91–100 of 148 posts
I wrote a mediocre book on a popular programming language, and have gotten something like 10-20keuros. It took a year to write it, dunno how many hours, but probably not a very good hourly pay.
Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention. What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup. Contrast…
Authors have the same problem as musicians. And app developers.
You can always make a usable app or non-fiction book, so you have one extra dimension of objectively measured value of your product. The first one, common to software and art, is the quality of the implementation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not the writer's job. It's what publishers are supposed to do.
They might disagree about that though. From the outside it looks like they operate more like VCs, publish lots of books, see what sticks.
I wrote a mediocre book on a popular programming language, and have gotten something like 10-20keuros. It took a year to write it, dunno how many hours, but probably not a very good hourly pay.
Unfortunately most writers of fiction make next to nothing too. Writers often are not happy writing either (unlike painters and video artists who seem to have a whale of a time). Sadly I toiled for 8 years on a novel (while working a day job). It was a massive effort. It might be hard for people to understand but I felt I had to write it (i.e. writers curse). I wish I had spent all that time on studying programming e…
Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention. What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup. Contrast…
The thing is that authors are too weak. They get maybe 10% of what is being made off of their work, probably much less. The publishing companies have strong leverage and can essentially extort money from the authors - they can say either you publish with us, or just put it back to your drawer and forget. It is now a bit easier to self publish, but still you are going to get pittance. In terms of music, as when artist…
That's nonsense with respect to books. If you self-publish on the most popular distribution channel (Amazon), you keep quite a large percentage of your revenue. The issue isn't the middleman, it's that there's a huge number of other books out there and unless you already have an audience or put the work into creating one somehow, not many people are going to find your work and buy it. If lots of people actually do buy it, you get a pretty good cut. But it's hard to get to that point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is that authors are too weak. They get maybe 10% of what is being made off of their work, probably much less. The publishing companies have strong leverage and can essentially extort money from the authors - they can say either you publish with us, or just put it back to your drawer and forget. It is now a bit easier to self publish, but still you are going to get pittance. In terms of music, as when artist…
>It's just that artists are somehow not able to get together and force fair terms on whatever it is in the upstream That's nonsense with respect to books. If you self-publish on the most popular distribution channel (Amazon), you keep quite a large percentage of your revenue. The issue isn't the middleman, it's that there's a huge number of other books out there and unless you already have an audience or put the work…
I enjoyed this, I thought it mostly made good points, and it linked to other articles I will look at. Yet.. I started reading a blogger who teaches how to make a successful blog, sells courses about it, etc. I soon realized her blog is just about her making money from promising to help you make money from your blog. A frighteningly vacuous operation. It seems a modern cousin to the old ad in magazines promising to re…
When Marques Brownlee tells me what motivated him to buy an iPhone it's always a gymnastic I need to play in my head on if I should even try to relate to a dude who buys/gets handed a couple devices or cars every week.