Hollywood Writers Get Paid Every Time Their Work Is Consumed. Why Shouldn’t Book Authors?

I had a small amount of unintentional virality on X/ Twitter over the last 24 hrs or so when I made the offhand comment that I truly think is 100% common sense that

If you refuse to use Amazon 'on principle' but openly brag about using used bookstores - which are *barely* better than piracy in that authors make exactly $0.00 from books sold there -...

... your "principles" fucking suck.

While a lot of responders to that have been muted and some blocked, one actually made a video response wherein this person put an idea in my head that eventually I figured out why I couldn’t let it go.

Specifically, this person mentioned Hollywood and how they get paid for, in their words, their performance.

Except that this isn’t, in the words of a Hollywood writer from 30 yrs ago in the hit movie Independence Day, entirely accurate.

Because the writer that wrote those exact words still gets paid - even if parts of a penny - every time you watch that movie. (Particularly since so few of us have a physical disc of it anymore.)

Or, to use even older examples, the writers of Happy Days, M.A.S.H., Star Trek: The Next Generation, Cheers, and so many other late 70s and early 80s hits are still getting paid today, nearly 50 years after they wrote those words, when someone who was born two generations after their work was complete watches someone perform those words.

Now, this was a win by the Writers Guild of America in contract negotiations dating back to the end of WWII - this is not a part of the US copyright system - and it only became “in perpetuity” with a 1977 version of those negotiations, per my brief research. (I’m sure if I’m wrong someone somewhere will comment to correct me. Such is the nature of the internet.) Thus, even as I am very ardently anti-union due to my family’s more direct exposure to them years later (when they caused the closure of the two factories my dad worked in during my childhood, the second one he went to work one day to find the doors permanently locked, which formed a lasting motivation for me as this happened right as I was finishing my coursework for my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree), even I have to admit that this was a significant win that has actually done a lot of good. Still doesn’t negate my own family’s direct experience with them, and still doesn’t change my overall attitude about their effects overall. Still, also not the ultimate direction of this article, so moving on.

So my ultimate question here is this:

If Hollywood writers get paid every time their words are consumed, why shouldn’t book authors?

Now, for now, I’m just asking the question and I do have a rough approximation of a suggestion for a system that I think could work to enforce this, but admittedly as smart as I am, this would absolutely need to be examined and thought through in much more detail with people both even smarter and with far more real-world data and experience in this industry than I will ever have. It may well be that this idea is completely unworkable even in theory, much less any practical system. Maybe Hollywood is simply too different from book publishing in some critical way that allows this to work for them but not for authors. All very possible, maybe even likely.

But my ultimate end goal here is to have a conversation about better ways to compensate authors when their work is consumed, and maybe by writing this article and talking about these ideas, I can stimulate exactly that conversation that does eventually find something that may be genuinely workable and thus actually make thins better for both authors and, ultimately, readers as well.

A Proposal For A System For ‘Residuals’ For Book Authors

Admittedly this is more of a sketch of a proposal than a full bore “do this!” level concept, but as a starting point, it makes sense at least to me.

First, all corporate sales - even via nonprofits (charities) - would remit a payment of some (low) percentage of the purchase price to the publishers quarterly or on some other regular schedule. I’m thinking this percentage would be in the 1-5% range, no matter the purchase price. (Thus, for a $0.50 book at a Goodwill shop, for example, Goodwill would send barely a penny back to the publisher, while a $10 paperback at Barnes and Noble would result in $0.50 or less back to the publisher.)

The only exception would be the same one legal in many States for guns - actual direct person to person sales would have no residual payment attached. Thus, if I sold you my autographed copy of Hunger by Jeremy Robinson - featuring the first appearance of one Dr. Jeff Sexton, who proceeds to cause the Apocalypse via his hubris - directly, I wouldn’t have to pay Robinson. If I sold that same copy to Books A Million, they would pay Robinson when they sold that copy to you.

Publishers would then take those quarterly payments and pay out to authors according to their existing contracts, perhaps updated to reflect this new residual system.

Ultimately, this wouldn’t make authors rich necessarily - but it could well make particularly popular authors quite comfortable for many years with either one mega hit (such as a The Martian or Dungeon Crawler Carl or Twilight) or with continued yet more modest success (ala say a John Grisham, whose truly massive works were many years ago now). For most, it would likely result in maybe a cup of coffee every other year or some such. That apparently happens even in Hollywood, given what I’ve seen on socials when some share their residual check amounts. But this would still be more than they are currently earning for those reads in the current environment, and would thus be at least a modicum of an improvement.

If it can even work at all. Again, I fully acknowledge that this may be one of those ideas of mine that simply cannot work in any way.

My hope is that someone will be spurred to thinking along these lines just as I was from Calkins-Treworgy’s original comment, and maybe perhaps someone can come up with something that can truly solve this issue in a way that more fairly compensates authors for their work than the existing arrangements.

So once again, I leave it to you. Am I truly full of shit? Is there maybe a kernel of an idea here that may someday bear some degree of fruit? Do you have a better idea to solve this particular problem? Let me know!