Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
If not enough people pay the author will not write more books. When the next book is payed for and written anybody can read it. There is no cost to read existing books.
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There are some people who tried this with varying degree of success - though let us not forget that what is success is kind of unclear here since author compensation is so variable, Stephen King was unhappy and abandoned a project after people paid for it in 6 figures from what I remember, while other authors may consider the book as a success at 10k or 20k or...
And this thing with "the author is not paid he/she will not write" - well I just do not believe this - sure there are authors that stopped writing because of lack of commercial success, but I profoundly doubt that was due to "piracy" and that a method as above would have made any difference.
If you write stuff that enough people find compelling - which I think is not as easy as it sounds - and if you can manage to find those people for which the stuff you wrote is for - and that is pretty hard too considering the amount of stuff that's out there - I think you will monetize the experience somehow.
Obscurity rather than piracy is the main problem for most authors and I still believe that will be the case for a while...