🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec14.222147.20742@cs.mcgill.ca> troye@cs.mcgill.ca (Troy ENGLISH) writes:
>Frankly , the shareware authors should be pissed! I know of a place that
>sells the games at 7.00 a piece with cost of producing being about 0.25
>each ......

  I think you are missing the point.  The shareware distributors are doing
all the work printing catalogs and sending them out to 100,000's of people.
The volume of potiential non-BBS non-internet customers is so great that
my shareware income is MOSTLY from people who bought a $4.00 disk from one
of the big vendors.
  If you are distributing shareware to try to make money, you must drop 
the kneejerk big-business-is-bad attitude.  The point is that these companies
spend a lot of money advertising my program in color catalogs at no cost
to me.  The relationship between authors and vendors is mutually benificial.
All my dealings with the shareware vendors has been very positive.
  Besides the fact that your figure of $.25 doesn't include the salaries
of the secrataries, evaluaters, shipping guys, catalog printing and postage,
building space and so on.  Believe me, it IS a tough market with a lot
of competition.
  Your $7.00 per disk company probably has found a niche selling to really
uninformed people.  That is probably not a very reliable or large market.
Most customers will probably figure out relatively quickly that they are
being ripped off and will never order again.  It's really not the author's
problem.
                                         -Kevin

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|  Kevin Stokes                        |     Please direct all pointless     |
|  Pie in the Sky Software             |   flames to my mailbox, it's much   |
|                                      |          more irritating.           |