Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
*shrug* Lots of people don't make enough money doing only what they love.
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That's different that being very successful and making X amount of money for writing good books.
And then seeing the X decrease even though you're books are selling just as much because all of a sudden e-books took over and your profit per copy drops despite doing the same quality of work.
True, every job has it's ups and downs, but most of us don't have to worry about seeing our incomes drop when we're doing the same quality work.
Not counting layoffs etc. as that's different from still working the same and getting paid less which is what some successful author's fear with e-books. A layoff would be like a publisher going out of business and leaving the author looking for a new contract.
So must jobs just don't have this kind of risk. As long as you have the job, your income will stay the same or go up. Salary cuts are very uncommon when you're doing your job at a high quality, but that's a risk authors face in this case.
And of course anyone can "just write" as a hobby etc. But that doesn't meant the talented, successful authors who are making a great living writing (and have been for years) should have to do that because because have moved from physical or digital. Or that they should make less money selling the same number of copies of their next best seller because X number of copies were e-books etc.
If anything, e-books are a great opportunity for fledgling authors like yourself. You don't have worries that authors who have successful careers have in terms of seeing profits shrink for no other reason than a move to e-books.
It's not that authors should be treated specially, or put on some pedestal. It's that those who are successful shouldn't see a drop in revenue when they're selling the same number of copies because people are now reading e-books vs. paperbooks. The person reading the e-book is enjoying the same content as the person reading the e-book, so I don't see why e-books should be much cheaper than the print copy, or why authors shouldn't make the exact same amount for the content they created regardless of the format it's being consumed in.
And again, that latter point is more a problem with greedy publishers, and hopefully as we move more fully to e-books they'll gradually die off as authors move to self distribution, where all they need is someone to edit the book and get it to the e-book stores.