Author Compensation Quotes

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, .. and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.

I don't take advances for my books.

I've learned over the years that big-name writers might be treated fairly by the media conglomerates that dominate publishing today. But the average author isn't.

Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.

When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.

A new regulation for the publishing industry: "The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.

Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.

I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.

If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a 'public lending right', where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.

Since [some] American publishers pay nothing to the English authors whose stories they appropriate and publish, other American publishers can not to afford to pay American authors for writing stories.

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly ... It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

We authors certainly don't know what is going to happen to our books. Are they going to disappear into the ether, following music downloads, or are ebooks going to open up a whole new world of readers? And how much are we being paid per copy? We haven't a clue.

Ebooks have many advantages - publishers don't have to make guesses about how many books to print, books need never go "out of print", and hard-to-find books can be easily available. So far, the only limitation seems to be finding a way for the writer to be paid.