The president of the Authors Guild since 2014, Roxana Robinson is the author of nine books, and her latest, Sparta, was shortlisted last year in Ireland for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The successor to Scott Turow, Robinson, in concert with Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger, says the industry must address what digital tradition and commercial realities are doing to author income.
In a keynote address on June 13 at the Rights and Content in the Digital Age conference in New York, she said, “New technology has made it a lot easier and cheaper for the reader to find the book, but it has drained the financial support for the writer to zero.”
In recapping the Authors Guild’s position on Google Books’ scanning of copyrighted texts (over which the Guild has lost its eleven-year court battle), Robinson told the assembly of publishing-house rights officials:
“Google, in its defense against our suit, claimed that compensating the authors would have been prohibitively expensive for them. Their solution was to pay them nothing. According to our survey, about half of our respondent writers would be living right around the poverty line if they depended solely on their writing incomes. Google, by contrast, made $76 billion dollars in revenues last year. So we need to think about whether or not this arrangement is fair or sustainable.”
Robinson said that, while digital enables new reach and media for authors, it also kills income for them, pressuring pricing with the internet-age concept of free content.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
