[fighterpilot]

Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention.

What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup.

Contrast this to the prospect of running a successful restaurant that is fundamentally limited by geography. No matter how well it serves region A, region B, C, D, etc is still up for grabs. A franchise can try to duplicate its success, but it's much more costly than a successful author making endless free digital copies of their work.

[varispeed]

The thing is that authors are too weak. They get maybe 10% of what is being made off of their work, probably much less. The publishing companies have strong leverage and can essentially extort money from the authors - they can say either you publish with us, or just put it back to your drawer and forget. It is now a bit easier to self publish, but still you are going to get pittance. In terms of music, as when artists realised to can just sidestep labels and publish themselves, the shops started using their advantage to take almost the whole pie - things like Spotify pay next to nothing for streams. It's just that artists are somehow not able to get together and force fair terms on whatever it is in the upstream, because they don't have money and any power. All they can do is to pull out their art, but there is 10x artists believing they can make it despite being scammed and they sign up.

[ghaff]

>It's just that artists are somehow not able to get together and force fair terms on whatever it is in the upstream

That's nonsense with respect to books. If you self-publish on the most popular distribution channel (Amazon), you keep quite a large percentage of your revenue. The issue isn't the middleman, it's that there's a huge number of other books out there and unless you already have an audience or put the work into creating one somehow, not many people are going to find your work and buy it. If lots of people actually do buy it, you get a pretty good cut. But it's hard to get to that point.

[varispeed]

Isn't that the people who can make a book popular are dealing with major publishers only? Therefore nobody is interested in the unknown writer's pie, as even 90% of 0 is still 0.

[ghaff]

Most people who publish through major publishers aren't making much either and publishers these days don't do a lot of promotion for authors who aren't already well-known.

They do provide sales and distribution and if you're writing mostly for reputational reasons, those may be good reasons to do with a "name" publisher.

But, if you're focused on trying to make money and are prepared to make a speculative investment in making it, it's not at all clear to me that you shouldn't self-publish and pay for promotion, editorial services, etc. to try to make it happen.

Authors have a lot better alternatives than mobile app developers who have basically no choice but to pay the app store tax and musicians who are significantly limiting their reach if they opt out of streaming.

[tonyedgecombe]

Authors have the same problem as musicians.

And app developers.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

Sorry, but this applies only to non-fiction.

You can always make a usable app or non-fiction book, so you have one extra dimension of objectively measured value of your product. The first one, common to software and art, is the quality of the implementation.

[tonyedgecombe]

Applications just like music have a near zero marginal cost. This is why the app stores are littered with $1 apps.