Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It took her 12 years to write a book! That’s not a successful author, that’s a hobbyist.
Look at an actual successful author like Nora Roberts. Since the start of 2012 she’s published 57 books!
And before you say “there’s no way those 57 books are as good as the one book which took 12 years to write” let’s look at reviews on Goodreads:
The Actual Star by Monica Byrne (2704 ratings for a 3.88 average rating).
Private Scandals (2012) by Nora Roberts (10151 ratings for a 4.01 average rating).
And that’s just one random book I picked by her. Many of them are way more popular than that (hundreds of thousands of ratings on Goodreads).
The point is: if you want to make money as an author (of books, video games, YouTube videos) you can’t ignore your own productivity. Taking 12 years to write a 624 page book is extremely unproductive! That’s 4383 days (including leap years) to write 624 pages for an average of 1 page per week. A part time newspaper columnist writes several times that output and probably spends no more than an hour or two working on it.
I knew a lot of musicians like this in my younger days before I gave up on my music dreams
The ones who grinded everyday for 8-10 hours writing and practicing? They’d write you a song in a day or two
Dudes who sat around “until inspiration hit”? They would have a new song randomly like every 6 months or so, sometimes garbage, sometimes solid. But if you asked them to write for you? Flake and missed deadlines regardless of what you’re paying
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 weeks ago
She writes full-time, maintains her own streams of writing income separate from royalties. And, if she’d written this book in one year, she’d be making $40k/year. And, she points out that her book income is in the top 20% of writers.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Book sales, like almost everything else based on popularity, follow a power law distribution. This means that having a book in the top 20% of all books by earnings is not that great considering that the bottom 80% of books earn basically nothing.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 weeks ago
And you don’t see that as a problem? If 80% of the people doing an important thing make nothing for it?
That structure exists for specific reasons, and can be undone with specific changes. Here’s an essay that goes into more detail about all of it, including as it pertains to other vital activities like music, teaching and art, as well as writing:
pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/
The article from my post was just a further deep dive into the nuts and bolts of how it impacts one other full-time practitioner of this important thing.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If nobody is buying their books then how important are they?
The structure is a mathematical one. More rain falls in large puddles than into small ones (and the rain makes large puddles larger). More asteroids fall into large craters than small ones (and the large craters grow larger).
qyron@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I call that bullshit. Smells like ghost writers from afar.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 weeks ago
Your argument is that she’s paying ghost writers so that she can maintain her lucrative can’t-afford-to-live-in-the-US lifestyle?
Is this comments section an influx of publishing industry shills or something? The logic of some of these comments is fully bonkers.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
My argument resides that at some point an author becomes a brand and it is cheaper and more effective for a publisher to have ghost writters churning out more material to make more cash, while paying a pittance in royalties to the author to keep them stringed, than waiting for the author to put forward another work.
Am I an industry shill? Hardly. An author will get pennies on the dolllar for every book sold, while the publishers make fortunes out of their work. That’s plain theft.