Write Cheques. Not Just Books.

December 2003

How anybody can turn thoughts into words and words into wealth.

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The Queen of England is poor. The royal grandmother of Prince Harry is not as rich as the mother of Harry Potter. JK Rowling, the author of the phenomenal Harry Potter series of books, is the richest author in history, based on the 125 million pounds earned last year. She is slated to touch the one billion pounds figure in the near future. But not everyone has the good fortune and extraordinary luck of Rowling, the Queen of England, Bill Gates, or even the hot male, Sabeer Bhatia. The world is full of ordinary people like you and me: living, struggling, striving, hoping. Until one day we simply disappear from the planet with dreams unfulfilled.

Look at Jane Austen. As an author, she earned 600 pounds her entire life. Emily Bronte did not sell enough books of Wuthering Heights to earn royalties. Agatha Christie has sold over 2 billion of her detective novels so far, Rowling has sold only 230 million. But what about the author of free India's national anthem, Rabindra Nath Tagore, the Nobel laureate, the author of so many beautiful poems and short stories? So who really earns the money, even in the case of JK Rowling? The publishers, of course.

Read Between The Lines

The story no one is willing to publish is the story of publishers and their wealth. The real story is about all those great authors or forgotten authors in every corner of the world who got paid little, or nothing at all, for their fountain of creativity. The story of authors who sign away the copyright of their books to publishers for pocket change, just to see their name and their work in a printed form on the shelves. And the story of those who faced a lifetime of receiving rejection slips and rejection notes from publishers. For every JK Rowling, perhaps ten million authors have burned on the stakes of disappointment and dejection.

Are you one of them? Are you a respected Professor or even a school teacher, who can write a great book on your discipline and know thousands would read it? Have you been word-processing poems in your consciousness while you keep body and soul together in some job, any job, somewhere? Can you write a great book on Teach Yourself X, where X stands for anything from Aerobics to Zen? I wonder how many thousands of people exist in India who have something beautiful and valuable to share through their words. I am also quite sure you know at least three people who do. This is for all of you, and it is not about dreaming in billions. It is about taking back control and ownership of your work, publishing it, and letting your readers pay you directly if they wish, and whatever they wish.

Book Yourself

Start by visiting lightandmatter.com. You will find a series of books on Physics, for undergraduate students at college, written by a respected Physics professor. The books are available as PDF for free, and are prescribed in various schools and colleges across the world, including Delhi University south campus. If students or teachers wish, they can order a printed version, which costs far less than similarly produced books. Also read the excellent articles on the site, on the business model around mukt books. Then visit theassayer.org where thousands of books, including books under the Free Documentation License (fdl) await you. These mukt and muft books point to the real revolution happening in publishing. Go ahead, download books of your choice. Do a google-search for free e-Books and prepare for a jaw-dropping results page. Finally, visit creativecommons.org. This site offers various alternative licenses to publish books and articles, all inspired by the vision and philosophy of GNU (gnu.org) and Linux. Choose your license, word-process your book in the mukt and muft OpenOffice.org software, and create your PDF from within this software in a few clicks for free. Upload your eBook to as many websites and eBook repositories as you can find on the internet. Let students, readers, and the general public know about your books through mailing lists and word-of-mouth.

If your book is good, it will touch the lives of thousands, or millions. And if that happens, the money will come. Less than JK Rowling's, but certainly more than Emily Bronte's. If you are convinced that you have a revolutionary book to publish, then know that you will also create a revolution in publishing. Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge and Learning, has to be free. Only then can Saraswati and Lakshmi, The Goddess of Wealth, bestow their combined blessings on you.

Inspired by the vision of Osho. Niyam Bhushan is a leading technology writer, editor, columnist, with a background in graphic design. He consults and trains in digital imagery. He has been using computers across several platforms since 1982, and loves the freedom and power offered by GnuLinux. Email: freedomyug at linuxforu dot com

© 2003 Niyam Bhushan. First published in LinuxForYou magazine, www.linuxforu.com. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.