Since yesterday, things have been changing on I Write Like. The commenters on the two blogs I linked to yesterday are more fervent and less willing to see past their own narrow opinions than ever. The maintainer of I Write Like removed the link that they were freaking out about and replaced it this:
Great job! Do you want to write better?
Stephen King’s On Writing is a must-read!
The link to On Writing is an affiliate link to Amazon, which of course sent some people up in flames, despite the fact that Making Light (the first blog I mentioned) has an Amazon affiliate link on every page. Some people see what they want to see. Heaven forbid they go anywhere else on the Internet unsupervised.
There are also links to books by that author you received as your result, all with affiliate links to their books on Amazon. This is how you monetize a meme. I emailed the maintainer asking about the ebook he was offering to subscribers, pointing out that it was in the public domain in the US and thus such an offer may be unappealing to those potential subscribers. He wrote back saying that because it was in the public domain, he could offer it as a PDF file. Well, of course he could. It doesn’t mean that it’ll be appealing since people can find it in other formats. On the other hand, Project Gutenberg doesn’t offer a PDF format, and PDF files are nearly universal. ePub it does offer, but no PDF. (And the non-HTML/Plain Text formats are experimental.)
That’s that. Let the haters hate. I’m moving on with my life.