It took her 12 years to write a book! That’s not a successful author, that’s a hobbyist.
Look at an actual successful author like Nora Roberts. Since the start of 2012 she’s published 57 books!
And before you say “there’s no way those 57 books are as good as the one book which took 12 years to write” let’s look at reviews on Goodreads:
The Actual Star by Monica Byrne (2704 ratings for a 3.88 average rating).
Private Scandals (2012) by Nora Roberts (10151 ratings for a 4.01 average rating).
And that’s just one random book I picked by her. Many of them are way more popular than that (hundreds of thousands of ratings on Goodreads).
The point is: if you want to make money as an author (of books, video games, YouTube videos) you can’t ignore your own productivity. Taking 12 years to write a 624 page book is extremely unproductive! That’s 4383 days (including leap years) to write 624 pages for an average of 1 page per week. A part time newspaper columnist writes several times that output and probably spends no more than an hour or two working on it.
Edit: Just a side note. Lord of the Rings also took 12 years to write. However Tolkien was a full time professor at Oxford during that entire time.
She writes full-time, maintains her own streams of writing income separate from royalties. And, if she’d written this book in one year, she’d be making $40k/year. And, she points out that her book income is in the top 20% of writers.
Book sales, like almost everything else based on popularity, follow a power law distribution. This means that having a book in the top 20% of all books by earnings is not that great considering that the bottom 80% of books earn basically nothing.
Yes.
At this point, copyright doesn’t exist to benefit creators, but to benefit rent-seeking corporate parasites.
That’s why I’m both for and against copyright - I’m for it as an ideal - as a tool to help ensure that creators can profit when others derive value from the fruits of their labors - but I’m very much against the current implementation of it, which exists solely to ensure that overpaid corporate fuckwads can profit off of the fruits of somebody else’s labor.
This
The thing about modern copyright is that works are supposedly protected regardless of the copyright symbol. But how does that work in practice? Because if everything is copyrighted, including something as simple as a doodle, then nothing is.
I believe the default assumption is that anything you created is yours, which seems reasonable to me. I don’t need to be DaVinci for my doodles to be mine, the quality or value of the work does not change that it is mine.
Now, imagine someone took your doodles and started selling them in a book they called “1000 of the Worst Fucking Failures of Art.” That would probably be offensive to you, and on top of it they are profiting off of your work (regardless of how much you actually put in).
Copyright gives you a tool to combat them legally to get your art removed or even damages if you were now known as “That person who tried and failed horribly to make art.” There is a saying along the lines of doing 1000 good deeds is good, but you fuck one goat and you’ll be known as a Goat Fucker.
You could, of course, fail to defend your copyright which, in some places, is seen as acceptance of how it is being used. You could also release the copyright and allow the work to enter the public domain so that anyone can use it for any purpose, including their worst art book.
