Comment on Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoIf 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 weeks ago
What does it say?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It says she earned $3400/year since she began writing the book (2012) and that her book is in the top 20% of book sales. Yes, it’s an unsustainable amount of money to support yourself on, clearly. You could earn more money stocking shelves at the grocery store.
But here’s the thing: she wrote one book in a decade!
Nora Roberts, at the peak of her career, was writing one book a month (now she’s only writing one book every three months in her 70s)! And the great thing about writing is that it builds momentum: the more you write, the better you get at writing, the faster you can write a book, the more you build a name for yourself, the more sales each of your books get.
There’s no problem here. Anyone who wants to can publish a book! You don’t have to go through a big publisher and collect a tiny royalty. You don’t have to take an advance. Just self-publish and keep all the profits yourself!