You're not getting any "sales at low prices" for your book when you're writing your book, period. So you either do a shitty, inspiration-sapping job while writing your book in your spare time, or you get a proper advance and can actually focus on producing best writing you can.
Where do people get this idea that Joe Nobody can go to Big Publisher X and say 'hey, give me $50k and I'll write a book for you'?
The only people who'll get money before they deliver a book are writers with a proven history of delivering profitable books. And those people have no need for a publisher anymore.
Writers cannot edit. If they could edit they would be editors.
Editors are mostly failed writers. Why would a successful writer want to spend their day editing other people's books when they could be writing their own?
A Stephen King - caliber writer will not pass up a big, fat contract with Random House or Harper-Collins when they first start out.
Stephen King was rejected by a bazillion publishers before someone decided to take a chance on Carrie. He did not 'get a big fat contract' when he first started out, though he made a ton of money when Carrie turned out to be extremely popular.
It costs nothing to produce for every competitor, so it is an advantage for no-one.
The competitors here are not publisher #1 and publisher #2. They're the publishing industry AND THE WRITERS.
A writer can sell a book to a trade publisher, get a $5k advance, pay 15% of it to their agent and then hope they earn out (in which case the publisher makes $12.5k on the same book they paid the writer $5k for), or they can self-publish and get 70% of the cover price of every book they sell.
Apparently, a lot of books don't earn out their advance.
Note that 'earning out the advance' doesn't mean 'making a profit'; most books will be profitable well before the advance is earned out. And a writer whose books don't earn out probably won't be published for long.
I don't know about other countries, but in America Amazon pay 35% royalties under $2.99 and 70% at $2.99 and above. A trade publisher typically pays 15-20%.
Would you work for 6 months or a year writing a book, without getting paid up front?
You think you get an advance before you write the book? Perhaps if you're Stephen King, but not if you're Joe Nobody.
You don't want to finish your work first and then get paid months after.
You do realise that you probably won't get the whole of your 'advance' until a year or more after the book is published?
You probably think the book industry is some kind of money making machine. It is not.
Publishers have fancy New York offices. Writers have day-jobs in Walmart. Book sales are down, but profits are up, because publishers are typically getting 50% of the cover price of an e-book sold on Amazon while the author gets around 15%.
50% of the sale price of a product where an additional copy costs nothing to produce? Most industries would be falling over themselves to own that cash cow.
Paying advances allows the author to actually pay their bills whilst working on the book.
Not when the average advance is down to around $5k. Plenty of writers who've dropped their publisher and started self-publishing have said that they earn more money more regularly than they did before.
As to e-book prices, publishers don't want people buying e-books because their entire business model is based around control of the print distribution market. There's no need for a publisher when you can just write a book and upload it to Amazon, rather than having to go through a publisher because most book stores won't sell self-published books.
You forget the single most important part of publishing: it provides stable(ish) income to the author when his royalties do not. Income such as advance payments.
From what I've read, a typical advance these days is down to around $5k. Unless you're selling a book a month, you're going to be working a day-job.
The publisher also provides the marketing, editing, proofreading, typesetting, illustrations and quite a few other services that the author cannot provide themselves.
No, they don't. Publishers pushed editing off onto agents and writers years ago, proofreading costs about $100 even if you hire someone to do it rather than spend a few evenings doing it yourself, typesetting is irrelevant for an e-book, illustrrations, if you need them, can be bought from an artist, and the only marketing that a publisher does for a typical book is to try to get it into book stores, not to get readers to buy it.
While publishers are still essential if you want a print book in a lot of book stores, the kind of services the average publisher offers a new writer for e-books might cost the writer a couple of thousand dollars if they paid for it themselves. In return for that, they'll be handing 50% of the cover price of that e-book to the publisher forever, and from the 20% or so of the cover price the writer recieves, they'll have to give 15% to their agent.
Publishers simply cannot justify their existence financially at this point in time with the royalty rates they're offering writers. They're raking in the cash from e-books while the person who wrote the book has to work in Walmart to pay their bills.
Indeed. On my HTPC I have Xbmc running without a window manager, which doesn't allow you to run anything else and logs out if the program exits. But that requires some reconfiguration, and you'll still need to disable the virtual console features so they can't log in and start another X session.
You really can't expect to lock down a system that you can't reconfigure.
Hey the Win7 start menu is great, I wish all OSes had something like it. You just type to search instead of having to navigate a big tree of submenus.
If I wanted to type to start programs, I'd use a command line. You have to type to start programs in Windows 7 because the new start menu sucks so much ass.
And don't forget that if you overwrite a single byte in a block, then that's going to result in a full block write.
Given that people who use their SSDs for compilations have said they can wear them out in under a year with older generation disks that supported many more write cycles, a crappy application could easily wipe out the next generation of SSDs in a few months by continually writing to the idsk.
Please explain how you can make file copies better.
I seem to remember reading that Windows 8 removed that stupid 'preparing to copy' thing which wastes a ton of time completely failing to work out how much time the copy is going to take so it can put up the progress bar for you?
Either way, it could hardly be worse than file copies in Vista, where copying a 2MB file could take five minutes.
You mean, still stuck in the 90s copying Windows 95?
And what's wrong with that? All the Windows 7 interface gives you is Windows 95 with a few fancy animations and a completely fscked-up start menu, and the Windows 95 interface is vastly better than a phone UI on a desktop PC.
I think it'll be the inability to get any serious work done without a keyboard and a mouse that will affect its chances much more than a few months difference either way on release.
And how is that any different from any other tablet OS?
Doesn't anyone know why else they would be forgoing a linux client?
Because the MPAA phearz the penguinz? With Windows 8 you'll have DRM built into the OS which won't boot unless it's on a 'secure' system, whereas on Linux someone will hack out the DRM from any software Netflix provide.
Which is fine. If Netflix let me watch their streaming service in xbmc as we do for everything else, then we'd be giving them money. As it is, we just borrow DVDs from the library. Their loss.
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You're not getting any "sales at low prices" for your book when you're writing your book, period. So you either do a shitty, inspiration-sapping job while writing your book in your spare time, or you get a proper advance and can actually focus on producing best writing you can.
Where do people get this idea that Joe Nobody can go to Big Publisher X and say 'hey, give me $50k and I'll write a book for you'?
The only people who'll get money before they deliver a book are writers with a proven history of delivering profitable books. And those people have no need for a publisher anymore.
Writers cannot edit. If they could edit they would be editors.
Editors are mostly failed writers. Why would a successful writer want to spend their day editing other people's books when they could be writing their own?
A Stephen King - caliber writer will not pass up a big, fat contract with Random House or Harper-Collins when they first start out.
Stephen King was rejected by a bazillion publishers before someone decided to take a chance on Carrie. He did not 'get a big fat contract' when he first started out, though he made a ton of money when Carrie turned out to be extremely popular.
It costs nothing to produce for every competitor, so it is an advantage for no-one.
The competitors here are not publisher #1 and publisher #2. They're the publishing industry AND THE WRITERS.
A writer can sell a book to a trade publisher, get a $5k advance, pay 15% of it to their agent and then hope they earn out (in which case the publisher makes $12.5k on the same book they paid the writer $5k for), or they can self-publish and get 70% of the cover price of every book they sell.
Apparently, a lot of books don't earn out their advance.
Note that 'earning out the advance' doesn't mean 'making a profit'; most books will be profitable well before the advance is earned out. And a writer whose books don't earn out probably won't be published for long.
I don't know about other countries, but in America Amazon pay 35% royalties under $2.99 and 70% at $2.99 and above. A trade publisher typically pays 15-20%.
$4.99 for a eBook on Amazon? I wish! I've only see prices of $9.99 on up.
Amazon has roughly a bazillion e-books for $0.99 each.
Of course most of them suck, but there are some good ones in the swamp too.
Would you work for 6 months or a year writing a book, without getting paid up front?
You think you get an advance before you write the book? Perhaps if you're Stephen King, but not if you're Joe Nobody.
You don't want to finish your work first and then get paid months after.
You do realise that you probably won't get the whole of your 'advance' until a year or more after the book is published?
You probably think the book industry is some kind of money making machine. It is not.
Publishers have fancy New York offices. Writers have day-jobs in Walmart. Book sales are down, but profits are up, because publishers are typically getting 50% of the cover price of an e-book sold on Amazon while the author gets around 15%.
50% of the sale price of a product where an additional copy costs nothing to produce? Most industries would be falling over themselves to own that cash cow.
Paying advances allows the author to actually pay their bills whilst working on the book.
Not when the average advance is down to around $5k. Plenty of writers who've dropped their publisher and started self-publishing have said that they earn more money more regularly than they did before.
As to e-book prices, publishers don't want people buying e-books because their entire business model is based around control of the print distribution market. There's no need for a publisher when you can just write a book and upload it to Amazon, rather than having to go through a publisher because most book stores won't sell self-published books.
You forget the single most important part of publishing: it provides stable(ish) income to the author when his royalties do not. Income such as advance payments.
From what I've read, a typical advance these days is down to around $5k. Unless you're selling a book a month, you're going to be working a day-job.
The publisher also provides the marketing, editing, proofreading, typesetting, illustrations and quite a few other services that the author cannot provide themselves.
No, they don't. Publishers pushed editing off onto agents and writers years ago, proofreading costs about $100 even if you hire someone to do it rather than spend a few evenings doing it yourself, typesetting is irrelevant for an e-book, illustrrations, if you need them, can be bought from an artist, and the only marketing that a publisher does for a typical book is to try to get it into book stores, not to get readers to buy it.
While publishers are still essential if you want a print book in a lot of book stores, the kind of services the average publisher offers a new writer for e-books might cost the writer a couple of thousand dollars if they paid for it themselves. In return for that, they'll be handing 50% of the cover price of that e-book to the publisher forever, and from the 20% or so of the cover price the writer recieves, they'll have to give 15% to their agent.
Publishers simply cannot justify their existence financially at this point in time with the royalty rates they're offering writers. They're raking in the cash from e-books while the person who wrote the book has to work in Walmart to pay their bills.
Indeed. On my HTPC I have Xbmc running without a window manager, which doesn't allow you to run anything else and logs out if the program exits. But that requires some reconfiguration, and you'll still need to disable the virtual console features so they can't log in and start another X session.
You really can't expect to lock down a system that you can't reconfigure.
Hey the Win7 start menu is great, I wish all OSes had something like it. You just type to search instead of having to navigate a big tree of submenus.
If I wanted to type to start programs, I'd use a command line. You have to type to start programs in Windows 7 because the new start menu sucks so much ass.
And don't forget that if you overwrite a single byte in a block, then that's going to result in a full block write.
Given that people who use their SSDs for compilations have said they can wear them out in under a year with older generation disks that supported many more write cycles, a crappy application could easily wipe out the next generation of SSDs in a few months by continually writing to the idsk.
That notion has been thoroughly debunked already. Let it go.
Troll rating: 4/10
Please explain how you can make file copies better.
I seem to remember reading that Windows 8 removed that stupid 'preparing to copy' thing which wastes a ton of time completely failing to work out how much time the copy is going to take so it can put up the progress bar for you?
Either way, it could hardly be worse than file copies in Vista, where copying a 2MB file could take five minutes.
You don't remember Windows 7?? Come on, man, it wasn't THAT long ago!
Windows 7 was just a service pack for Vista that removed most of the suck.
You mean, still stuck in the 90s copying Windows 95?
And what's wrong with that? All the Windows 7 interface gives you is Windows 95 with a few fancy animations and a completely fscked-up start menu, and the Windows 95 interface is vastly better than a phone UI on a desktop PC.
I'd say the problem is your expectations and interpretations, not Windows 8.
Troll rating: 3/10.
Who's been placed in the Windows Mantra this time?
With the new 'secure boot', Windows 8 ain't done until Linux won't run...
I think it'll be the inability to get any serious work done without a keyboard and a mouse that will affect its chances much more than a few months difference either way on release.
And how is that any different from any other tablet OS?
Same thing that has happened with every change that has provided a significant performance improvement with a given resource...
Applications that have a little more functionality, and lot more waste.
Except with SSD write lifetimes falling with every generation, in this case 'a lot more waste' could mean trashing your drive in a few months.
I think you can safely say it's a fckload more than 0.1% of HTPCs.
Doesn't anyone know why else they would be forgoing a linux client?
Because the MPAA phearz the penguinz? With Windows 8 you'll have DRM built into the OS which won't boot unless it's on a 'secure' system, whereas on Linux someone will hack out the DRM from any software Netflix provide.
Which is fine. If Netflix let me watch their streaming service in xbmc as we do for everything else, then we'd be giving them money. As it is, we just borrow DVDs from the library. Their loss.
You presumably failed to notice the part where the fuel cell is likely to be powered by gasoline?
Turnabout is fair play.
Until the politiican adds you to the US government's kill file and a misile comes flying in your window.