thinking about random things

[poliun]

 read an article about authors getting paid by publishers depending on colour. am rather confused. I thought authors' get royalties, and don't get paid outright. can anybody explain, pretty please.

Comments

[reilaflowers]

They usually get an advance payment for the rights to publish, then royalties for the sales but it's all so subjective that it's hard to say exactly who gets paid what. I've found an article that I think is the one you read and even the white authors admit there's huge difference between their first book and later ones. It's impossible to tell if there is racism involved. Maybe people read the "about the author" section before purchasing a book but I've never done that. But then I don't care about the gender, race, ethnicity, none harmful religious views (homophobia for instance can be a harmful religious view) or any other factors like that when picking a book to read.

[hitokage]

every contract is different, twitter had a hashtag - PublishingPaidMe, iirc - that was published authors talking about what they were paid and it's a mess. Different publishers offer different advances and royalties, assuming they offer you such things at all - if you self-publish, you're looking at a lot of up-front expenses and returns may be good or bad depending on the genre and current trends. The one thing authors can agree on is that vanishingly few people get any kind of *good* money by writing books.

[poliun]

got it. thanks. yeah, the article I read was about that hashtag, in other words life is hard all around.

[poliun]

thanks. yeah, in order to get everything in an orderly system, we have only complicated the process.