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Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author
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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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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.
Edit: Just a side note. Lord of the Rings also took 12 years to write. However Tolkien was a full time professor at Oxford during that entire time.
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.
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.
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:
https://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.
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).
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.
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.
The barriers for publishing a book are extremely low today. Most university campuses actually have book printing and binding services available which professors use to make textbooks for their courses. For unaffiliated individuals you can get a book printed and bound in China for extremely low prices (think cheap enough to print a hundred copies to give out as Christmas gifts to friends and family).
What does it say?
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!
Edit: I do want to say that I’m all for a basic income (implemented as a negative income tax). People shouldn’t be living on the streets and starving to death in the modern days. But that has nothing to do with books and there’s no reason to be sponsoring people to write books that nobody wants to read.
No, I meant my pluralistic link. What does that one say?
Edit: Sounds like talking is fun but listening is unacceptable. I never said that anything this guy was saying wasn’t true, just saying why it wasn’t the end of story, but I think he’s just not into hearing that.
I call that bullshit. Smells like ghost writers from afar.
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.
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.
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