Crowdfunding for history book

[Jason Scott]

Just when I think the vintage/retro computing lists I'm on have sunk as low
as they go, and it can only be nodes among the continuum from there on out,
John comes blazing out of nowhere with a new,
screech-of-the-bottom-of-the-barrel-getting-hit howler response like this
one.

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 10:58 AM, js at cimmeri.com <js at cimmeri.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 2/11/2015 12:35 AM, Evan Koblentz wrote:
>
>> Hello cctalk'ers,
>>
>> Hopefully this message won't offend anyone --- I recognize that I might,
>> and I apologize in advance if it does.
>>
>> As many of you know, I've been in the vintage computing hobby for about a
>> decade. The first person I met was Sellam Ismail. He helped guide me as a
>> newb collector of handheld/pocket computers.
>>
>> Somehow that led to me co-founding MARCH, publishing a 1,000-subscriber
>> newsletter for a few years, rescuing a mainframe here and there, making the
>> VCF East into a premier event, and becoming a "talking head" everywhere
>> from BBC Radio to the Wall Street Journal. (My personal site is
>> www.snarc.net if you really want to know more ... bring popcorn.)
>>
>> Now I'm asking for some personal help from the community.
>>
>> I'm trying something radical: crowd funding, so that I can finally finish
>> the decade-long project of writing my book about the history of mobile
>> computing.
>>
>> You can imagine how frustrated I feel when telling my family "I'm in the
>> The Wall Street Journal!" but that I'm also dangerously under-employed
>> (having been spit out of the technical journalism field after 16 years). It
>> does not compute.
>>
>
>
> Sure it computes.  Vintage computing -- currently -- is just hobby-worthy,
> and your little Man-On-Street quotes appearing here and there are hardly
> income worthy.   Your experience compared to the Real Guys on this list (of
> which I don't qualify to rank as either) barely qualifies you as anything,
> much less a "talking head" for vintage computing.  You're a talking head
> for MARCH.  That's it.
>
> Why should people PAY you to write a book?   Only established authors with
> some kind of track record get an advance from their publishers.
>
> Annoyed,
> - J.
>