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Originally Posted by pidgeon92
This article contains a link to an Author's Guild blog posting regarding Turow's opinion on the Goodreads acquisition by Amazon. The interesting part was not Turow's opinion (which will come as a surprise to no one), but the comments from authors at the end of the posting.
http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy...-can-be-built/ |
There is a real schism emerging between the people in the writing business (especially the genres) and the people in the book business. Turow's publishers solidarity has earned him a lot of disdain among a lot of writers. Especially the ones that *don't* have the comfort of six- and seven-figure contracts.
Instead, there are a *lot* of writers like this:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...f-publish.html
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I started in the usual way, with traditional publishing, and had six science fiction novels published by New York houses between '95 and 2003. My work garnered good reviews and there were a couple of awards, but despite my best efforts no meaningful amount of money was going into the family coffers. Economically, I was wasting my time. Emotionally I was inhabited by a deep, dark sense of failure, with no viable means to turn things around. So circa 2000 I more or less walked away from the field for almost ten years. I did not stop writing entirely, but it was close.
In 2009 I woke up to the ebook revolution.
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In the end, it's the total revenue that matters. Ten thousand copies sold of an original novel is not going to impress a traditional publisher or lead to meaningfully higher income for me. But working on my own gives me a bigger cut of the list price. So if I manage to sell online ten thousand copies of TR:FL at list ($7.99 ebook/$16 trade USD) in 2013, I'll have made a nice (but not spectacular) annual income.
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To a lot of writers, self-pub is the difference between a book that delivers maybe $5000 in royalties (off 10000 sales at $10) which is noise to Turow, and that nice income cited above from the same number of sales.
Or, like these folks:
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/hugh...t_for_writers/
Turow may or not be accurately defending the interests of the big contract authors but there are a lot of writers who eagerly embrace the changes he decries. Hence the pushback.