I call that bullshit. Smells like ghost writers from afar.
Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week agoShe 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.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week 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 1 week 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.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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).
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
You didn’t read the link, did you.
The imbalance in people buying books, that make it mostly impossible to earn a living unless you happen to be someone both you and me have heard of, exists for specific reasons. Those mathematics are not laws of nature, they are consequences of how book distribution got rearranged in the 1980s, which produced a great holocaust of writers at the time, which is bad.