[ANN] My Transition from a Software Developer to a Writer/amateur-philosopher/entertainer/Internet celebrity

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Ori,

thanks for your message (and for bottom posting). See below for my response.

On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:05:06 +0200
Ori Idan <ori at helicontech.co.il> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 7:34 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at shlomifish.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > in case you missed my post on blogs.perl.org, see:
> >
> > *
> >
> > http://blogs.perl.org/users/shlomi_fish/2013/03/ann-my-transition-from-software-developer-to-writerentertaineramateur-philosopherinternet-celebrity.html
> >
> > (short URL - http://xrl.us/bonezw ).
> >
> > Reading from it:
> >
> > <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
> > I'd like to make an announcement: after some serious thought, I decided
> > that
> > from now on, being a software developer (which I am not too bad at) will
> > only
> > be the means (but the absolutely necessary ones) to me being a writer /
> > entertainer / philosopher / Internet celebrity (a little bit of all those
> > and
> > then some) whose main pride and passion is his personal web site, which is
> > full
> > of a lot of material, and various pages and material is constantly added
> > to it.
> >
> >
> Nice move Shlomi, but as a writer (with 2 books published in print and 4 as
> EPUBS) I can say that I prefer to keep doing it as a hobby and not as my
> day job.

Sure, I'm planning to continue being employed as a programmer for the foreseen
future.

> If I had made writing my day job (which is something I wanted few years
> ago), I'd be forced to be commercial and write about what people really
> want to read or the way people like to read.

Well, many people enjoyed reading the stuff I wrote, but you are right that
often one needs to adapt him or herself to their audience.

> These days I started to make my living connected to writing but not
> directly from writing. I now make my living from digital books consulting
> and services and still work as a software consultant.
> 

Sounds good. I think I can be a good software consultant as well, giving my
experience and insights to various companies who are interested in learning how
to make their workflow better, in exchange for money (I don't think I'll be a
good manager, though - at least not yet).

One aspect of making money that I thought about was starting from licences such
as CC-by-sa (Sharealike), CC-by-nc (noncommercial) or CC-by-nc-sa
(noncommercial + sharealike) and either selling
non-commercial/non-sharealike/non-attribution exemptions for them or even
auctioning an entire relicensing to a more permissive licence - such as
CC-by.

I also decided that I am going to write primarily in English now, because
with English I have a larger target audience this way, and also because I am
very inspired by, reflect, and address common and often popular Anglophone
culture. I also started working more intensively on publicity - including
image-based Project Wonderful ads, guest posts, forum posts, publicity on
Internet news sites such as Slashdot or http://reddit.com/ , etc. and like
I said - also real-life networking. It seems that lately, more people have
heard about my site, and also I got many more requests from publishers who want
to publish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful ads there (which
still isn't a lot of money, but may indicate that my site may be getting more
popular).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish   

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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