Comment by fragmede 2 days ago
JK Rowling never has to work again in her life because she wrote a couple of books that were exceedingly popular. Because she doesn't have to work, she's not been forced to come up with new stuff. How is that not stifling?
I am not working 40 hours a week so although equality seems fair I don't really like your idea.
She comes up with new stuff all the time. She's had a separate career as a writer of thrillers, and is still working in the PotterVerse.
She's an awful person for other reasons, but that's beside the point here.
Reality is most trad-pub authors have full-time jobs anyway to pay the bills. If you're not one of a handful of publishing superstars, trad-pub pays incredibly badly as a result of corporate consolidation and monopoly dominance.
To be clear - there are far more people living parasitically off investments, producing nothing at all and extracting value from everyone else, than there are talented creators living the high life.
She made enough money selling books by the 5th book that she'd never need to do anything again and live better than 99% of people on the planet.
What do you want?
She's not allowed to make money selling books?
What I want is irrelevant. She's now able to rest on her laurels thanks to copyright. She's earned it. I very much enjoyed the books! Under our current culture and level of technology, that's the dream.
But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that? we have the technology to feed all the people, it's just a distribution and organization problem. "just". Money, and capitalism is how we've organized things and it's worked great for a lot of people but it's also left a lot of people behind.
We keep making adjustments to the system but we don't have to be trapped in the system. we can take a step back and look at things and say, hang on a minute, if the goal in life is to feed and clothe everybody, we've either succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, or utterly failed.
> But why shouldn't everyone get to live like that?
Because we don't have that much money?
The same analogy could be applied to business though. Some Colonel invented a fried chicken recipe and started a chain of restaurants, now he doesn't need to work anymore.
In my opinion, if someone creates something that has value for a lot of people, they should get rewarded for it.
...it's worth noting that J.K. Rowling is still coming up with new stuff. I quite like her ongoing Comoran Strike detective series. They're published under a pen name, but it's Rowling.
You pick one example and ignore thousands of writers who didn't even return costs after publishing a book. Also, as another example, a great Russian 19th century poet and writer Alexander Pushkin left lot of debt after his death. He supported publishing other writers but it turned out to be a commercial failure. Maybe this fact will make you less unhappy about supposedly unclouded lazy writer's career.