Quote:
Originally Posted by mdibella
I did of course mean that since writing a book is not easy, I would have thought that someone who can do it would make a decent salary. As an avid reader, I would HOPE that the people who produce the books I enjoy would not be living hand-to-mouth while someone else gets rich off their work.
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Writers of books do not get paid a "salary." They get a royalty off of each book sold. As mentioned, it is usually 5 to 10 percent of each sale. A friend of mine wrote a successful niche book, it is consider the book to have if you work with a particular graphics program. The book cost $50 retail, and she got $5.00 of each sale.
She also had a "real" job, because in order to make a living the publisher would have had to sell a whole lot more of those books every day than they actually did.
Of course, the retailer makes a profit, an there is some portion of the remainder that the publisher is supposed to be spending marketing the book and the author. There are also production costs. If the author has an agent, I would surmise that the agent's fee comes out of the author's cut.
Putting a book out in eformat decreases production costs significantly. However, this just means more money for the publisher, since they are not going to suddenly decide to increase the percentage going to the author.
But, in short, no ... most authors (unless they have written several best sellers) either have salaried writing jobs (as newspaper editors or reporters, or as script writers/readers), or other jobs which pay the bills.
That's just the way it is at present. I'd like to see it change.