mirrorstone:
daemonmatthias:
nicos-book-thoughts:
alrig...
alright for the millionth time I’m seeing yet another author I admire talk about how they literally can barely afford to live & yet there are people openly admitting to pirating their books so, like
i guess it needs to be said again
pirating books is not the same as pirating your favourite Disney movie or whatever. book piracy kills author’s incomes and can genuinely ruin someone’s career
Textbooks and other research materials being paywalled by greedy fucking publishing houses who won’t pay any of that money to the authors anyway? Pirate them.
Novel written by an author and published through a regular publishing house? BORROW FROM A LIBRARY or buy outright. Do not pirate. The sales/borrow numbers OUTRIGHT determines pay to the author, whether their next book gets greenlit or cancelled, etc.
Two things to remember:
1. Authors don’t make NEARLY as much as you think they do. A first time author’s advance (if they get one at all) averages $5K-$10K. The vast majority of books get an advance under $50K. That sounds like a lot, but income tax on $50K is about $10k, so they’ve actually made 40K. Authors aren’t considered employees of the publishing house so they’re paying for their own health insurance, and paying the additional self employed tax of about 15% on top of income tax, which removes about $5K and $7K respectively, bringing the total to about $28K per year, assuming you can write a book a year, and assuming you get the high end of the advance amount every single time. A lot of authors are working for the equivalent of minimum wage.
2. Not every author gets an advance, so royalties from sales might be the only money they get from their book. Advances are more common in big publishing houses, but lots of small publishers can’t afford to offer them. Additionally, even if they get an advance, it’s literally that, an advance on the expected royalties. Authors will get no money until the advance earns out, when there are enough sales that the total amount of royalties they would have made on the sales equals the advance. This can take a long time, and lots of books never earn out. For many authors, the advance may be all they money they see from the book for years, or all the money they get at all.
