Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author

Comments

• chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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    • 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.

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    • qyron@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I call that bullshit. Smells like ghost writers from afar.

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  • quixotic120@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    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

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• tonytins@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The thing about modern copyright is that works are supposedly protected regardless of the copyright symbol. But how does that work in practice? Because if everything is copyrighted, including something as simple as a doddle, then nothing is.

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  • Bronzebeard@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    This makes absolutely zero sense

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  • fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    if everything is copyrighted, including something as simple as a doodle, then nothing is.

    Care to explain? If I make something that inherently has copyright, then if you copy it I can take action.

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    • tonytins@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Well, before the 90s, copyright was defined by a copyright symbol and publication date. Now, that symbol is merely a formality, which kinda defeats the purpose of why it was there in the first place. And, I mean, good luck policing the internet.

      Anyway, copyright was only formed for monetization reasons in exchange for protection, and works were supposed to enter into the public domain within a decade or two. If that was still the case, we wouldn’t need Patreon.

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