Do you think it’s wrong to get paid for doing nothing?

If you immediately said yes, you have a choice:

1. You can quit reading this post now, and go back to your regularly scheduled life of trading time (or skills, or hard work, or yes, even knowledge) for money. Good luck with that. I hope you’re able to retire someday.
2. Or you can keep reading and run the risk of changing your mind. It’s OK to argue with me (in your head or in the comments) if you want to have a reasonable adult-type discussion. It could even be fun.

Hi, people who stayed!

Lemme tell you a little secret. I myself would have answered this question with a “probably yes” until earlier this week when Johnny B. Truant once again blew my mind in this post about believing in the value you provide.

(You should totally go read that post. I mean it. Do it now. I’ll wait. Oh, and remember that Johnny swears. Beautifully.)

Are you back? ‘Kay. Johnny is right on when he talks about the value of knowledge and the right to charge appropriately for it.

And I’m going to go one step further and suggest that it’s even OK to make money for doing nothing.

Everyone who just thought of Dire Straits? Congratulations, you’re as old as I am.

(I could use some chicks for free, actually. I’m thinking of raising some chickens so we can have fresh healthy eggs from our own backyard. But then I’d need a chicken coop, because we have foxes and coyotes and bobcats here. Hmmm.)

Back to the “money for nothing” discussion.

My goodness, what kind of greedy immoral person thinks they should be able to just get handed free money?

For starters, everyone who’s ever invested in the stock market… and that includes you “I’m buying and holding mutual funds for my IRA portfolio” folks. But that’s not the main point of this particular rant.

I’m mainly talking about anyone who’s ever created any form of intellectual property, ever. Like stories, for instance. Or music. Or movies, or software. Or teleclasses. Or ebooks.

All of these pieces of “content” can be digitally duplicated with a marginal cost (additional cost for each copy) of exactly zero.

Of course it costs money to print a book, or burn and ship a disc. But that’s merely the container for the intellectual property, not the intellectual property itself. And in our online world, there are more and more “information products” that don’t have a tangible, physical existence at all, and that’s where I’m headed.

If you think that the price of a book (or an ebook) is a reflection of the work the author put into it, I’d suggest you reconsider. Because that would mean, among other things:

• Nothing that resulted from hard work could ever be freely given away
• Bestseller status would automatically mean those authors worked harder than other, non-bestselling authors
• Once an author dies, you shouldn’t have to pay for their stuff anymore; it should be free
• The higher the number of copies sold, the lower the price should be (reflecting a fixed amount of work that went into writing and production)

But we all know that someone can write and launch an ebook, and then essentially keep selling copies forever, while doing exactly zero additional work. Slap it up on a website and have an autoresponder deliver the link, and that’s it.

Why should this person keep receiving profits from doing no additional work?

Well, first, why not? That only seems wrong if you actually believe that the only way to earn money is hard work. See stock market reference, above. The people who cash the dividend checks are not doing the work.

Second, a more substantive guess at an answer: Because as a buyer, I’m not paying for the work the author did to write the book. I’m paying for the experience of reading it.

Yes, it’s true that I might “learn something.” That might even be the point of my experience. But it doesn’t have to be.

People are still paying for books of fiction (maybe not so much in e-format, but still). I recently paid good American money to purchase tangible copies of all four books in a certain vampire series, for instance.

(Okay, it was Twilight. I admit it. And although I have giant problems with some aspects of the books, I still enjoyed the experience I had reading them. I like SpaghettiOs, too. Happy now?)

Rooted in integrity

Do I resent Stephenie Meyer for making money from my purchase? Hell no. Neither do I resent the authors of the various info products I’ve bought.

In fact, I think info products seem like a pretty great way to make some money, while helping people and staying true to my small-business tree roots.

Soon, I’ll be launching some paid products. (I’ve already added two new services, WordPress Installations and AWeber Tune-Ups, but those are both old-school trading-skills-for-money gigs, so they don’t fit the “info product” definition I’m working with here.)

I’m now choosing to believe it’s OK to make money from the kind of product I can sell over and over again with very little (or even zero) additional effort. I know that I will in fact put hard work into creating them, and that they will in fact provide value… for My Right People. And all others? Need not apply.

And you can choose to believe the same thing about your work. Will you?

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