Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
The point remains standing -- an author needs incentive to write books. Financial incentive is the best known. The more an author makes, the more of his energies he will spend trying to create books. If he can make SOOO much money that he no longer spends his time writing, his success will ensure MANY folks will spend their time trying to earn those rewards.
|
Anyone who thinks they are going to get rich from writing fiction is deluding themself, they would be lucky to make as much as they could get flipping burgers. The main incentive to write is a desire to write, maybe with the hope of peer recognition. Any money you might make from it is just a bonus.
Giggly is right about a lot of things — whether you put a price tag on your book or not, there will be a lot of people who read it for free. Just like there always has been. So a way of collecting money from some of those free reads would be worth coming up with. But I don't think his idea would work, for the same reason that voluntary donations don't work.
Something like his idea, with payments being made automatically as soon as the reader reaches the last page, maybe. Or something like the UK library scheme where you get a small payment each time it is downloaded, paid through advertising revenue on the download site. But I can't really see any of the big publishers allowing anything like that.