AL Bait
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Yeah, those fuckers.
Penguin Random House countered that the new company would “enhance” competition because the combined company could turn out books more efficiently.
Of course you would.
enabling the combined company to offer bigger advance payments and marketing support to authors.
This to me is the ultimate insult. Marketing support. You've gotta be shitting me. That's all on the authors! All the ones not with a King surname, that is. That's how you get Penguin to even listen to you in the first place. Bigger advance payments? Let's see that shit in writing.
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Brings up an interesting point...How many novelists make six figures per year, averaged out over ten years?
“Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”
Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton
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Brings up an interesting point...How many novelists make six figures per year, averaged out over ten years?
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Brings up an interesting point...How many novelists make six figures per year, averaged out over ten years?
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Is that about the career length of a successful author? Or do we judge it by the number of books published?
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Is that about the career length of a successful author? Or do we judge it by the number of books published?
Is that about the career length of a successful author? Or do we judge it by the number of books published?
I'm the wrong guy to ask. I'd say that the vast majority of authors today have day jobs. Not because they suck, but because for a whole lot of reasons, it's almost impossible to make a full-time living by exclusively writing books. That means people come and go to it.
Of those few "successes," though, much of the time, that success is attached to something—they're well known in their corner of the world, which is why they even got a book deal in the first place. Almost always, the schmuck who sold 18,000 copies of his novel in between his day job is fifty times the better writer than, say, Liz Cheney's ghostwriter. So what does that tell you about success in publishing?
Publishers are paying out less to fewer authors, leaving the unicorns the only ones left to get the marketing help and the earnings. And about that marketing: they're are also picking up a lot of bad habits from the music industry. If you have, say, six-digit legit followers in IG or millions on YT, you can get some kind of book deal reasonably easy. See a problem with that? How you get those followers has absolutely nothing to do with writing, and everything to do with how hard it would be for a publisher to market the work.
Anyway, I would honestly say that consistently paying a utility bill with your earnings is a legitimate definition of authorship success in today's world.
