Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week agoBook 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.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I read the link. It doesn’t say what you think it’s saying. The perception you’re getting is that there are millions of authors out there, that they’re all writing full time, and that 80% of them are earning less than Monica Byrne.
There are simply huge numbers of books that essentially don’t sell at all. I’m talking about technical manuals, academic books in niche topics of research, and even textbooks for courses that only a handful of people take. We don’t need a system to support these authors because they’re not trying to support themselves by writing books. Rather, the books they write are basically a side effect of their day job.