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>Remember, authors are not film studios or rock groups. We don't have merchandising opportunities, we don't perform live for a ticket fee

They used to! Charles Dickens was very popular in the US in the 19th century. But because of the lack of international copyright laws, it was completely legal for American publishers to print copies of his books without giving him a dime (because they were only covered by British copyright). So what did he do? He did a couple of tours of the US where he sold tickets to shows where he would read from his books and answer questions from the audience.

I'd rather a great writer write than be stuck on book tours.

Book tours are still a thing. minus the money. Although maybe the big authors like King, Martin, Gaiman, Rowling, Sanderson, get something out of it.

I'm not sure how common book tours are. I've done some book signings at events where I've nudged the event organizers into buying some books and giving me a table to sign them at some scheduled time. (Pro tip: It helps to have someone high up in the event hosting organization quoted in the book :-))

But my impression is that publishers are pretty selective at sending authors around the country on a book tour these days. Obviously big time (or even big time genre) authors can often book pretty nice speaking gigs if they like.

Publishers are very selective about sending authors on tours, because (except for the very biggest names) tours don't make money and cost quite a lot to organize -- they're loss-leaders designed to generate enthusiasm among booksellers (independent bookstores generate disproportionately more sales than you might expect given their usually-small size, and an enthusiastic local seller who feels a sense of amity towards an author can over a period of years produce thousands of additional sales).

I got sent on a couple of book tours when my career was spiking, over a decade ago. Grueling, and no very visible short term impact on sales ... and that's with free ticketing (the events were to generate publicity, not revenue). Many authors are middle-aged introverts and don't really thrive under such conditions -- myself included.

I'd probably actually like it personally but my books are just trade press computer stuff and I doubt I'll do something through a publisher again. Not because of any particularly bad experience but it basically happened because of who I was sitting next to at some event dinner and I'd just as soon not make any material money on my own terms :-)

I think my favorite short/novella/novelette(?) of yours is A Colder War. But lots of great work!

I was just thinking about this today, I hope you don't mind me bouncing it off of you?

The computers & robots seem poised to make most human labor obsolete. (I'm only really good at programming computers and I feel like my career prospects just evaporated. Craigslist job section seems to agree with that assessment as well.)

To me it seems like the obvious response is to sort of declare ourselves the winners (Humanity: 1, Nature: 0) and get on with Star Trek. (In other words, institute something like UBI so people don't starve and/or riot, fix up our relationship with the ecology so civilization doesn't crash, ...and then I don't care what we do.)

What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work? I don't mean in a greed sense ("If it is money it is good.") but more in the philosophical or practical senses.

As an example of what I mean, the young fellow who writes/draws "Kill Six Billion Demons" ( https://killsixbilliondemons.com/ ) basically went from art school directly to a fan-supported, uh, career on one story, releasing pages as he drew them. (He then also publishes hardcopies, and I think he sells schwag too.)

This exactly. I'm actually really surprised that so many people here who are head-deep in the open-source software community think that books are somehow different.

Is restricting the use of your software or the blog post you spent a long time researcher or whatever to paying customers really want you want?

When I write software I want the most people I can reach to use it. I get a kick out of people finding my software useful.

The world we live in now with a huge universe of free software is a bazzilion times better than the world of the 1980s when I started programming. I want the same for other industries. Pay people to live and let them do what they enjoy. Some of them will create stuff for others.

> What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work?

Ideally I'd like to know how many people were reading my work, and whether they liked it -- but I really just want the freedom to write (in reasonable comfort).

Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this, at least on any scale that can support more than a tiny handful of authors, plus the folks climbing the teaching-MFA LitFic academic career ladder (for whom writing is often simply an extramural career progression activity -- with notable exceptions).

That's the failed promise of Amazon Unlimited though, isn't it? Authors get some sliver of the monthly $10 in exchange for having their books on the service, according to how much they're read. If it cost readers $1,000/month and had enough customers then author's could collect real amounts of money and live off that. Unfortunately, the number of people who can even afford an extra $1,000/mo is small, never mind be willing to pay that.

The other problem is a bit harder to solve though. Authors don't get paid by how much they're read, but by how many books people buy. There's a subtle difference between the two, and as the story about a large number of record owners not owning record players suggests, I might read book one of a series, get really excited about the rest of the series and buy them all. And then not read them. Maybe it balances out with readers passing one copy of a book around, but I doubt that. That might just have to be something author would have to face if Expensive Kindle Unlimited ever became a thing.

> Ideally I'd like to know how many people were reading my work, and whether they liked it -- but I really just want the freedom to write (in reasonable comfort).

FWIW, I kinda figured. If you were really that into money you would have picked a different career, eh? (As a fan I'm glad you didn't.)

> Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this,

Ah, that's where it all falls down, eh?

I've got some ideas, and I just got some land on which to try them. At risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm looking forward to finding out if I'm a genius or just full of shit, you know?

Question for you in particular since you are an author who I read and enjoy (and pay): Would you continue writing novels if you got UBI of equivalent size and weren't allowed to charge for your books?

Speaking for myself, that’s damn near the dream. Wild success is nice, but consistency is the true holy grail in art. If I had a consistent reliable source of income and could budget the rest of my life around it, I’d never have to do all the side work — marketing, deal making, querying, networking, etc — that is required currently BECAUSE one must maximize the profit of the good times to shore up against the lean.

How would you feel if the UBI were, say, $10K per year which is the likely number compared to any (unlikely) number would be?

Exactly the same, assuming this remains the UBI applied to all folks, not just artists. Again, I don’t think I can overstate how game changing regular payments of that amount would be. Being able to plan ahead is a rare luxury in the art game.

Not just for individuals either — imagine what would come out of the collectives of artists who would pool that money.

And in such a world, where basic needs for all citizens are handled already, I can see a version wherein art and entertainment would be even more greatly valued — especially since UBI means access doesn’t need to be gated nearly as harshly.

That's what I'd call living the dream!

Limited, but not zero, as the existence of a Laundry table top game states. I would totally buy a "Bob Howard" minifig or some sort of Laundry diorama from you!

One of those "book nook" things in the shape of a Laundry IT office would be pretty fun (until the SCORPION STARE cameras blow up the neighbouring shelf).

It quasi surprises how pro-piracy hacker news is, probably in large part due to need to minimize their own guilt from their own piracy. Maybe there is a socialist bent with the belief that if there was no money novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it. It seems that only SaaS products are acceptable but then hackernews also hates subscriptions...

Some people will reflexively mod down anything that's pro-artist or pro-writer. They continue to embrace the idea that somehow piracy is somehow a good thing when it's pretty easy to see how it hurts.

Many of us probably actually discovered what we wanted to do for a living by being able to use all sorts of software that was way more expensive than we could afford as a teen, which eventually led to buying the software. I am thoroughly against pirating things you are making money off of, but more lenient on personal use/exploration/learning. If there was something akin to a public library full of the worlds commercial software for people to discover, explore and play with, I would have done that as that's where I was getting most of the books from that I was using to learn all of this complex software, like the $18,000 Alias|Wavefront 3D software, back then.

I totally get it, it’s a market segmentation problem where pirated software serves the bottom end of the market. If companies officially offered such discount prices then they’d be pressured by their regular customers for the same price. Segmenting based on willing to risk pirate software is a convenient workaround. Personally I’m still clinging on to old versions of perpetually licensed software. It makes little sense for me to pay a yearly subscription for something I use a few days a year. I’d much rather a day rate or hourly as I do a wide variety of things but only one thing at a time.

Some companies provide free non-commercial versions for learning e.g. Houdini and Nuke. I wish more companies would do it.

Hell, Davinci gives away their video editor application Resolve Free for commercial use. They're able to do that because they money off of hardware sales and getting editors into their ecosystem is worth more than a software license would be. (They do also sell a pro/Studio version of their software.)

A lot of high end software does have an education discount version if you're affiliated with a local college or university.

> novelists and artisan software craftsmen could produce for the love of it

People probably won't build some dashboard for a large boring corporation but they absolutely will do it for something they love. This isn't even theoretical. See how much software and programming research exists completely outside of the market. And for writing, take a look at fan fiction or stuff on writing subreddits.

Certainly some people do it for money, but there still is a significant number of people who do it for the love of it.

A lot of things are indeed desirable enough to produce that many of us keep producing them even without much in the way of economic incentives. As someone firmly in the hobby segment when it comes to writing (my two self-published novels has sold more than average yet still won't cover my - admittedly ridiculous - takeaway spend) the money doesn't matter to me, and so I've probably given away as many copies as I've sold.

The problem I have with this support of piracy myself, is that while there'd be millions of books still being published without noteworthy economic incentives, economic incentives matters to get volume and quality from at least a proportion of those producing creative works full time who we'd really like to be able to dedicate their time fully to it.

In other words: Even if (and that's purely for the sake of argument) I had the talent to produce something of similar quality as cstross, talent is not enough. It also takes a huge amount of time and dedication to polish those skills to get to the that level, and very few people who are doing it as a hobby can ever hope to (and/or want to) put in the level of effort needed. I certainly could never do that.

If we could achieve the same with grants or something like UBI, great, but I feel we'd lose a great amount of of creative works if it wasn't possible for a proportion of people to work full time honing those skills. And many of those works would be among our best.

My dad wrote a book. It sold reasonably well as an academic book, but his hourly pay for it probably was in the single digits of pennies. He knew this in advance, and wrote the book as a prestige thing.

For non-fiction I think that is often the most viable way of getting a return on the time spent. I've not published any non-fiction in print, but even my (old... time to write some again) blog posts have more than once gotten people to put aside coding tests and/or fast-track me through interview processes, so the prestige is certainly a good point.

The D language, that I work on, is given away entirely for free. It has the most permissive license I can find (Boost). I don't get paid for contributing to D.

The same goes for most contributors to D. (A handful get paid via sponsors.)

If you're familiar with my posts, I'm about as far from a socialist as one can get.