An Answer To Declining Author Incomes

If authors want to get ahead, we can’t blame consumers or distributors for where we are.

An author friend of mine, C. Hope Clark, posted an article on her Facebook feed entitled, “The Disastrous Decline In Author Incomes Isn’t Just Amazon’s Fault” by Carrie V. Mullins (@carrievmullins), a contributor to website Electronic Literature. Her article paints a gloomy picture of authors whose voices are silenced by the decline of money paid to authors, leading to fewer of them being able to afford to put the time and effort into writing that it takes to make a work great.

“Most writers are cobbling together various sources of income like teaching or speaking engagements, yet the median income for full-time authors still only reached $20,300.” — Carrie V. Mullins

She blames several key factors for creating this problem: Amazon, whose insistence on thin profit margins for publishers means there is less money to pay authors; Amazon’s resale market that allows resellers to offer cheap versions of the book without paying the authors who wrote them; Google Books and Open Library, who offer classroom products without compensation to the authors; and, lastly, generations of entitled consumers who have become so accustomed to free or close to free content that they aren’t willing to pay more for the books they buy.

She ends the piece with a quote from the Authors Guild.

“Reducing the monetary incentive for potential book authors even to enter the field means that there will be less for future generations to read: fewer voices, fewer stories, less representation of the kind of human expression than runs deeper and requires and rewards more brain power than the nearest bingeable series on Netflix or Amazon or GIF on your phone.” — Nicholas Weinstock, Authors Guild Council Member

Notably absent from the article is any sense of responsibility for the problem from the writers themselves. We create the content. If we are underpaid for it, it is only because we are willing to accept being underpaid. We have allowed the traditional publishing industry to buy our works for cheap and resell them at a profit margin of 7 to 1 because we weren’t willing to learn the ins and outs of salesmanship. We were artists, and that was enough.

We are paying the price for that decision. We sold ourselves too cheaply for far too long because we did not know how to get paid better. Paradoxically, the answer to the problem of declining author incomes is giving away more free content, but doing it in a smarter way.

For a very long time, authors have been targeting sales to publishers who in turn target individual readers. That’s why it takes so many sales before an author ever starts to see a profit. However, that isn’t how it has to work.

Bloggers have proven that selling ad revenue is the best way to monetize free content. Authors and publishers understandably have shied away from that technique because they know that banner ads and even small footer ads in the middle of their work is something that readers aren’t going to like, want, or appreciate.

However, there is a way to be subtler about it and still draw in the bigger advertising dollars that corporations have to spend: weave the promotion into the story. Consider it the literary equivalent of product placement.

We know that this works in commercials. Think of the series of Folgers commercials where a budding romance was developing on screen. The coffee became part of how the couple connected. The same thing is true about the Extra gum commercials. The story becomes the reason people watch and the gum sticks in the brain because they made it part of the way that the couple connected as the romance unfolds.

People love those commercials because of the story, and they remember the commercials (and the brand with it) long after they stop airing because of their connection to the storytelling. This is what authors can do to begin combatting the low pay they are getting from readers and publishers: work with brands that are appropriate for the story you’re trying to tell and weave those brands into the story.

Naturally, this will mean giving up some control over the direction of the story. The corporate brands that are included have a right to make sure they are comfortable with the way their brand is represented. However, the benefits are tremendous for both sides.

Commercials last 30 seconds. It takes seeing those commercials at least 7 times before it begins to really stick in the brain. Books last for several hours, sometimes days. If the product or service being presented is masterfully woven into the narrative, that means your readers are being immersed in the idea of what it will be like to use that product or service for hours or days, and for a fraction of the price that it would cost them to run mainstream advertisements for hours or days.

Blaming Amazon, resellers, venues like Google Books and Open Library, and consumers isn’t going to solve the declining author income problem. All it’s going to do is alienate readers and make writers feel powerless to change things. What is needed is for us to take control of our work, take responsibility for our income, and find innovative solutions that allow us to survive and even thrive in an ever-changing environment.