3 ms·

Author income levels dropped 29% since 2005 – The Guardian

8 points by cstross 12y ago

onion2k 12y ago
The article doesn't go in to whether the lower income for authors is from falling demand for written content (eg lower book sales), increased supply of books (eg same income divided between more authors), or competition from other media (eg sales of ebooks redirecting revenue to middlemen like Amazon). The change in the industry seems to be similar to the changes that the record industry has been going through for the past couple of decades. It's not necessarily a problem per se. We don't need full-time authors. We need books, but if they're written by people who have jobs as well, what's actually wrong with that. The status quo doesn't have to be maintained.
- a3n 12y ago
  Have the prices of books gone down? Anecdotally, it doesn't feel like it to me. I think one thing (out of probably many) that's happening is corporations are continuing to take a larger slice of the pie. The extreme example is minimum wage jobs, where prices rise but wages don't.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    In the UK there used to be a thing called the "NET Book Agreement", whereby everyone who sold books agreed not to discount them below the recommended price. In the early 90s a couple of bookshop chains started to ignore it, and it went away soon after. Then the supermarkets go in on the action and started massively discounting bestsellers. Since then, prices have stayed very low. So no, prices haven't gone down recently, but they've never really been any lower than they are now.
cstross 12y ago
Noteworthy points: 1. The period spanned -- 2005-2013 -- covers the big boom in ebook self-publishing that Amazon precipitated by making it easy to self-publish. A lot of self-published authors make very little money, so this may skew the figures. (Increased supply.) 2. The ALCS survey polled both professionally published and self-published authors (it was open to the public).

3 ms·

Author income levels dropped 29% since 2005 – The Guardian

8 points by cstross 12y ago

onion2k 12y ago
The article doesn't go in to whether the lower income for authors is from falling demand for written content (eg lower book sales), increased supply of books (eg same income divided between more authors), or competition from other media (eg sales of ebooks redirecting revenue to middlemen like Amazon). The change in the industry seems to be similar to the changes that the record industry has been going through for the past couple of decades. It's not necessarily a problem per se. We don't need full-time authors. We need books, but if they're written by people who have jobs as well, what's actually wrong with that. The status quo doesn't have to be maintained.
- a3n 12y ago
  Have the prices of books gone down? Anecdotally, it doesn't feel like it to me. I think one thing (out of probably many) that's happening is corporations are continuing to take a larger slice of the pie. The extreme example is minimum wage jobs, where prices rise but wages don't.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    In the UK there used to be a thing called the "NET Book Agreement", whereby everyone who sold books agreed not to discount them below the recommended price. In the early 90s a couple of bookshop chains started to ignore it, and it went away soon after. Then the supermarkets go in on the action and started massively discounting bestsellers. Since then, prices have stayed very low. So no, prices haven't gone down recently, but they've never really been any lower than they are now.
cstross 12y ago
Noteworthy points: 1. The period spanned -- 2005-2013 -- covers the big boom in ebook self-publishing that Amazon precipitated by making it easy to self-publish. A lot of self-published authors make very little money, so this may skew the figures. (Increased supply.) 2. The ALCS survey polled both professionally published and self-published authors (it was open to the public).