….you might not actually get paid.

Words: 1798
Time to read: 10 minutes

There seems to be an idea floating around the author community that you should get paid every time someone reads your book. This is especially true when we talk about pirating. The main concern is that we aren’t getting paid for those reads. I get it, especially since two years ago I pivoted to first person present and focused on billionaires in an attempt to find a readership that will read all the books I’ll ever write.

But when it comes to books, we’re always saying books are meant to be shared. These days, we mean more word of mouth so that other people will take those recommendations and buy their own copies. Sharing books, physical or passing around a Kindle, has turned into something of a no-no because as an author, we want our cut, no matter how small that ends up being.

Nothing a book loves more than to be collected.

Eloise Bridgerton, Bridgerton, Season 3

I don’t know if the idea of not sharing is more popular now because pirating is more prevalent, authors complaining that the second their books are available online they end up on a pirate site, or because we’re fighting against all the legitimately free books out there. A reader can sign up for newsletter promos like Freebooksy, Red Feather Romance (that does feature free books sometimes) Ereader News Today, Robin Reads, and other newsletter promos that promote free books. If a reader opened those newsletters every day and took advantage of all their offerings, there’s a good chance that person wouldn’t have to buy a book to read ever again. And then there are subscriptions to programs like Kindle Unlimited and Kobo Plus, where readers aren’t paid as much as a sale (at least, that’s the way it is if an author participates in Kindle Select), and yeah, authors love to put Amazon down for it. And we can’t forget the huge free book blasts that are becoming more and more popular. (You can read about some of them here: https://www.bookbub.com/blog/stuff-your-kindle-day.) I joined one last year and there were over two thousand free books available for download. If a reader downloaded every book, even if they are voracious readers, how long do you think it would take them to read every single one? A year? Longer? And those blasts can happen two or three times a year, depending on the genre you like to read.

Free books are out there. And yours, whether you like it or not, might be one of them.

I’ll be fifty years old this year, and I remember when there weren’t Kindles, there wasn’t KU. There wasn’t online reading at all. Okay, you got me. There wasn’t internet, haha. If you wanted a book you needed to go to the library, pick up a paperback at a K-Mart or PAMIDA, if you remember those from so long ago. This was back when bookstores actually carried books and not toys and games and music, and if you wanted to read a series, you were very lucky if you could find them all in one place. There were other ways to get books, other ways that didn’t always ensure an author would see their royalties–thrift stores selling secondhand books, rummage sales. I have totes and totes of Harlequin Desires and Temptations because there’s not a thrift store I can’t go into without loading up.

Is it fair to an author?

At some point, I think it’s better if you let go of the idea you’re going to get paid for every read. The way books were created and designed was to be shared, and it’s been that way with other printed media like newspapers and magazines for decades. Publications try to curtail this loss of income by using online paywalls for their digital editions, but more often than not, if you hit a paywall, you click out, or you use an internet extension to bypass it if you can. To some extent, we think information should be free, but just like an author wants to be paid for their work, so does a journalist or, in some cases, a blogger or newsletter creator. Indie authors who go the nonfiction way to help other authors find a balance between free and paid information. Dave Chesson gives indie authors tons of free resources, everything from QR code and barcode generators to free Amazon ads classes. But, he also charges for things like Publisher Rocket and his formatting software, Atticus. There are other indie authors who give out free marketing advice or answer questions by giving up time to be interviewed or joining in podcasts but offer things authors can buy (I’m thinking of Zoe York who is very free with information on her YouTube channel who has written nonfiction books about writing a series and fiction writer Alessandra Torre who hosts an authors’ convention called InkerCon and runs a Facebook group of the same name).

Some authors do give away books, a reader magnet like I do, or a free first in series if they’re not exclusive with Amazon. You’d have to ask them why they’re okay with giving away books. Some of them have a large readership and just consider these books a loss leader because they know the return on investment is worth it. Some are very guarded with their books and rarely give anything away for free, thinking they deserve every penny for every second spent writing. In my opinion, this kind of attitude comes off as miserly. There was even one person in Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing group on Facebook (that I am no longer a part of) who said he wouldn’t be offering a paperback version of his book because he didn’t want people to share it. With that kind of attitude, I wonder if he found any readers at all.

This isn’t a post about giving away books. I’ve written about that before (https://vaniamargene.com/2022/11/28/author-update-thoughts-on-getting-blocked-and-giveaways-are-they-worth-it/). It’s really a personal and business choice and discussion around it can get very heated at times. What I’m really getting at here is that after someone purchases your book, what happens to it afterward can be out of your hands. They can give it to a friend, put it in a LFL (little free library), put it in a donation box for charity. When my son put together my bookshelves, I went through all my books that aren’t in storage. I gave my local library three big boxes of books I knew deep in my heart I would never read or didn’t want to keep (and yes, some of them were indie). I didn’t feel like I was cheating the authors out of royalty money. Some of the books I did buy from places where the authors would get their cut like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the grocery store, and Walmart. Some I didn’t, like secondhand bookstores and thrift shops. I’m getting older and have trouble reading smaller print, and while I still love to hold a book, I prefer to read on my Kindle, and between the Freebooksy newsletter I subscribe to and my Kindle Unlimited subscription, I have plenty to read for many, many months.

There will always be someone selling the books they’ve purchased–third party sellers on Amazon and people trying to get rid of their copies on eBay. Some of my books are on eBay going for a helluva a lot more than if they would just buy from Amazon, and maybe sometimes those sellers make money but probably most of the time they don’t.

When it comes right down to it, authors make very little off their books, and that could be why authors are so guarded. I particularly see this attitude from newer authors who only have one book available and who’ve found their book on the pirating sites. They realized that when you print a 500 page book and have to price it at 25 dollars readers are paying Amazon for paper and those authors are lucky to make fifty cents (that’s actually an exaggeration, and if you you want to play with a print calculator, you can find it here https://www.draft2digital.com/podcalc). They don’t want to give books away for free, don’t see a value in it because they do only have the one book. I see authors raising their prices to try to make any kind of money at all, and that’s a business decision. Personally, I’d rather keep my prices reasonable, even on the low side. I’d rather have two readers for the price of one, but not everyone thinks like that. I’d rather have a reader in KU than lose out on page reads because I hate Amazon and I’m wide. We all have to make the choices that are best for us, but while owning a business can be stressful, there are things you can choose not to stress over and one of those things are readers reading your books for free. It will happen.

I don’t mind if people share my reader magnet after downloading it from Bookfunnel. I don’t care if someone buys one of my paperbacks and ten people read it after her. I’ve read free books, and it would be hypocritical not to expect it to happen to me because I’ve done it all my life. The idea that people shouldn’t be able to read a book for free needs to die down. There will always be free books everywhere, and if you believe you should get paid for every page, I’m sorry to say that you may be in for a hard time business-wise. There is value in ARCs, reader magnets, and loss leaders. There might even be value to your books being read on pirate sites. Who knows where you’ll pick up a fan.

Laura Zats and Erik Hane, the hosts of Print Run, recorded an interested podcast about the topic of secondhand books, more specifically, the used bookstore Half Price Books in Apple Valley, Minnesota. They’re agents who live in the Twin Cities area, so they talk about the trad side of things, but their conversation was interesting nonetheless, and you can listen to it here: (https://soundcloud.com/printrunpodcast/episode-166)

That’s all I have for this week. I’ll have an author update for you soon, and hopefully that will have some good news. I also would like to talk more about ads and I’m still mulling over what I want to talk about based off a comment about AI and algorithms I saw on Threads not long ago.

I hope you’re having a great summer. It’s two-thirds gone, and if you wanted to get anything done before fall hits, you might want to get on that. Summer will be gone before you know it!

Take care and thanks for reading!