Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
If an author sells 50,000 copies and gets $1 royalty per copy, he gets $50,000.
If 1% only pay he gets $500.
$50,000 seems reasonable compensation at a glance, although if the author publishes once every 3 years and writes full time, it works out to a pretty small annual income.
And, of course, most open source software donations are above $1 per copy.
I don't think the buyer should have total control over whether payment is made, unless the author of software developer grants them that right.
It is like stealing carrots from a farmers field. One little carrot won't hurt him we think, but if 99% of all carrots are stolen, soon no-one would be tempted to grow carrots.
Helen
|
If 50,000 people read a book by an author I think that author should be very happy and continue to write.
Let's just assume that 10% of the people who read the book liked it, that's 5000 people who are now interested in the author and people for whom hopefully the author has had the foresight to gain some contact info for. For the author's next work there is now an already interested base of people for whom the conversion rate to paying readers should be significantly higher than 1%. Some would pay less than what the author believes their work to be worth, but some would pay more, some would probably pay alot more, depending on how much THEY think the book is worth, and how much of their income they can afford to spend on words.
With the advent of Internet 2.0 this will all be academic. The network will know what you download, know how long you spend with the media that you download, know how much you make in a year, and then subtract the right amount from your network account and transfer it to the creator.