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出书越来越不赚钱了，西蒙·库珀说。二手书和电子书的兴起更加剧了这个现实，今天英国作家的年中位收入只有1.1万镑。“如果电子书也可以买二手的，那我就完了。”在这样残酷的现实面前，作家该怎么办？未来还有人写书吗？
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
royalt ['rɒɪəltɪ] 版权，专利权
39p 39便士，即0.39英镑
Brussels这里指欧盟
mantr ['mæntrə] 咒语
skit [skɪt] 讽刺文
ancillary [æn'sɪlərɪ] 辅助的，附属的
阅读马上开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用的时间，对照下方的参考值就可以评估出您的英文阅读水平。
I've just had the latest royalty statement for my first book, published 20 years ago. This January through June, I sold 654 copies of the British edition. My earnings: only £257.20, or 39p a book.
Honestly, the problem isn't just me. Only fools ever wrote books to get rich but today very few authors can even live off it. Our agents and publishers congregating at next week's Frankfurt Book Fair will squabble over a shrinking pie. Author economics keep deteriorating. That is changing the kind of books that get written.
Close reading of my royalty slip reveals the first big problem: discounts. On almost every copy I sold, the publisher gave the bookseller – typically either Amazon or Waterstones(a British book store) – a discount of more than half the cover price. That's normal nowadays, and much higher than before, explains my agent, Gordon Wise. Even if the customer paid the cover price of £8.99, I get just 39p.
But few customers still pay £8.99. On Amazon my book costs £6.29 new or only 1p second-hand. Finding used books has never been easier, and pays authors nothing. Or you could buy an ebook of mine on sale for 99p. In the latest discounting battle, Amazon is reportedly pressuring French publisher Hachette to cut prices for its ebooks. And if Brussels lets customers resell their ebooks, I'll get nothing at all.
Many readers today philosophically oppose paying for words. I've found pdfs of my books free online. “Information wants to be free,” says a modern mantra. Well, my information doesn't.
Anyway, nowadays you can enjoy yourself with unprecedented ease without reading my book. Instead, you could watch almost any TV show on earth, or mess about online, or read one of the one million-plus other books published in English this year. No other struggling industry has this many product launches, notes a publisher. Little wonder that publishers concentrate their remaining cash on a few bestselling authors.
The consequence: the median income of British professional writers (ie people whose main job is writing) is now £11,000, down from £15,540 in 2005, according to the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. That's even though British writers earn more per capita from translations than their peers anywhere else. The low incomes make total sense: if you're getting 39p per copy, then even moving 20,000 copies a year will earn you just £7,800.
Worse, authors must now work as unpaid self-promoters forever tweeting and blogging about their books. The New Yorker magazine recently ran a skit about an author offering readers her cellphone number, home address, and adding: “In fact, if you drop by and I'm not home? SLEEP WITH MY HUSBAND. Seriously, go ahead.” For now, this remains a parody.
Of course, few writers ever lived from books alone. Most worked as academics, journalists or advertising copywriters. Often, journalistic or academic work effectively funded research for non-fiction books. Not any more: all those professions have shrunk and taken big pay cuts. That must reduce the number of well-researched books.
One ancillary profession has grown: speaking. If you write a business book, you might get £5,000 for giving a 40-minute talk about it – more, probably, than you'll earn from book sales. But few novelists get paid to talk.
Nonetheless, half the planet still wants to be a paperback writer. People are right to write. They just need to be realistic about it. A friend writing his first book said to me, “I hope it makes a splash.” Cruelly, I told him: “It won't.” I said most books are like stones thrown into the ocean: they sink soundlessly at once. Many get zero reviews.
But, I said, if a few peers like your book, your professional status will rise. Then one day your great-grandchild will find the thing on the bookshelf, read a few pages, and say, “That's the man my great-grandfather was.” You write to leave a trace. As the critic Cyril Connolly warned, few books live 10 years – less than a dog or car – but small contributions to the culture are worthwhile too. My friend's book got nice reviews, and sold some copies. You don't need to be Tolstoy.
Another reward: your book is your entry ticket into the world of authors. Good authors are curious, original, articulate and sometimes even funny people. I've never found better company.
So people keep writing. But many now do it as self-expression: a book as a Facebook page writ long, memoirs of unremarkable lives. Nearly 400,000 books were self-published in the US in 2012, reports Bowker, the market research group. These writers aren't doing it to make a living. Hardly anyone is any more.
To survive in this former profession, you probably need a rich spouse or rich parents. A publishing friend says he now struggles to find writers “from a non-upper-middle-class background”. There aren't many new Philip Roths(a Pulitzer-winning writer) recreating lower-middle-class Americans or new Dickenses giving us poor London. Surprise, surprise: the 1 per cent is taking over.
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A.When the publisher offers the bookseller an unusual discount.
B.When a reader buys the book online instead of in a physical store.
C.When a paper copy is sold by a bookstore.
D.When a second-hand copy is sold.
答案 (1)
A.They work as academics, journalists or ad writers.
B.They offer their home addresses to readers to promote books.
C.They turn to writing fiction books.
D.They become speakers.
答案 (2)
A.No, as the market is getting smaller and polarizing, only the few writers can survive.
B.Yes, people like publishing books even if they won't get paid.
答案 (3)
(1) 答案：C.When a paper copy is sold by a bookstore.解释：每卖出一本8.99英镑的书，作者会拿到0.39镑的收入。文中没有提出版商给书店的折扣大小会影响作者的收入，二手书则不会给他带来收入（盗版的pdf更是如此）。这本书的电子版卖0.99镑，显然作者拿不到0.39镑。
(2) 答案：A.They work as academics, journalists or ad writers.解释：作者说道，现在极少有人只靠写作出书挣钱了，Most worked as academics, journalists or advertising copywriters. 作者用抓眼球的方式吸引读者注意，是《纽约客》中虚构的一个讽刺故事。
(3) 答案：B.Yes, people like publishing books even if they won't get paid.解释：线索在倒数第二段，作者说光是美国的自费出书量就有每年40万本，这么多人出书不是为了赚钱--Hardly anyone is any more.——也就是虽然写书不赚钱，但还是会有大量的出版的。