Alex.

Alex.

“Don’t want to worry about your best work and ideas getting lost because you sign them over in order to get work with Dragon?

Don’t submit your best work and ideas.”

I’d remembered reading about Paizo taking steps to compensate subscribers, and certainly didn’t think there’d have been money flowing from Paizo back to Wizards as an artifact of the license non-renewal. So that much isn’t a surprise.

What I’d been wondering was whether Wizards — whose plans seem to have morphed somewhat since the original announcement of the printzines’ demise — might have extended “goodwill” subscriptions to Dragon’s print subscribers as a means of kickstarting the ezine and generating good PR for themselves. (Before anyone laughs, I didn’t think this was likely, but it would have made enough marketing-sense to be worth thinking about.)

Anyhow, the point I was trying to make up in #95 thus stands — if I were second-guessing rulings from SFWA’s membership committee, the way I’d vote would be: Dragon, the printzine, remains a pro market for membership purposes. Dragon, the new ezine, is a completely different market, and presently is not.

I also agree strongly with Annon and James Lowder; my experience over many years, though at greater distance, is that a variant of Feist’s Law (“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”) applies here. This is not a case of WotC’s editorial teams setting out to screw writers; this is a case of corporate management and corporate legal powers hamstringing the editorial teams. Substitute “ignorance” (at the corporate level) for “stupidity” in the axiom as quoted, and the context should be about right….

No, WotC is not honoring any subscriptions from the print incarnation of Dragon. All that money stayed at Paizo (who licensed Dragon from WotC). Details at Paizo are here: http://paizo.com/paizo/news/v5748eaic9kh0 and here http://paizo.com/transition

Hope that helps!

Perhaps this will get fixed — the company is launching a new book line that might suffer thanks to this Dragon move in the same way the relaunch of Amazing Stories was harmed at the time by the Dragon CD ROM. (Some writers stopped selling to Amazing, others dropped their subscriptions….) Problems like this certainly diminish the PR value of publishing with a market. Editors and other publishers know when a market is tainted — when it offers such bad terms that many pro writers stay away. So listing a market like that on your resume isn’t likely to impress. In fact, it may make another publisher or editor wonder just how professional you are, if you accepted such bad terms for your work. All credits are not necessarily good credits.

The awesomeness justifies the means. How dare those writers stand up for themselves–protect their IP and demand their contracts be honored, their rights respected! WotC would never send out threatening letters to fan web sites that reproduce WotC material without permission! If the fans crave it, the company would never dream of getting in the way!

If anyone needs a reminder of the sort of silly, writer-unfriendly attitudes that make decisions like this possible at WotC….

These new [i]Dragon[/i] terms are a bad deal, even for PR use.

Cheers,
James Lowder

If you’re trying to tell me that you are an IP specialist and have some legal perspective I’m missing here, feel free. But I’m not getting your argument that it’s wise for an author to pay somebody else an indeterminate sum–the complete ownership of something they, a published author, have written–as the cost of publicity of unknown value. Especially since the ‘free sample’ argument suggests that the author would be better off publishing in a venue that doesn’t suck up all rights.

WizarDru, as I remember dimly, there actually was some legal foofaraw over Feist’s Riftworld series, because he based it on his local group’s D&D campaign, not knowing that the GM had in turn based part of that campaign on M.A.R. Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne books.

I’m writing for Hasbro right now via WotC, and what I’ve noticed is that Harbro has a very large number of people making decisions that do not completely understand exactly how to be a publisher of books with words in them. Toys, they know. Cardgames, they know. Books, they don’t have the same level of experience doing books and working with freelance writers of books.

They are well-intentioned, intelligent people, and they show a lot of promise. Though I wouldn’t touch Dragon Magazine with a long pole, right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the very talented people working and editing in the books department cannoodle this one into industry standard over time.

Things have definitely gotten better since the initial buyout, and it’s been largely due – from what I’ve seen – to the staff of Wizards gently communicating this new form of business to their new corporate overlords.