Dear Broke Reader: Your Sense of Entitlement is Killing Me

I found this article online from a FB repost and it is excellent. It paints a clear picture of pirating books. And yes, I’ve stumbled across many of my books and short stories for downloading and some sites are even selling the stolen copies. I get no kick-back for that by the way.

My publisher is small. But they are great peeps and love books. They sell my paperbacks for a few dollars above cost. We go 70/30 on that. 30 is mine. E-books are also 70/30, where 70 is mine.

Most of my sales come from Kobo, Amazon, iBooks and Nook in that order. I get between $1.05 and $2.04 net on a 2.99 book (before publisher and other cuts) that cost $500 to edit (yes it gets edited before going to my publisher, who edits the edits–I learnt the hard way of trusting my editing skills), cover design costs, advertising and general pimping costs. So, all up, that book costs me a little over a $1000. It costs you $2.99.

Read the article written by Sarah Madison:

Forget about the effort it takes to write a story. Let’s ignore the author’s contribution to this endeavor and deny them any right to be paid for their creativity. This ‘art should be free’ argument completely discounts the fact someone has to pay the editors, cover artists, formatters, distributors, book promotions teams, buy a dealer’s table and so on. I guess entitled readers expect that investment to come out of my own pocket with no hope of return. And if authors didn’t pay someone to for these services, we’d have to do them ourselves, taking time away from writing to do so. Not to mention a shabby editing job or poorly executed cover is one of the first things readers will complain about.

Read the full and beautifully written article: Here.