trash

This is pretty simple. Authors get paid when you buy their books. If you don’t buy their books, they don’t get paid. They get paid a percentage of the price you pay for their books. If you buy highly discounted books (from amazon or B&N or Scholastic book fairs), they get paid a lot less. If you borrow a book from the library, they got paid for that one time (in the US), but at least they got that. If you read a book from a pirated site, they don’t get paid.

The problem I see is that most people don’t understand this very simple equation. They think that authors get paid by publishers just to be authors. Hint: we don’t. Authors don’t get paid to do book tours. Unless people buy their books. Authors don’t get paid by the government to be authors. Authors don’t get paid by Hollywood for their books unless they get a pittance if they’re actually given an option (1% of authors get books optioned, 1% of those get made into movies). If an author gets a movie made, they still make very little of that money, except for if books are purchased. If an author wins an award, most of the time, they make no money from that directly, only if more books are sold.

Are you starting to understand what my point is here?

Yes, some authors make money on the side doing school visits for children. A lot of them don’t even make that, especially in Utah, where local publishers are using school visits as a promotional opportunity and have nearly eliminated the market for paid visits from authors who AREN’T trying to push books on kids. (Yes, I have strong feelings about this.)

Yes, these days authors make money sometimes by being youtube celebrities (I can count on one hand the number of authors doing this). Yes, authors sometimes make money through Patreon, though this is pretty new and we’re still figuring it out. Think about this for a minute. Authors have to hustle to make money because actually writing books doesn’t pay them very much. What? Yeah, even NYT best-selling authors are not making enough to pay mortgages sometimes.

In the UK, there’s something called Public Lending Rights, where an author gets about 8 pence per borrow of their books (it’s a little more complicated than that, because they sample from a subset of libraries, but that’s the basic idea). So if a hundred people borrowed my book over the course of a year, I would get about £8. That may not sound like much, but that’s kinda the point OP is making.

N O I S I A 

this game has given me too much power.