Saturday, June 20, 2009
The Fiction Industry
Publishers bank on creating a lucrative industry around each author they publish. Stephen King, for example, is an industry in himself that supports a bevy of agents, lawyers, secretaries, editors, copy editors, sub-rights specialists, screen writers, film producers, film diectors, and television series creators with his stories, novels, comic books, movies, made-for-tv movies, and tv series. They all depend on Stephen King's works selling and continuing to sell. All of Steve's novels and short stories, including his first novel (Carrie), remain in print after 30 years, and the accumulated monthly income from all of those works adds up to a pretty penny. Everyone who is part of the Stephen King Industry takes a cut of the pie, and Steve only gets to keep a fraction of the total revenue. Hopefully, there's a little of the frosting left by the time everyone else--including the IRS--slices it up into pieces. I've known authors who have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual revenue, but they don't have enough left to pay the rent and health insurance after the agents, lawyers, feds, and state revenuers take their skim.
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I recently listened to an audiobook of Stephen King's short stories, some of which he wrote while a teacher and while trying to make it as a big-time fiction author. In the commentary with the audio book he described the situation he was in in the early 1970s I believe it was. It was interesting to learn about how he got his start. I knew from this commentary that his start was rough, but I did realize that he probably continues to struggle to maintain his lifestyle despite being so popular.
ReplyDeleteFiction writers, like song writers and movie and tv scriptwriters, support a humongous industry where the corporate entities (conglomerates and their lawyers and acccountants) and the distributors take the biggest pieces of the pie. Writers are at the bottom of the food chain, and writers and their works can get swollowed up and spit out if they don't watch out for their rights.
ReplyDeleteThis same corporate model is at play in the health care industry where medical centers and insurance companies and their lawyers and accountants chew up and spit out doctors every day. Quality in writing and in healthcare has diminished as corporate industrial greed emphasizes bottom line increases.
ReplyDeleteIt goes to show you that every career choice has its downfalls. Not to say that fiction writers and doctors should not fight for their rights, but there are bottom feeders all over the place.
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