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.