If you make some software and sell it online, you can make lots of money. Thanks to low-cost distribution, it’s possible to write one bit of code and sell it many times, generating fat margins in the process. Throw in a larger industry trend toward recurring pricing as opposed to single-shot sales, and you have the foundation for rich software company valuations in hand.
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Writing was supposed to be the same, but it mostly didn’t work out. The internet allows you to write once and distribute those words to anyone at incredibly low costs, but the economics wound up being pretty tough. The real way to make money writing online, it turned out, was to treat words as code to a degree and release them under a subscr …
