I suppose book authors could use the same model as musical performers, in that the record company takes the lion's share from the recordings, and the band has to sell live performance tickets and tour merchandise.
You write the book to build the fan-base, and draw your living expenses from signings, convention panels, t-shirts, collector's edition packages, etc. It sounds like a perfectly awful model for promoting the arts, of course.
Perhaps a gallery model? Write just one copy of a book, sell it for thousands of dollars, and let the one that buys it decide whether to unleash it on the world or not. It'd be like that Wu Tang Clan record that Shkreli bought.
Acquire a patron? Allow a rich fan to pay all your living expenses, and in return you put their name in the acknowledgements. Or crowdfund it, and expand the acknowledgements to more pages than the story.
There are a lot of possible models. The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018. There are barely even enough people that value skilled labor enough to pay for it. If art were valued more highly, artists wouldn't even need to figure out how to be paid, because middlemen would be scrambling over each other to skim off some of the cash flowing from audience to artist.
> The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018.
In other words, the problem is that "art" is vastly overproduced. Which is only natural when it's being subsidized so heavily via copyright: everyone wants their chance at that rare bestseller which will see them set for life.
Honestly, we need to question not only whether copyright is a reasonable way to promote the production of art, but also whether there is even a need for such promotion in the first place. There is already more artwork in existence than any one person could properly appreciate in their lifetime, and no technical reason why it can't be perfectly preserved and made available to everyone at minimal cost.
If copyright at life+70 years oversupplies the art market, crashing the equilibrium price to nearly zero....
Is the solution too obvious? Cut the term of copyright protection by 5 years every year, then start halving the remaining term after hitting five, until the shovelware "art" becomes trivially manageable. If it still comes in heaping, steaming piles all the way down to one week, then clearly copyright was unnecessary.
You write the book to build the fan-base, and draw your living expenses from signings, convention panels, t-shirts, collector's edition packages, etc. It sounds like a perfectly awful model for promoting the arts, of course.
Perhaps a gallery model? Write just one copy of a book, sell it for thousands of dollars, and let the one that buys it decide whether to unleash it on the world or not. It'd be like that Wu Tang Clan record that Shkreli bought.
Acquire a patron? Allow a rich fan to pay all your living expenses, and in return you put their name in the acknowledgements. Or crowdfund it, and expand the acknowledgements to more pages than the story.
There are a lot of possible models. The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018. There are barely even enough people that value skilled labor enough to pay for it. If art were valued more highly, artists wouldn't even need to figure out how to be paid, because middlemen would be scrambling over each other to skim off some of the cash flowing from audience to artist.