|
In response to the rather modest question posed in the OP, I'd have to agree with DArenson and L.J.Sellers that promotion trumps donation. It doesn't hurt to google an author whose work you've enjoyed and see what avenues of compensation, promotion, or acquiring future works they've endorsed; we no longer live in a world where readers can assume that marching off to a brick and mortar store and buying a mass of wood pulp with the author's name emblazoned across it is a preferred or even possible means of supporting their work.
As for what steps authors should take to be compensated, pursuing a contract with a big publishing house and hoping you'll be one of the half dozen authors they see fit to actually promote was always a long shot. The ease and accessibility of online distribution should be (and has been) a good thing for artists of all kinds. New authors should certainly consider pursuing alternate avenues of compensation, such as electronic self-publication, releasing their work serially on a subscription model, ad-supported online publication, or offering premium and prestige editions of their work and/or related merchandise. Putting up a donation box is not likely to get you far.
The other side of that coin, though, is that facility with language is not always (perhaps rarely) coupled with business sense. Often artists need someone representing them, and can do little more than decide to whom they should hand off their work, then step back and hope for the best. The more time they devote to building a website or monitoring half a dozen different services by which they promote and distribute their work, the less time they're actually writing, and perhaps the less they're able to promote a frame of mind in which they can produce work.
What I would like to see are entrepreneurs providing these services to authors without trying to force online distribution into the paradigms of wood-pulp publishing.
|