close. So online self-publishing is not a one-size-fits-all solution by any matter, though I do tend to recommend it to poets — especially since there are so few general-interest magazines and newspapers that publsih poetry anymore. We have a far better chance of reaching readers this way.

You’re the first person I’ve bumped up against who’s made such a statement, although there surely are others I’ve simply not found.
It feels like an affirmation of my own instincts in this matter of publication. Even though it’s a nearly reflexive response to anyone who can string a few words together, I’m beginning to hear the “you should write a book/get published/stop giving your stuff away” mantra more often.

I may be nuts, but I’d much rather spend my time researching and writing, and developing relationships with my readers, than devote myself to “getting published”. I’ve had two poems anthologized and published a handful of magazine articles, and my feeling about it all was, “Well, ok. Been there, done that. Now – back to work.”

Anyway – I didn’t mean to run on so, but this whole business of it’s-not-really-writing-unless-you-get-paid drives me crazy. More thinking to be done on the subject, for sure.

I’ve been researching it and found myself reading some of the debates regarding the NC portion of the license. Interesting stuff, and I like your take on the function of the SA piece. Hadn’t thought about that.

Yes, I think that’s true about the influence of the Disney Corporation. As if I needed one more reason to hate them.

I don’t think using a Creative Commons license and submitting to journals are mutually exclusive. Applying a CC license to your work in general does not prevent you from lifting its provisions for individual works — and in any case, copyright reverts to you after publication in almost all magazines. Some of the online ones might even be amenable to posting a link to your chosen CC licence after the piece if you asked them to.

It’s book publication that gets a little tricky. Fortunately, Phoenicia Publishing was willing to include my CC licence in my chapbook, but I’m not sure how many other literary presses would be so amenable. And it’s a bigger deal for me since a book represents a sizable collection of work — I’d really want to make sure readers know they’re free to reproduce and alter it.

Cool, glad I could give you a nudge. Obviously there are other copyleft licenses than the Creative Commons share alike — the Wikipedia articles on open content, open source and free culture have plenty of links if you want to research it. A lot of people go for the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence, though the free culture purists criticize the noncommercial part. I am comfortable with applying an Attribution-Share Alike licence to my writing, since my poetry isn’t very likely to make anyone a fortune, and if it does, god bless ’em. But I figure most people who are going to want to use my work in any real money-making way will want to include it in a standard copyrighted work, which means they’d need my permission to lift the share-alike provision, for which I can demand a payoff or royalties. In practice, it’s only my photos that have attracted that kind of interest, and to date I’ve been easy, only asking for a copy of the book at most. (Got my mom a beautiful hardcover book on golden eagles that way.)

It’s funny, I have a list of things I’ve been meaning to do with my site and one of them is to change the rights to a cc share-alike type license. I share many of your concerns about copyright especially the fact that our copyright laws seem to be doing everything possible to ensure we become a civilization with no shared/public culture. That bugs me and I don’t really want to be a part of it. Perhaps I’ll move that change a little higher up on my to-do list.

Thanks for the comment. Seven years into this blogging thing, I still haven’t gotten over being amazed at it — both the ease of the technology, and the richness fo the literary culture that’s grown up as a consequence. But my decision to give away my work on my blog rather than try for first publication elsewhere has less to do with generosity than impatience, I’m afraid!