The PhoneBoy Blog

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1. Speaking as an author, I can tell you that what I made on the royalties for my two books depended on how it was sold. Authors are either getting paid on contract (no royalties) or in the 10% range (royalties percentage of wholesale price). That’s for technical books, fiction and other things may differ and it’s generally on a sliding scale.

   Music contracts are notoriously lopsided. In fact, most musicians hardly make money on their CDs as the record companies withhold those profits to payback the “advance” the artist was given. Most artists make money on touring.

   WGA members get zilch for producing content that goes online. That’s gotta change, given where things are going. The actual percentage amount is arguable, though I think they’ve used some reasonable logic to come to the price they did.

   1. PhoneBoy on November 7th, 2007 at 10:41 pm

2. The video is a little disingenuous. It starts out by saying, “Authors get paid for every book sold. Musicians get paid for every CD sold.” Are these fair comparisons? Authors do virtually all of the creative work of writing a novel (although editors do more than most people think). Musicians do virtually all of the creative work of writing a song for some musicians (although lots of other people contribute). Does what a writer do for a TV compare fairly to what an author does for a novel or what a musician does on a CD? Are the actors, the director, the film crew and so on analogous in role to studio engineers, editors, etc., or do they do a lot more work to make the resulting product?

   Also, how much do most authors and musicians actually get per book sold? I’m going to guess it doesn’t actually compare very favourably to their four cents. I suspect that all but the biggest musicians make more or less nothing on CD sales these days, mostly making their money from touring. Authors make a little more, but they’re unlikely to be rolling in it. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of authors can actually manage to quit their day job, even if they’re quite successful.

   2. Irfon-Kim Ahmad on November 7th, 2007 at 8:32 pm