Not my union, not my monkeys, BUT

The Authors Guild, an American union, has published a study pointing to libraries as a major contributor to the decline in income for writers, and everyone's mad about it because libraries are great.

They point to digital lending as a major driver of this as via Libby, which honestly – and I realise I'm just some idiot – feels like a wild swing in justifying why libraries are just now starting to impact authors' earnings when they've been around for fucking ages.

(There are a few controversies going on with the Authors Guild at the moment, including the fact that they've partnered with a generative AI firm, which is honestly scab behaviour, but this is not my union, I don't know the details.)

Now I have many opinions on why authors are earning less these days and I'm obviously about to list them for your reading pleasure, but just to be clear, libraries rule and authors do earn royalties from libraries. That is one of the reasons we love libraries and hate piracy – most of us want books to be freely available to anyone who wants to read them, and libraries make that possible while still ensuring our work is recognised and rewarded.

Libraries pay for every copy of a book they have, regardless of its format. That's why you might have to wait for an ebook or a digital audiobook of something popular, even though digital copies are technically infinite.

These days a lot of countries also have Public Lending Rights schemes, although the US does not have a national one yet. The Authors Guild should get on that. (In the UK we can thank Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy for ours). PLR is a pool of money that gets divided up every year between authors based on how often their books are taken out of the library.

Regardless, there are other, much more important factors driving author incomes steadily down the drain.

An under-discussed one is the fact that so many people live in smaller places with more people. Successive economic shocks, rising costs, stagnating wages – people live at home for longer now, people live with a pack of flatmates for longer. Living alone or with a partner probably means living in a small one bedroom, or studio flat. The lives we are asked to live in this iteration of capitalism are not conducive to owning a lot of books, and I say this as someone who owns a lot of books.

Which is has a multiplying effect on another cause, which is that books have been devalued by the tech industry. Amazon grew to prominence by selling books at a loss. They did this to drive their competition out of business. They did this despite already having an advantage – operating out of warehouses means they can always buy books in bulk for a discount, where brick and mortar stores don't have space to store surplus copies.

Amazon sold books at a loss for a long time and a lot of people got used to that. This was compounded by the arrival of the Kindle (I love my Kindle). They popularised the Kindle by selling ebooks for pennies and it fucked with all of us – I'm still reluctant to buy an ebook if it's not a daily deal and I hate that about myself.

The thing is, undercharging customers for something always comes back to hurt someone. I used to work for an office supplies company and we would get endless complaints about printer cartridges costing more than the printer itself cost. That pricing was intentional – the printer is sold at a ludicrous loss because once you've bought a printer you're locked into buying that brand's proprietary consumables. But you don't appreciate the value of the tool you've bought and you resent the company for appearing to jack up the prices on the cartridges.

Amazon have done this to the entire publishing industry.

The tech industry writ large has done this to the entire entertainment industry, actually. And to the transport and postal industries.

After years of subsidised products and services, when people are asked to pay the real cost they're going to be resentful about it.

Part of this is because people perceive the money they spend as solely going to our corporate overlords and forget that actually a lot of it is going to ordinary people. You buy a book at Waterstones and, sure, a slice goes to the weird hedge fund that owns it right now, but there are also the booksellers who work there. Then the money Waterstones paid the publisher – part of that goes to the staff who work there. (The staff at bookshops and publishing houses are largely wildly underpaid too, by the way.) Then a chunk goes to the author, and a chunk of that goes to their agent and that contributes to the salaries of all the people who work at the agency.

I do think that to make the world in any way ok again we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to paying for things again. Paying what things are worth. That's going to be a long and arduous journey and other things are going to need fixing to make that possible. Like the death of all billionaires.

Finally in it's capitalism, the publishing industry as it operates today has a limited capacity for fostering long term careers. I don't think this is a publishing problem so much as an everything problem, to be honest. It feels like the current conventional wisdom among business boys is very focussed on short term gain. Investments need to pay off, and they need to pay off quickly, and we need to be sure they're going to pay off.

That means businesses – whole industries – are failing to properly protect their own futures. You see this with the eagerness to replace entry level employees with AI systems. It's like they've all forgotten that entry level employees are just the first step towards experienced, skilled employees who are much harder to replace.

They will suffer for those choices down the line, but they're too used to only looking one quarter ahead to care.

In publishing that means that fewer authors are given the kinds of deals that let you grow slowly over the years, with the support of your publisher. You're much more likely to get a one book deal, and if that book doesn't sell well right out of the gate you'll struggle to get another one.

This is further complicated by the fact that the primary marketing strategy is social media, which has never been that effective and is now all the more impossible as each platform gets more and more hostile to its users.

None of this really relates very well to how buying and reading books actually works.

Books are slow. They're supposed to be slow. A person wanders into a bookshop and picks something off the shelf. They take it home and don't get round to it for a few weeks or months or years. Then maybe they love it, they tell people to read it. They look up that author and buy their other books.

In an ideal world publishing houses would operate on the assumption that it'll take them years to make back what they invest in an author. They'd accept the need to keep that author fed and clothed while they write a book ever year, or every two years, or whatever, and that one day, when they're on book six or seven, they might have a moment. A bit of a splash, enough to boost sales ccross their history, maybe enough to keep sales coming in for years down the line.

In an ideal world, they'd do that for a bunch of authors all the time because every so often one of them – and it's impossible to predict which one – will have a genuine wild hit and that success is enough to make the whole enterprise worth it.

But the current model of capitalism doesn't allow for that. The current model has shareholders and boards whose needs matter more than the needs of authors. That means that the needs of the shareholders and boards matter more than the needs of the industry itself, but they like to pretend otherwise.

You can't come for libraries. They are a crucial public utility that does enormous amounts of good for the community, and for authors, and they have done anything to bring the industry to the point it's at today.

It's not the libraries. It's the billionaires. It's always the billionaires.