I know that there are a lot of people who think they should have access to other people's work for free, but it seems unfair to deny a living to the people who did the work in the first place.
For example, I have just finished my first novel. If I can sell it to a publishing house, and they actually print and distribute it, I will receive about 10% of the cover price for each book sold. So, if a book is $8, I should receive about 80 cents for each copy that gets sold.
It took me two months to write the book, but the idea had been running around in the back of my mind for years, so it wasn't really starting from scratch. I have a friend proofreading it for me. He's been at it for almost a month, and it's a heavy slog because Word didn't catch most of the errors. By the time I finish this, it will be the beginning of June -- seven months after I started -- and that's just my time, not my proofreader's time. Add the proofreader, and that makes it eight months of almost all my time to write this book and whip it into a decent shape.
During that eight months, I will have held down a part-time job to help stave off my creditors. If I actually sell it (and I'm not holding my breath, here), a big seller in Canada is about 50,000 copies, or so I've been told. Well, that's not likely to happen with a first novel, especially in genre fiction. So, say it sells 20,000 copies in Canada -- a nice round figure. Multiply that by 80 cents, and that's $16,000. Sounds like a lot, but it's under the poverty line, and I still have to pay the proofreader, and income tax and, by this point, I'll need an agent. That's another cut out of the $16k -- anywhere from 10-15%.
Okay, say that I keep churning out a book a year that my editor wants to publish. It's difficult, but not impossible. Gradually, my readership increases and I have a Canadian bestseller on my hands! That would bring in about $40,000. Let's face it. I'll never get rich doing this -- but that's okay because I love doing it.
Now, say that someone buys one of my later books in the first week that it's out. They take the time to scan it and put it up on the internet. They might put it out there for free, or they sell it. Either way, I'm not getting anything for it. Some of my readers might decide to read it online because they think books are too expensive and, hey, the author is rich anyway, right? All of a sudden, fewer of my books sell. And if it happens a couple of times in a row, I may not be able to sell the next book to my editor, because my sales are 'way down. The publishing house will get the impression that people don't want to read my stuff anymore.
No matter how I cut it, I'll never be able to make a great living as a Canadian writer, even without online piracy. With it, I might as well give up now.
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The link below was posted by a film director a few days ago during the big SOPA protest. I know nothing about making films, so found his comments about how indie films are financed to be interesting.
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