Even with 70% royalties, an ebook sold for $3.99 per copy will generate a pre tax income of $27,930 per ten thousand copies sold. Hardly a rich living. And this would have to be repeated every year for an author to have an income somewhat near that of a school teacher.
That's why you write more than one book a year, every year. Then ten thousand fans will allow you to live pretty well.
And note that someone who sold 10,000 paperbacks through a trade publisher would make more like $5,000 and they'd disappear from the book stores after a few months. Those self-published e-books will be available forever, and every new fan who finds your later books is likely to go back and look at some of the earlier ones.
Libraries could purchase ebooks and lend one out for each copy for a specific time.
Which is exactly what they currently do, and is a reasonable compromise. The publishers also want to force them to buy the book again after they've lent it out a few times, which is insane.
Fanfictions tend to be short, and dont take months or years to write.
Plenty of popular novels were written in days or weeks. Michael Moorcock, for example, has written about how he could write a novel in a few days when he was younger; in some cases that showed, but some of the other books are considered classics of their genre.
Even if you can only manage to write for an hour a day, in two years you can write a novel that a professional writer could have written working eight hours a day for three months (if I remember correctly, three months is how long Iain Banks said he typically spends on a novel, and he's pretty successful).
Joe Unknown doesn't have that ability. He needs the services offered by a publisher: editors who understand not only clean prose, but what will sell; marketing teams that can put together a big push on a book; and salesmen that can make a store take a chance on an unknown writer.
Uh, Amazon will 'take a chance' on anyone who can upload a book to them. Most books get no marketing beyond that required to get into book stores. Most publishers expect a book to be edited before they see it so they don't have to spend time doing so.
The average unknown writer will never sell a book to a big publisher. The average unknown writer who does sell a book will get an advance of a few thousand dollars and then be expected to do their own marketing. The average unknown writer who's capable of writing a book that would sell to a big publisher would do much better to just upload it to Amazon, Smashwords and other book retailers where they'll make most of the money rather than hand that money to the publisher instead.
In my experience, the only people who still think publishers are required are publishers and unpublished writers.
Do you make money as a writer? If you did, would you favor the publishers which would pay you or the libraries which will not?
Publishers pay writers?
A typical deal right now is that when someone buys an e-book the retailer takes 30%, the publisher takes 75% of the remaining 70%, the agent takes 15% of the remaining 25% of the 70%, and the writer gets whatever dregs are left over.
Most sensible writers would rather that publishers die so they get the rights to their stories back so they can sell them themselves and make more money.
The creation of books for you to read still requires the labor of authors to write those books, which means you're essentially arguing that you've found a way to not pay the authors but you still want authors to come around and do the work.
So you're saying that we should close all the libraries?
Back in the real world, if you go to a writers' forum these days it's full of people asking how they can get their books on Amazon for free so that more people will read them. Most of them can't get into libraries because libraries only buy books from big publishers.
You obviously don't realize just how small the middle class is right now and it keeps getting smaller.
Primarily because the tax-consumer class keep voting themselves more of the middle class' money. Democracy can only last until the majority realise they can vote to steal from the minority.
So, as parent has demonstrated, the average citizen is so opposed to trade unions because they believe all of the bullshit they've been fed for years by the corporate masters... eg. "ignorance."
Or because they've had experience of working with unions and know what a disaster many of them are. I'm sure there are good unions somewhere, but most I've met in the UK seemed to be about perks for the leaders and protecting the incompetent.
I've read that to be efficient you should download and check your email no more than a couple of times per day. Have time set aside 1st thing in am, noon, and late afternoon to read and deal with it, and don't let it pop up, speak or distract you the rest of the day.
If you ignore your email then people start phoning you, which is far more distracting.
....keep in mind that ALL brand new techs had to start out as playthings of the rich
Except electric cars are not 'playthings of the rich'; they've been around since the late 1800s, but we dumped them when the internal combustion engine came along for all the same reasons that they're a dumb idea today.
In my state you can go 200 miles on some roads between gas stations. I wouldn't want a car with lower range than that.
But just think how many new jobs there'll be for tow truck drivers collecting all the fancy electric cars that ran out of power in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, and? Our Honda Civic costs less than half as much, goes at least 50% further, and takes a fraction of the time to 'recharge'. We can just manage to drive to my girlfriend's parents house on one tank, whereas if we bought this 'luxury sedan' we'd have to stop for a few hours half-way to charge up... except there's nowhere to do so.
Why would you want a 'luxury sedan' that can't make long journeys, or requires you to hang around waiting for hours on the few routes where you can?
Won't happen, ever; the GOP hates Paul because he would end their imperialistic endeavors and open-ended, unfunded wars, end the Fed, and go back to a currency standard that's actually backed by tangible value (not this B.S. "fractional reserve" system we have today).
The party elite hate him even more than the Democrats do, but they're not the ones who pick the candidate. With the lousy selection of choices this year I think he has a pretty good chance, particularly if the Democrats continue to attack the front-runners.
That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly.
This used to be the Unix Philosophy, before someone decided that it would be really cool to force everyone to use your own specific applications rather than building independent apps and window managers with some kind of standardised communications for anything that needed two apps to talk to each other. If developers had stuck with that I'd be able to run KDE apps in Gnome without crashing or having to continually click 'Oh my God, KBollockManager is not running' dialog boxes.
Why they did this, I don't know. I guess they decided it was easier and shinier to build everything from scratch than to negotiate with other developers so that their apps would interoperate easily.
If your own selfish interests are more important than those of your country and your countrymen, there's not much point in arguing with you.
Indeed. If you selfishly demand that the government should steal money from other people and give it to you, then you're part of the problem, not the solution.
When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Somewhere in the last year or so it got one of those Windows-style 'Program Load of Bollocks is not responding, do you really want to shut down?' dialog boxes that made me want to uninstall it almost overnight. One of the things I've always liked about Linux is that I could tell it to shut down and walk away, knowing that when I came back in two weeks it would actually have shut down, unlike Windows where it would be sitting there at some stupid dialog box waiting for a response it would never get.
And then the Gnome morons had to go and add one just to fsck it up.
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.
A stable ABI is the reason why Windows is such a crock of crap and Microsoft can't fix poor decisions made twenty years ago. It's also pointless when most software people run on Linux is open source.
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.
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Even with 70% royalties, an ebook sold for $3.99 per copy will generate a pre tax income of $27,930 per ten thousand copies sold. Hardly a rich living. And this would have to be repeated every year for an author to have an income somewhat near that of a school teacher.
That's why you write more than one book a year, every year. Then ten thousand fans will allow you to live pretty well.
And note that someone who sold 10,000 paperbacks through a trade publisher would make more like $5,000 and they'd disappear from the book stores after a few months. Those self-published e-books will be available forever, and every new fan who finds your later books is likely to go back and look at some of the earlier ones.
Libraries could purchase ebooks and lend one out for each copy for a specific time.
Which is exactly what they currently do, and is a reasonable compromise. The publishers also want to force them to buy the book again after they've lent it out a few times, which is insane.
Fanfictions tend to be short, and dont take months or years to write.
Plenty of popular novels were written in days or weeks. Michael Moorcock, for example, has written about how he could write a novel in a few days when he was younger; in some cases that showed, but some of the other books are considered classics of their genre.
Even if you can only manage to write for an hour a day, in two years you can write a novel that a professional writer could have written working eight hours a day for three months (if I remember correctly, three months is how long Iain Banks said he typically spends on a novel, and he's pretty successful).
Joe Unknown doesn't have that ability. He needs the services offered by a publisher: editors who understand not only clean prose, but what will sell; marketing teams that can put together a big push on a book; and salesmen that can make a store take a chance on an unknown writer.
Uh, Amazon will 'take a chance' on anyone who can upload a book to them. Most books get no marketing beyond that required to get into book stores. Most publishers expect a book to be edited before they see it so they don't have to spend time doing so.
The average unknown writer will never sell a book to a big publisher. The average unknown writer who does sell a book will get an advance of a few thousand dollars and then be expected to do their own marketing. The average unknown writer who's capable of writing a book that would sell to a big publisher would do much better to just upload it to Amazon, Smashwords and other book retailers where they'll make most of the money rather than hand that money to the publisher instead.
In my experience, the only people who still think publishers are required are publishers and unpublished writers.
Do you make money as a writer? If you did, would you favor the publishers which would pay you or the libraries which will not?
Publishers pay writers?
A typical deal right now is that when someone buys an e-book the retailer takes 30%, the publisher takes 75% of the remaining 70%, the agent takes 15% of the remaining 25% of the 70%, and the writer gets whatever dregs are left over.
Most sensible writers would rather that publishers die so they get the rights to their stories back so they can sell them themselves and make more money.
The creation of books for you to read still requires the labor of authors to write those books, which means you're essentially arguing that you've found a way to not pay the authors but you still want authors to come around and do the work.
So you're saying that we should close all the libraries?
Back in the real world, if you go to a writers' forum these days it's full of people asking how they can get their books on Amazon for free so that more people will read them. Most of them can't get into libraries because libraries only buy books from big publishers.
You obviously don't realize just how small the middle class is right now and it keeps getting smaller.
Primarily because the tax-consumer class keep voting themselves more of the middle class' money. Democracy can only last until the majority realise they can vote to steal from the minority.
I thought tax cuts are evil and stuff?
People need to learn that the world doesn't revolve around them and their needs.
If you don't do the things that people need you to do, then you tend to find you don't have a job to do after a while.
So, as parent has demonstrated, the average citizen is so opposed to trade unions because they believe all of the bullshit they've been fed for years by the corporate masters... eg. "ignorance."
Or because they've had experience of working with unions and know what a disaster many of them are. I'm sure there are good unions somewhere, but most I've met in the UK seemed to be about perks for the leaders and protecting the incompetent.
I've read that to be efficient you should download and check your email no more than a couple of times per day. Have time set aside 1st thing in am, noon, and late afternoon to read and deal with it, and don't let it pop up, speak or distract you the rest of the day.
If you ignore your email then people start phoning you, which is far more distracting.
Yeah, but when you go driving in a snow storm, make sure you are prepared.
That basically means: don't drive an electric car. Particularly when the temperature is forty below zero.
It competes with BMW, Mercedes and Porshe.
Not if you actually use it to drive anywhere. Which is kind of the point of a 'luxury sedan'.
Don't forget that most electricity comes from fossil fuels so the car neither green nor sustainable nor renewable.
Nonsense. I've seen Logan's Run, I know you can run an electric car from the number of solar cells you can fit on the roof.
Except electric cars are not 'playthings of the rich';
Duh, I meant 'brand new tech', teach me not to cut-and-paste-and-post without proofreading.
....keep in mind that ALL brand new techs had to start out as playthings of the rich
Except electric cars are not 'playthings of the rich'; they've been around since the late 1800s, but we dumped them when the internal combustion engine came along for all the same reasons that they're a dumb idea today.
In my state you can go 200 miles on some roads between gas stations. I wouldn't want a car with lower range than that.
But just think how many new jobs there'll be for tow truck drivers collecting all the fancy electric cars that ran out of power in the middle of nowhere.
No one embarks on a 300 mile roadtrip with the gas gauge blinking red.
Why not? There'll be a gas station in five miles and I can 'recharge' in under five minutes.
I mean the high-end model goes 300 miles.
Yeah, and? Our Honda Civic costs less than half as much, goes at least 50% further, and takes a fraction of the time to 'recharge'. We can just manage to drive to my girlfriend's parents house on one tank, whereas if we bought this 'luxury sedan' we'd have to stop for a few hours half-way to charge up... except there's nowhere to do so.
Why would you want a 'luxury sedan' that can't make long journeys, or requires you to hang around waiting for hours on the few routes where you can?
True. I wouldn't even call this impractical at all, just too expensive for the everyman. They look like decent deals if you have the money.
So rich people don't like to drive more than 160 miles without stopping for several hours to recharge?
Won't happen, ever; the GOP hates Paul because he would end their imperialistic endeavors and open-ended, unfunded wars, end the Fed, and go back to a currency standard that's actually backed by tangible value (not this B.S. "fractional reserve" system we have today).
The party elite hate him even more than the Democrats do, but they're not the ones who pick the candidate. With the lousy selection of choices this year I think he has a pretty good chance, particularly if the Democrats continue to attack the front-runners.
That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly.
This used to be the Unix Philosophy, before someone decided that it would be really cool to force everyone to use your own specific applications rather than building independent apps and window managers with some kind of standardised communications for anything that needed two apps to talk to each other. If developers had stuck with that I'd be able to run KDE apps in Gnome without crashing or having to continually click 'Oh my God, KBollockManager is not running' dialog boxes.
Why they did this, I don't know. I guess they decided it was easier and shinier to build everything from scratch than to negotiate with other developers so that their apps would interoperate easily.
Don't worry. All the Democrats will achieve by this is to increase the odds of Ron Paul being the Republican nominee.
If they were smart they'd be supporting Gingrich so they don't have to face real competition in the election.
If your own selfish interests are more important than those of your country and your countrymen, there's not much point in arguing with you.
Indeed. If you selfishly demand that the government should steal money from other people and give it to you, then you're part of the problem, not the solution.
But I thought Gingrich was a Republican?
When did last time GNOME get new amazing functionality? Really?
Somewhere in the last year or so it got one of those Windows-style 'Program Load of Bollocks is not responding, do you really want to shut down?' dialog boxes that made me want to uninstall it almost overnight. One of the things I've always liked about Linux is that I could tell it to shut down and walk away, knowing that when I came back in two weeks it would actually have shut down, unlike Windows where it would be sitting there at some stupid dialog box waiting for a response it would never get.
And then the Gnome morons had to go and add one just to fsck it up.
Linux/Unix desktop environments at the moment appear to be all about the colour of the bicycled shed, rather than things that ACTUALLY matter to end users / developers such as a stable ABI.
A stable ABI is the reason why Windows is such a crock of crap and Microsoft can't fix poor decisions made twenty years ago. It's also pointless when most software people run on Linux is open source.
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.