How much does the average author get paid?

[LazyScot]

Fascinating thread!

My better half studied the 1700's and 1800's; a time of a lot of change in the area of publishing with many familiar debates and problems.

What resonates with me most from that time is that most authors never sought (or expected) to make money from writing. Certainly some did, but the purpose was not to earn a living. It feels that the publishing industry still thinks of authors in a similar way, unless a good agent can convince them otherwise.

If we are thinking about money, how much do you pay for a couple of hours entertainment? For movies, it is probably about $10. For a newspaper, I would say it is about $2 (but then I don't read all the stuff in most papers!), and I have adverts as well. How much do you pay for a book and how much entertainment do you get out of it? Most books give me 20 to 40 hours, and probably cost c. $10. Steve Jordan's pricing seems incredibly good value to me (and as soon as I get through my backlog -- the Edinburgh Book Festival is always a bad idea).

Another interesting thing is the difference in time it takes to write a book. I believe some biographies have taken almost 10 years (from what Michael Holroyd said at a previous festival), where as others produce fiction in about a year (or Charles Stross who seems to produce a several each year). Should this factor into prices?

With the exception of perhaps a few hundred authors on the planet, I don't see how authors can make a realistic living just from writing. But if the authors of this planet looked at it like this, I think the world would be a far poorer place. We are fortunate for their calling, and willingness to do this. What I hope is that some of the places do allow the authors to take a larger cut of the price paid by the readers, allowing more of them to make a real living (or more likely a less poor one).

I'd also like to point out that there are publishers out there that don't make any money at all, and exist simply to make books and authors accessible in ways they would not otherwise be -- so I'm not against publishers, per se!

[SandySchwab]

Originally Posted by dstampe

For example, I'm reasonably comfortable with using the reviews on Amazon, as long as there are more than one and I know something about the author's style. Multiple reviews show a consesus and that people are motivated (positive or negative) to post.

Amazon reviews are easily manipulated, though. Unfortunately, there are authors who don't believe readers have a right to criticize their books. So, don't like that one-star review? Tell enough people (family, friends, rabid fans) to click "not helpful" or "report this" and the review will be pushed down the page or even disappear.

Want a couple of 5-star reviews? Tell your family and friends and author buddies to write glowing reviews.

I have no idea how widespread a problem this is or which genres are more affected than others. But the problem certainly exists.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by LazyScot

Fascinating thread!

My better half studied the 1700's and 1800's; a time of a lot of change in the area of publishing with many familiar debates and problems...

You're right: The 1700s and 1800s were a period of serious change, especially in areas of entertainment, and more especially in capitalistic and entrepreneurial ventures. With the changes that the internet has brought, changes could be as radical now as they were then, and give us an industry that will look unrecognizable to authors and publishers of just a few years ago.

I expect the same globalization that is currently upsetting concepts like copyright, ownership and distribution, will play a major role in establishing new publishing, distribution and payment channels. For instance, maybe authors will have a more controlling role, hiring editors in another country to vet their work, and paying for distribution through advertising of a product made in a third country. Or maybe the traditional publishing and distribution system will subdivide into modules, allowing an author's agent to choose the best ala carte combination of editing, publishing and distribution channels for their client, job by job.

Either way, we can expect more change to come, some of it possibly unpredictable, all of it interesting.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by SandySchwab

Amazon reviews are easily manipulated, though. Unfortunately, there are authors who don't believe readers have a right to criticize their books. So, don't like that one-star review? Tell enough people (family, friends, rabid fans) to click "not helpful" or "report this" and the review will be pushed down the page or even disappear.

Want a couple of 5-star reviews? Tell your family and friends and author buddies to write glowing reviews.

Another problem is people reviewing a book they haven't even read-- in some cases, a book that isn't even out yet (Paolini's Brisingr comes to mind). One way to avoid this would be to restrict reviews to those who've actually bought the book from Amazon (because Amazon would have no way of knowing who might have bought the book elsewhere).

But in the case of free downloads, this wouldn't work because someone could download the book and not read it, and then write a review. However, once the price went up over $1, I think the number of spurious reviews would drop dramatically.

Regarding online writer's workshops, usually the MS are distributed by email, but even if they were posted online, access could be (and would need to be) restricted to members of that workshop only.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Reviews from Amazon are no more reliable than those from the publisher themselves... they are all skewed to sell you the book. Reviews should come from a fully-impartial third party, like a site or magazine dedicated to reviewing, not selling.

[Over]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Reviews from Amazon are no more reliable than those from the publisher themselves... they are all skewed to sell you the book. Reviews should come from a fully-impartial third party, like a site or magazine dedicated to reviewing, not selling.

I think this is an exageration. Sure, there are better reader reviews than others, just like there are different people with different opinions. Someone that reads reader reviews before buying a book, will take a look to more than a couple reviews. The good and the bad.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Reviews from Amazon are no more reliable than those from the publisher themselves... they are all skewed to sell you the book. Reviews should come from a fully-impartial third party, like a site or magazine dedicated to reviewing, not selling.

The reviews published by Amazon itself are skewed, but the customer reviews seem to run the gamut. As far as a completely independent site or magazine, like Consumer Reports... well, funding is often a problem for an operation like that.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Reviews from Amazon are no more reliable than those from the publisher themselves... they are all skewed to sell you the book. Reviews should come from a fully-impartial third party, like a site or magazine dedicated to reviewing, not selling.

Amazon reviews are useless in my opinion. Not for the reasons above, but

1. They are self-selecting - people with a stake in the book will post - either they loved it/have obligations to the author.., or they hated it/detest the author... How likely is it that you will have similar taste with an unknown Amazon reviewer?

2. They are usually short and non-descriptive - I liked it/hated it kind and that is just useless in a review unless you *know* the reviewer's tastes

3. There is no guarantee the reviewer actually read the book as Harriet Klausner' blurb based reviews prove


I look constantly for and buy new authors and so I have several review sites I use that I know are reliable from experience in time with them, and then excerpts are all important - usually a page or two of the book makes it clear for me if it's a must, a check it more, a later when in the mood, or a complete avoid.

In sff at least there is a large network of very good reviewers and review sites, with different interests for that matter so you can find reviews of the latest vampire yarn, as well as of the hard sf space opera or the latest hardcore mil-sf, so it's easy to check books out. What is hard is to get people to review lesser known books since reading time is limited and every month there are lots of major sff releases and those tend to get the most attention, with lesser known novels appearing here and there based on reviewer's taste.

[DaleDe]

We have a few reviews in the wiki. They are quite good and it would be nice to add to them.

Dale

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

I look constantly for and buy new authors and so I have several review sites I use that I know are reliable from experience in time with them, and then excerpts are all important - usually a page or two of the book makes it clear for me if it's a must, a check it more, a later when in the mood, or a complete avoid.

In sff at least there is a large network of very good reviewers and review sites, with different interests for that matter so you can find reviews of the latest vampire yarn, as well as of the hard sf space opera or the latest hardcore mil-sf, so it's easy to check books out. What is hard is to get people to review lesser known books since reading time is limited and every month there are lots of major sff releases and those tend to get the most attention, with lesser known novels appearing here and there based on reviewer's taste.

Would you mind providing a few links to review sites? I'm looking for more "philosophical" sff (for lack of a better term). I prefer a strong science underpinning to my stories, i.e. if it's supposed to be sf, I don't want to see terms like "tesseract" or "mutant" thrown around just for flavor with no connection to their contemporary scientific meanings, but the interactions between the characters and how they solve problems are usually the most interesting part of the story for me. If fantasy, I prefer a strongly developed, original mythos, preferably without elves and orcs (I've already read Tolkien), again with an emphasis on characters solving problems, preferably by working together (eventually, at least). Any suggestions?

[dstampe]

Originally Posted by bob_ninja

Say I am interested in cyber fiction. I may hear of few big stars in the genre from media, I may stumble upon one of his books in Chapters store, etc. I only get exposure to big starts of the genre.

Say we had a number of forums here, one for each genre. Now I can simply go to this forums and examine the recommendations. You can even assign multiple tags, like dark cyber, or techno cyber, or whatever. Using indexing engine I could quickly search huge library of recommendations and fine tune for my taste or mood. Again, so long as it is an open forum not controlled by commercial interests then all authors have the same treatment; as opposed to what publishers decide to promote, or media decides to write about.

The problem I see is that sometimes it's hard to relate what you like to a label, or that you're interested in a specific subset of a labelled category. The examples above, for example, don't really man much to me--I know what cyberpunk is of course, and based on the names I suspect I'd dislike the "dark" and like the "techno" subgeneres. I'm sure there's dozens of categories that exist, and it's probably too much to expect a general reader to learn what all of these mean.

Probably there's a tutorial somewhere out there that defines each, and gives example authors and titles of each. But what if you have't read any of the books or authors given as examples? What if the authors cited as exemplars wrote in several subgenres, and the reader has only read the "wrong" books? A description of each classification will also be of most help if the reader understands their own personal preferences, something that may only come from reading a wide range of material, and having a few disappointments to define the limits.

So the question is, should readers need to educate themselves before deciding which group(s) to patronize? This could be a high bar to set for many readers, unless this tutorial is very carefully designed and executed. The problem is that reading dry descriptions simply does not work unless the reader has already has encountered material that can be related to the description. However including a "reading list" of plot outlines, short stories, and excerpts would turn this into more of a literature course, so is probably not the way to go either.

All this of course leaves aside the question of whether the book/author in question is even correctly catagorized. Certainly publishers tend to link books to whatever category sells best right now.

It is also probable that a reader's tastes are not limited to a single genre or subgenre. I suspect that a large part of what a reader likes could be determined by 20 or less rating scales (statistical dimensions) such as:

- how important is technology in the story or background?
- do you prefer characters or or noncharacter (plot, technology, cultural) elements to dominate he story?
- scales: personal or cosmic?
- involved, multilayer plot or action?
- hero or antihereo? Can you tolerate unhappy endings?

and so on. For these questions to have more than academic meanings, you'd have to relate them to one or more authors/stories that the reader has actually read. This could be a problem for a beginning reader.

Once ou had those dimensions for a book or author, you could almost certainly match readers with the material they'd best like. Each work would be rated by multiple readers on each dimensions as well as a few global ratings that even untrained reader could easily give (how "good" was it? did it flow well? would you read more like it?). These global scores, combined with the closeness of the match to your preferences, would give a personalized book score.

There are probably a lot of ways to determine the important dimensions, both to identify the questions that best measure them and to determine the scores for each work. It is very important to find the right set of measures or the whole thing is inefficient (less accurate, too many questions required to categorize, or too big a dtabase needed). There are statistical ways to compare how good a scoring system is but I'd suspect you might need tens of thousands (more likely hundreds of thousands) of whaterer data points (book reviews, user ratings, or even favorite book lists) to determine the best set. Maybe this has already been collected somewhere. I know Amazon has a huge database of what people buy, but whatever they're doing with it it isn't working too well, I find lass that 5% of their recommendation even worth clicking on the link, and some are simply ludicrous.


.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Would you mind providing a few links to review sites? I'm looking for more "philosophical" sff (for lack of a better term). I prefer a strong science underpinning to my stories, i.e. if it's supposed to be sf, I don't want to see terms like "tesseract" or "mutant" thrown around just for flavor with no connection to their contemporary scientific meanings, but the interactions between the characters and how they solve problems are usually the most interesting part of the story for me. If fantasy, I prefer a strongly developed, original mythos, preferably without elves and orcs (I've already read Tolkien), again with an emphasis on characters solving problems, preferably by working together (eventually, at least). Any suggestions?

How 'bout a review of my next novel, Teenage Mutant Tesseract Philosophers?

(Whoops... how did I get out of the Lounge?)

[nekokami]

I considered just such a rating scale when I was working on the Gaeabooks project, which was specifically going to use reader recommendations with links to buy books through existing bookstores, rewarding reviewers who did a good job describing and reviewing books. I was looking at the Otakuworld system of relating anime and manga by themes at the time, which did a reasonably good job of finding new anime and manga based on titles I already liked. I never did get the scales worked out, though.

The other way to do it is heuristically, by which I mean the method Librarything (and presumably Amazon) uses. This has the reader input a batch of their favorite books and/or authors, and makes recommendations based on other readers and what they listed as favorites (or bought, in the case of Amazon). Actually, I found that after I went through my Amazon account and fine-tuned my recommendations data (removing books and other items I'd bought as gifts, for example, adding books I'd bought through other sources, and rating the items I'd bought through Amazon) my recommendations started to get pretty good.

Somewhere in one of the boxes in the basement sits my copy of A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction, an extraordinarily helpful book by Baird Searles, Martin Last, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin, published back in 1979, which listed major SF authors at the time, gave a brief description of their works and styles, and, most helpfully, provided advice along the lines of "if you like this author, try these other authors." I found most of my favorite authors that way. I really wish they'd update this book, but when I wrote to the authors about this a few years ago, they'd all rather moved on to other projects since then. I've seen a few websites try the same general idea over the past few years, but none that seemed to last (that I found). I'd welcome any suggestions in this area.

Oh, and Steve, for you, I'd make an exception.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Would you mind providing a few links to review sites?

The best ever review site in my opinion has been Emerald City run by Cherryl Morgan. It has not been active for a while - Cherryl now has a blog at Cherryl Musings with occasional reviews - but it got nominated and even won a Hugo I think, but it has the archive online and I bought lots and lots of books, especially from the UK based on that.

For current what's up in sff, the best site is Robert Fantasy Book Critic whose monthly new releases and various spotlights are just awesome - I get to check them every month and I do my best to find a new book to add, and I rarely manage. After commenting on his site for a while, I got co-opted as an occasional reviewer especially of more sf-nal and weird mainstream titles but for me that's just a hobby

Larry Of Blog of the Fallen is a more offbeat site, with lots of cool stuff, foreign authors, but I got lots of book recommendation from it and of course added mine too. He is one of the few people I know that read more than me, since this year I managed maybe 170 new (for me) novels so far, while Larry managed over 200 till now. The occasional "list 5 authors that wrote in this or that language that you like" - for 15-20 languages - challenge to the readers produced many new interesting finds for me and Larry is a big fan and connoisseur of Spanish language literature, so I found about extraordinary authors like Robert Bolano, the new CR Zafon novel which is related to Shadow of the Wind but of a more fantastic and darker bend - read it in my slow Spanish since the US translation is not yet available - and some more sfnal ones.

Jonathan McCalmont of SFDiplomat is not diplomatic but hard-hitting and while reviews come and go, links and opinions there are very useful

Of course each of those sites has tons of links to other sites, including more pro ones like Strange Horizon, Niall Harrison Torque Control and so on - so you can just explore from there until you find what fits your taste.

For forums I contribute to sffworld since I find it the most broad based and interesting and lots of authors drop by

And SFSignal has current sfnal links every day so I check it every morning

Hope these will help you.

Links:

http://www.emcit.com/

http://www.fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/

http://ofblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/

http://sffworld.com/

http://sfsignal.com/

[dadioflex]

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