Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
But you get paid for the value of your work at once. An author (or other creative professionals) doesn't get paid for his/her work when it's done, but the payment is somewhat deferred and dependent on its quality (or success). If the author gets some some advance, then the problem is transferred to the publisher...
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To quote Boldrin and Levine's
Against Intellectual Monopoly (p. 141) once again:
Quote:
Indeed, for books, we do find that up-front profits are typically the most important. Eric Flint reports that the “standard experience is that 80% of a book’s sales happens in the first three months.”13 In the same page he also provides, among other things, the following data for his own novel cowritten with David Drake, Oblique Approach:
- Royalty period Sales
- July–December 1998 30,431
- Janurary–June 1999 5,546
- July–December 1999 835
- January–June 2000 795
Our own data on a much broader base of fiction novels shows a decrease in sales over the initial four months of roughly a factor of six.14 The book industry, at least for paperback novels, is an industry in which the cost of creation is relatively small. Flint reports that the “average paperback sells, traditionally, about 15,000 copies” which, with a royalty of $2 per copy, would work out to about $30,000, also consistent with our broader database.
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