

Author income levels dropped 29% since 2005 – The Guardian - cstross
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/08/authors-incomes-collapse-alcs-survey

======
onion2k
The article doesn't go in to whether the lower income for authors is from
falling demand for written content (eg lower book sales), increased supply of
books (eg same income divided between more authors), or competition from other
media (eg sales of ebooks redirecting revenue to middlemen like Amazon). The
change in the industry seems to be similar to the changes that the record
industry has been going through for the past couple of decades. It's not
necessarily a problem per se. We don't _need_ full-time authors. We need
books, but if they're written by people who have jobs as well, what's actually
wrong with that. The status quo doesn't have to be maintained.

~~~
a3n
Have the prices of books gone down? Anecdotally, it doesn't feel like it to
me. I think one thing (out of probably many) that's happening is corporations
are continuing to take a larger slice of the pie. The extreme example is
minimum wage jobs, where prices rise but wages don't.

~~~
onion2k
In the UK there used to be a thing called the "NET Book Agreement", whereby
everyone who sold books agreed not to discount them below the recommended
price. In the early 90s a couple of bookshop chains started to ignore it, and
it went away soon after. Then the supermarkets go in on the action and started
massively discounting bestsellers. Since then, prices have stayed very low.

So no, prices haven't gone down _recently_ , but they've never really been any
lower than they are now.

------
cstross
Noteworthy points:

1\. The period spanned -- 2005-2013 -- covers the big boom in ebook self-
publishing that Amazon precipitated by making it easy to self-publish. A lot
of self-published authors make _very little_ money, so this may skew the
figures. (Increased supply.)

2\. The ALCS survey polled both professionally published and self-published
authors (it was open to the public).

