Sometimes I wonder about people putting their knowledge online without getting paid for it. That goes even for people who make comments at the end of an article on some site. There's nothing to keep the writers on that site from using the end comments for story ideas. I don't want to get into copyright, but my understanding is that once you put your work online anyone can claim it and use it. Even it's illegal, it's going to happen.
One of my partners complains to me all the time that I give away too much of my writing for free--an odd habit as I'm now a professional writer.
It's a difficult thing to balance. On the one hand, I, like most of the working writers I know, never chose to be a writer; writers write because we have to write, we're compelled to write, not because we want to write. It's easy to write online.
More to the point, giving away some of your writing for free builds a base. The polyamory book I just wrote,
More Than Two, is selling amazingly well for an indie writer with no marketing---4,000 copies in its first three months! That's almost unheard-of for a first-time nonfiction indie book.
Part of the reason is I've been writing about polyamory on the Web for free for a very long time (I first started in 1998 or 1999).
With tech writing, which does go stale fast, the way you sell books is to establish credibility and show you know what you're talking about, and the way you do that is...write for free.
But, of course, if you ONLY write for free, it becomes a time sink that never produces anything of value for you. There's also this weird thing where you gain credibility by writing for free, then you publish a book and now suddenly you gain MORE credibility, so more people read the stuff you put online, which increases the interest in your next book...and 'round and 'round it goes.
