via
https://ift.tt/3epoiyggirl-in-red-crossing:
jackironsides:
bygodstillam:
taibhsearachd:
taibhsearachd:
Lmao did I seriously get called a bootlicker for holding the terrible oppressive opinion of “authors deserve to be paid for their work”? You’re not a radical for distributing other people’s creative work for free you’re just a dick.
Fucking wild how many of these people seem to believe both that books are so vital that it’s necessary they’re immediately available to everyone at no cost, and also that authors are bougie scum who contribute nothing to society, have nothing of worth to say, don’t deserve to be paid or not have their job security undermined, and should find another job… and they see no contradiction in this. Absolutely amazing.
#this is honestly not an exaggeration I have seen all of this in the past hour #also loving the assumption across the board that all authors are white able-bodied financially stable and otherwise not marginalized #which is HILARIOUSLY inaccurate in the circles I run in #and by loving I mean I want to punch people
#‘oh but if you buy books it goes to the publisher not the author’ #yeah usually but if you buy books it tells the publisher it’s worth buying ANOTHER book from that author #it means their next advance might be higher #it means they CONTINUE TO HAVE A JOB
#yeah capitalism is bullshit and we all hate it but until we escape it we still all need incomes in order to eat
Also, as I have said a million kajillion times? People who work in publishing deserve to eat too. Not just authors. Although authors also deserve this! Publishing isn’t the music industry. Editors spend many, many hours working on those books you like so that they’re readable. (Sometimes you can tell when an author has got too famous and they clearly have stopped listening to their editors. You can see the quality of the books decline.) Illustrators drew that map of the book’s fantasyland at the front; illustrators drew that double-page spread of a mediaeval town with the hundreds of people walking around. Photographers took the colour photos in the glossy insert. Permissions staff called around and cajoled that Scandinavian museum to secure the right to print that photo of that Viking ship. Typesetters and graphic designers made the interior readable, and made the eye catching cover. Heck, editors made sure that each paragraph of text was tagged correctly so that the book could be turned into an ebook, and checked it once it was done to make sure it hadn’t all gone weird in the conversion. If it’s a nonfiction book, there’s even a chance that the publisher sought out an author or author team to write the book, not the other way around – especially for textbooks.
There is an extraordinary amount of work that goes into publishing a book. Authors spend a horrific amount of time on each one, and so do staff at publishing houses. Almost none of us get paid particularly well. In my first job as an editor, I was alarmed to discover that I could get a 10k raise by quitting and going to work as a receptionist. I’ve been a receptionist before. It didn’t require me to work overtime, or to have a university qualification. I’ve played Solitaire on the computer as a receptionist. Being an editor had me regularly stay late at the office.
The thing about ‘x book has sold so well! All the money should go to the author’ is that it shows you don’t understand how publishing works. Most books don’t make very much for the publisher. Some don’t cover the cost of production. The reason why publishers can keep producing books, and can publish interesting or risky books, is those rare success stories. In Australia, our local publisher Allen & Unwin had the distribution rights for Harry Potter, which they did not produce. But the money they got for distributing the series bankrolled books by Australian authors. It meant they could publish Garth Nix’s children books, a beautiful coffee table book on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or the Phryne Fisher series.
Pirating books won’t hurt the few executives who make money at publishing. But it will hurt authors – most of whom don’t make enough from writing to classify their work as anything other than a hobby – and it hurts people like me, who make authors works look good.
Pirating books shuts down small publishers, or otherwise they get bought out by the same big publishers you rail against. Ours is not an industry with a large safety net. We really, I don’t know how to get this across to you, do not make much money. The reason why Hachette is large and makes a lot of money is because Hachette is an umbrella publisher that has something like sixty smaller publishers under it. I can’t remember the exact number from when I worked there, and it’s likely changed since, anyway. If you don’t want the five big publishers owning everything, you need to support the smaller publishers. Which means buying their books, or at the very least not pirating them.
Most people who work in publishing do it because we really love books. We’re really not in it to make money. Which is good, because people who work in publishing are really poorly paid. I have met more than a few who leave after five or ten years, who go to work in the government, or at universities, or in marketing, because the poor pay and the stress has finally got to them.
And you know what? If capitalism ceased to exist tomorrow, I’d be delighted to spend my days making books for no renumeration. I love books. I love editing! But that’s not the world we live in, and I don’t want to see my tiny industry basically cease to exist. I’ve already seen the number of jobs in publishing shrink and shrink in my country. I’ve seen publishers disappear and get swallowed up by others.
Authors and publishing staff are not the enemy. Why the fuck shouldn’t they get paid for their fucking labour.
Hi! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood professional copy editor!
I haven’t been paid in three months thanks to corona. I don’t get paid much when I do get paid. And if you pirate this biography of Charles de Gaulle that I am devoting my weekend to, I won’t get paid at all.
Books do not fly straight from the author’s head to your hands.
If you can afford it, buy your books. (And if you’re in the U.S., buy them from Bookshop.org because fuck Amazon.)
If you can’t afford to buy books, GO TO YOUR LIBRARY! THAT IS HOW YOU GET BOOKS FOR FREE! A librarian can help you get any book you want! And the library pays for the books! Publishers get money to pay their employees and you get the book for free! The library gets a boost in circulation numbers, which helps them convince the state government to please, please give them some of the tiny percentage of tax dollars that are still used to better the community.
You say you love books?
SUPPORT SMALL PUBLISHERS. SUPPORT SMALL BOOKSTORES. SUPPORT LIBRARIES.
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