The Cost of Writing
Why are books so expensive? Fifteen to thirty dollars for a fiction hardback, ten to twenty-five for a trade paperback, and a mass market paperback can run you over ten dollars. Even e-books can cost you five to ten dollars, or even more depending on how popular the author is, or how ambitious the author/publisher is. Who has that kind of money to spend? Isn’t it just a collection of words? Why not just dig up a torrent and read it for free? What does that really hurt?
Of course, I’m an author, and inherently biased, but there are a good many reasons for the cost of books. Media may not seem to be particularly valuable in this day and age, when there is a glut on books, music, movies, and games. Deciding how to allocate money can be very difficult, unless one has a trust fund and can simply buy whatever one chooses. Most of us, however, have a finite amount of disposable money, and have to juggle finances. It can be tricky to decide among keeping our Netflix subscription; buying the latest superhero movie on BlueRay; downloading albums by our favorite musician; keeping our Internet up and connected; and of course, buying Fallout 4 or other games of our choice. It can be very tempting to go for the easy option in books when they’re just a bunch of paper and ink, or just pixels. How can that cost so much?
In our culture, the concept that time equals money is a basis of our economic system. No one would dream of suggesting that someone shouldn’t get paid when they go to work as a cashier at their local grocery store. No one would suggest that a receptionist, or a construction worker donate their time for the fun of it. So why are writers different?
The answer is that books seldom get paid what they're worth. There's no way to compensate an author for the years they take learning their craft. I have been actively working on mine since age twelve, and at the risk of divulging my age, that’s forty years. I have taken classes in writing, participated in at least five workshops, begged people to look at my manuscripts, and put up with people telling me that everything I have learned was wrong, while I was given a pat on the head and unwanted advice on how to do it “right”. I have sent stories out to magazines that send them back with crushing form letters (and more recently, more polite and sometimes personal rejections as well as a few acceptances). I have worked through writer’s block and clinical depression, and forced myself to write when all I really wanted to do was sit there and stare at the walls. And for none of this did I receive any compensation.
And then there’s the time involved in actually writing. A single novel takes months to years to complete, depending on the author’s writing style, or whether they have a day job that gives them enough flexibility to put good writing time in regularly. If an author got paid minimum wage for just the writing time, they'd top over the amount charged for a book before they finished Chapter One of a novel. Even a short story can take one to several hours to write.
But isn’t part of the compensation the fun authors have in writing? Well, not necessarily. There are times when I have a passionate fire and love for what I’m writing. Then there are times when I would rather weed thistles barehanded than deal with trying to get my plot from point C to point E. Writing is work. Like any other job one loves, there are times when the daily grind of forming the right words gets overwhelming or boring, or just plain hard. More importantly, the fact that an author loves their job should not mean that they do not get compensated for doing it. Your doctor doesn’t work for free, even though they may love medicine. Your florist may have a passion for flower arranging, but that doesn’t mean they should do it for free. Even a circus clown gets compensated for the work they do, either hourly, or through salary.
And then there is the physical cost of books. If you want to buy a paper book, it costs a certain amount, and even with a print-on-demand, you’re paying for a service, not just a finished product. E-books require people to format them, so that it’s possible to search in them, go to particular chapters, etc. Most of these people aren’t receiving what their work is worth, either.
Given all of that, the amount authors get for our books isn't much, especially as self-published or small press authors. Even considering that the cost of writing is spread out among a number of readers, there's very seldom anything near compensation for the amount of effort that goes into writing. Becoming a New York Times Bestselling Author is like winning the Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes – we’d all like to, but the odds are so far against one, it’s probably easier to get bitten by a shark. Ideally, it's only the best who get there, but in actuality, it means months to years of submitting to major publishers, and even then it partially depends on the particular taste of the first person looking at your manuscript.
What I am not saying is that we writers are so awesome that you should be happy to spend all your hard-earned money gracing our works. I’m a reader as well as a writer, and I have to decide where to put my own money. Plenty of times I have very little money for books. But there are a lot of ways to cut costs without resorting to piracy. Libraries are great places, and even have e-book access nowadays. Many books are given away free in e-book form, or have special deals where they cost very little. BookBub is great, and Goodreads giveaways are wonderful things. Project Gutenberg has a large catalog of free books. And there are always used book sources, which don’t pay the author for their work directly, but help support the book selling industry, and will help an author if you decide you then have to read every other word they wrote, and pre-order their next book.
So consider when buying a book – do you want to work for free? And if the answer is no, please extend authors the same courtesy.