Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

I'm not too sympathetic, on account of the following:

- Her figure of $24K is per book, and then she says (paraphrased) "well, if I were to write one book like this a year." Most authors producing mass-market paperbacks write somewhat more than one per year. The author in question appears to write several per year (looking at the Amazon listings) which probably gross a fairly similar amount. So, what's the meaning of this "if I were to write one" business?

- She expects to see the rest of her advance and some non-negligible amount of money coming in in the future from royalties and other rights, so it's not really fair to say that her "income" from this book is $25,000. As a professional author, she would be earning that $25,000 this year and also earning money from prior sales this year, and then she would be earning more from this book later.

- Finally, here's the Amazon synopsis:

Immortal Darkyn Lord Valentin Jaus and landscape artist Liling Harper are two lost souls. Brought together by fate, bound together by passion, Valentin and Liling find solace in each other's arms. But the ties that bind them are deeper—and more dangerous—than either of them can possibly imagine...

No offense to struggling vampire romance novel writers, but why is it important that people are able to earn a great living writing books like this? I don't think it's a big loss to society if people aren't getting rich at this particular trade. When authors who are really advancing the art can't make a good living, then let me know.*

* No, this isn't totally subjective. People will be reading Pynchon 30 years from now, but they won't be reading Lynn Viehl.

"No offense to struggling vampire romance novel writers, but why is it important that people are able to earn a great living writing books like this?"

I think the point was how difficult it is to make a living writing. Period. This is a book that debuted on the New York Times best seller list and it provided its author a moderate income of well under $100,000. According to the NY Times, there are over 10,000 works of fiction published by major presses every year, a lot of them astonishingly well written and crafted. A lot of authors take well over a year to write a work of fiction. If a best seller writing for a well established series can barely rake in that amount of money, imagine how little the people who are producing original work are making.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/books/the-last-word-how-ma... (sorry the link is old, I couldn't find more recent numbers)

Well, I agree with that, and I don't doubt that fiction which I would probably say is "better" or more worthwhile might well tend to sell even less.

I think the author is being a bit alarmist about her personal situation. I and other people in many fields do high-quality work for under $100,000 a year, too. But if, as she author suggests, the publishers are making a relative killing on these same books, I'd consider that unfortunate in general. (Although I wouldn't consider it surprising, since most creative industries seem to end up with the same balance of power between distributors and producers.)

Perhaps the Kindle and self-publishing will see it fixed someday.

In my mind, the issue is more to do with other people getting rich off the back of this authors work while the author gets hardly any thing.

So the question is not the value of the book to society, but the percentage of the value the author should get versus everyone else in the stack.

Is that true in the sense that it makes you feel bad, or true in the sense that you think a smart publisher could make more money with lower rates? If you're right about how much it costs to profitably distribute a book, you could potentially dominate the publishing industry.

well, I hope the ebooks will change this. With the costing of printing going away, you don't need a publisher anymore. The only thing you really still need to do is marketing.

Of course, the flip-side is that anyone will be able to publish a book and most people will know how to steal them. Neither of which make for great prices. Still, interesting times.

Publishers with a good reputation will likely continue to act as a combination of editor and gatekeeper. Anyone can put something out now, but saying that it has been edited, approved, and possibly marketed by a major publisher will likely to carry some weight.

In fact, there is a possibility some publishers or indpendent editors functioning as publishers will begin to take that on as a primary role and become very selective in what they attach their name to.

You're not accounting for the fact that this is a book on the NYT bestseller list. She could write dozen of books over her lifetime and have only one make that list. So I'd quibble with "which probably gross a fairly similar amount."

Criticizing the quality of the book doesn't seem entirely valid, because quality literature may sell far fewer copies. How many copies of his books did Pynchon (for example) sell?

It looks to me like she has written a number of books in this same "Darkyn" series over the past few years, several of which have peaked on the NYT bestseller list. Check her Amazon or B&N page.

Anyway, I agree that quality literature may, in reality, sell far fewer copies (although I'm sure that Pynchon has sold hundreds of thousands or millions) -- the reason I mentioned that was because one reasonable argument is this idea of fairness, where you could say, "it's not fair that someone producing something of this quality should be paid so little, so the system should be different." I would agree with that if Joyce Carol Oates was making $50,000 a year, but I think that in this case the market's valuation of this work matches or exceeds my personal sense of fairness.

I think it's better to take into account a book's longevity. If it is a classic in print 50 years and sells steadily, it could outsell a book in the NYT bestseller list, which might only sell that big for a year or even less.

Longevity, yes:

'The Very Hungry Caterpillar,' a popular children's book has sold 29 million copies, and according to Newsweek, does $50 million in licensing deals a year. (yes, year)

http://www.newsweek.com/id/189230

I'm a writer (not a novelist, yet) and from what I've learned from the people I've talked to is simple. #1 is that they write out of a passion (myself included) and that they'll do it regardless of money, so the complaints about the grossly low pay becomes somewhat dubious when many writers still work day jobs for the majority of their career. One of my extended family was a semi-pro golfer, he had notorious low pay from it (even professionals doing the full circuit don't get amazing pay, it's the endorsements that pay well), but he works in banking so his day job pays a lot so he gets to do what he loves (golf) a lot.

#2 is that the genre you choose can seriously affect how much you get paid. Vampire-Romance is 99% of the time YA, which is predominantly read by young-female readers, many of whom may be transients in the market. This might be your ideal literary area, however this isn't a mountain of gold waiting for people with pickaxes to come claim it, this is a stream with a dozen people with sifters already there.

I'm working on a Fantasy series, which if I'm lucky on a NYT best seller list might pull me in above $25,000 due to its target market being well established and adult readers (IE people who'll buy hardback). However, I'm a realist and I quickly realised that Mystery novels have the biggest literary market and pay their authors the most of any. Writing a pulp mystery novel could likely bring in $25,000 for a single book (likely very few royalties, but that's beside the point here), hitting a best seller list for mystery (especially a multi-book deal) would easily bring in the big cash and could work as your day job.

The authors own efforts also contribute, many authors believe that their only job is putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), which is well within their rights. However many authors do vast marketing and meet-and-greets, signings and such to help boost word of mouth of themselves, not their books. A good example here is John Scalzi, who is constantly in contact with his fans and does extensive convention runs. This kind of self-marketing is how many webcomics became profitable and allowed their artists to become full time at it relying solely on advertisements.

Edit: Note on the genre front. Many NYT Best Sellers hit the front page on Hard Cover (where the author makes a greater percentage of royalties, but also the book sells for 2/3 times the paperback price), especially mystery novels. However YA never hits the list in hard cover, many are rarely ever released in hard cover. Not selling hard cover books well will easily 1/2 or 1/3 your pay and typically the older reader spends more on their books and will buy hard cover.

FTA:

> Speaking of comparisons, the publisher’s portion of sales on this book has grossed them around $453,839.68. I don’t have any hard figures on the publisher’s net, so I can’t give you the bottom line there. If I had to make a guess, I’d say they probably netted around $250K on this one.

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