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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I'm not sure how to reconcile this hypercapitalist statement with the known fact that said monkey patronizes socialistic public libraries 
Why stop at authors?
Should book editors -- who can be even more important than the author in determining how good the book is -- also have compensation wholly based on a percentage of sales?
Should the pay of professors be 100 percent based on the number of students signing up for their courses?
Should retail clerks, and wait staff, be paid solely based on a percentage of sales that pass through their hands?
Should acquisitions librarian compensation be directly proportional to the number of patrons who borrow the books they select?
Web search indicates that the top leadership of Google and Facebook don't get paid, but Jeff Bezos takes an annual salary, plus $1.6 million for security. Here's a modest proposal. Until he starts giving most of his authors advances, Bezos should be paid just like a Kindle Direct Publishing author -- zero profits to Amazon, zero compensation.
Maybe you are going to say yes to all the above. But it seems pretty harsh to me, especially in the case of low-wage workers such as retail clerks -- and most authors.
Also, as a reader, I believe that if the author doesn't receive an advance, the book is liable to be lousy -- because the publisher has no investment it needs to recoup by making the book as salable as possible. There surely are lots of Kindle Direct Publishing authors who are as good as Hachette authors, but whose books are not, because Amazon has insufficient incentive to improve titles before presenting them to the public. |
Can we please stop bandying about political labels. They say nothing and act to obscure the real discussion.
So far as why stop at authors go the answer is clear. Writing books is clearly appropriate to this method of payment. Many writers are actually employed, sometimes on salary, in various fields Screenwriting, amd producing technical manuals come immediately to mind. But how many employers are going to pay an author a salary to sit at a desk all day and write a book? How many authors would like or even be able to work this way. Paying by reference to sales is the logical and overwhelmingly most appropriate way to pay for this type of creative work in a way it is not for your examples.
And the top leadership of Google and Facebook don't get paid? Please don't be so naive or pretend to be so naive.
And the only way to make a book as saleable as possible is to have a publisher advance money so that the publisher will then advance more money to make it saleable? Doesn't the author want to make the book saleable. What the author gives up to a BWM publisher makes these little services which may be peformed by such a publisher enormously expensive. Can't the author pay a good editor etc if this is so worthwhile and pay a fraction of what the BWM Publisher extracts (and in dollars too, not flesh).
I think we will find in the future that many self-published authors start using worthwhile services such as editors more and more. A BWM publisher's services in "improving titles" comes at far too high a cost, which is yet another reason their business model is in so much trouble.