3 ms·

Your "unlikely situation" is literally-not-figuratively how most authors you've heard of--no, not the GRRMs of the world, but the folks who sell books steadily-

Your "unlikely situation" is literally-not-figuratively how most authors you've heard of--no, not the GRRMs of the world, but the folks who sell books steadily--keep the lights on. The long tail exists and is very long--longer today in a world with Amazon--and that they don't have to write a screenplay adaptation and can instead eat and keep a roof over their heads while they write the next book is a feature, not a bug. It accrues over time and the gap between personal prosperity and precarity grows over time because the back catalog keeps selling.

csnover 3y ago
The story of the barely surviving artist that needs extremely long copyright durations to eat and keep a roof over their heads is an emotionally compelling one, but I’ve never seen it backed up by data—and I’ve looked quite hard to try to find some. Can you point me to a source that provides sales figures by publication date so it is possible to look at how much money is being spent on >20 year old fiction? A source that can exclude dead and high-net-worth authors would be ideal, or at least one that provides quantiles, since I’d expect old book sales to be disproportionately weighted toward rich or famous authors, rather than the sorts of working folks you’ve mentioned.