I turned down a substantial amount of money from Live Steam Magazine for the Green Twin Article.
I did not ask for money, they just said "We will send you this money".
I told them "thanks but no thanks; contribute it to a good cause for the hobby".
I am not going to get in the business of making money from the hobby.
I think going commercial would ruin it for me.
I have one job already; I don't need two.
I certainly don't fault others who want to make some money from it; more power to those folks.
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it is my not so humble opinion that you should always take the $$. The reason is sort of twisted, but it's like this: Not Live Steam magazine necessarily, because I have never bought a subscription, but for some other mags. Two mags that come bi-monthly, published by the same company and realistically, are the same mag, just split into two parts. The subscriptions are rather expensive, at least for me the are.
My complaint is that the mags are printed on very expensive paper, thick paper, photographic quality paper, very few pages and usually empty of quality projects that don't seem trivial or outright silly. you might guess the two mags I am talking about. I thimpfks that most likely the problem is that there simply are not enough people sending in quality projects like had been done in the 20's, 30's, 40s ---to mabye the 70's when the hobby was heavy with subscribers (before TV, internet, etc.). Now too few are interested and, I suppose, the magazine companies can't sell enough mags to lower the cost. They really needs to attract better projects.
If they had better projects I would be far more willing to pay the high price. I'm lucky if I get two projects a year that I am mildly interested in and one project in TWO years that I really want to make. I can't really justify spending 130$ for two mags per year with a total of 12 issues. I could buy three or four sets of plans that I specifically want to build for that amount of $$.
So my feeling is that take the money and brag about it so there are more people willing to take the time to send better projects to the magazines. The internet has so many great vids, Blondi, Joe, the old tony, and loads of others that it is really absurd, it seems impossible that the magazines can continue to exist in their poor form. The problem with the internet, is too often there are no downloadable plans. Many of these peeps get $$ from advertising, have sponsors or use Patreon so I don't feel as if I should pay them more for plans necessarily.
I am presently re-doing the Bonelle TCutter Grinder drawings which are so complicated that these actually need to be paid for if one wants good copies. The problem with the ones I am copying is that the drawings I am taking mine from are very poorly done--lots of missing dims, all parts unnamed or unnumbered, parts that one cannot tell where they go or how they are used. Many parts are extremely difficult to see how they are to be made--this means a perspective or 3D view needs to accompany the part. Also, there is a mix of imperial and metric units! NOT good. AND . . . there are metric, imperial and BA and BSA threads. IMO (and not very humble either), this is very poor way to make things.
Sometimes drawings are so time consuming to make, I thimpfks the person making them should be paid. JD de Waal is one such person--he does a lot of drawing and gives them away for free which I really appreciate, however, he has most likely put in thousands of hours doing this. I don't like his cramming of his drawings the way he does, particularly since it is not on paper but rather digital--easy to store and extremely cheap.
. So if you are after customers who just want to play around with any combustion engine for a few minutes before it becomes boring. You probalby need to stay below the price of any 2nd hand item and below utility motors.
