ronburk - 5:22 pm on Aug 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

Lessee, I'll just spin the giant "Everything I Know, I Learned from..." wheel, and it slows down, clicking through "Genghis Khan", on to "Kindergarten", almost stopping at "Working at Microsoft", finally landing on "The Bible". Ok:

You shall not muzzle the ox when it treads out the grain.

You're trying to shift your risk of not being able to profit from content (or perhaps not being able to judge what good content is) onto the writer. This should attract people who cannot get a better offer anywhere else. You might do better by shifting from thinking "how can I get a great, risk-free deal for myself" into thinking "how can I offer a great, risk-free deal to really good authors?"