When someone writes a book and the publisher says, "We'll publish this for you," money comes back to the writer as well as the publisher.

So the more copies of a book that are being distributed, the higher the pay rate and the popularity of a book.

Maybe we could have something that recongnizes someone for being a top selling writer in Lusternia? An honors line for a given IC year? And gold from the cost it takes to copy a book or to withdraw a book (though I'm not aware of any costs it may take to check or withdraw a book a book from the libraries).

Ideas, suggestions, concerns?

Rewarding based on the number of copies (or even frequency of checkout) would easily be abusable though... you could donate 10 copies of your own book to a library, or continually check it in/out just to boost its popularity.

An honors line like "She is the author of 3 prestige books" when there actually -are- prestige books would be nifty. Or just "He is a prestigious author." Not sure how that could be adapted for organizational authors though.

I think it would be cool if the author of a book got 5% of the checkout fee.

so if books cost 100 gold to check out, eachtime a person checks out the book the author gets 5 gold and the library gets 95.

Not quite sure how thats "abuseable" since if I checked out a book lots and lots of times I wouldn't be making any money.

Well, I think popularity would be based on culture scores, etc. There are in-game rewards if the book is also considered a bardic work.

Sales isn't as good a measure of popularity. I wonder if the system can track the number of people who read a book and how often. Maybe one can get honours from that or that could be used.

A percentage fee might be nice--although it's hard to do that with the current system, and I can't see how that can work. Maybe as a writer's tax on each book?

Hope you're getting use of the book Tully bound for you. As well as the book Gywnevere must have that I bound for the Priestesses of the Naos (it was meant for you, but for some reason she was in charge of it last weekend). I like to have Tully be a philanthropist and give away books. Gave away books to Invictus Lyceum(sp?), Elcyrion's Order, Isune's Order, Ialie's Rainbow Dreams, and a few other people. Plus scrolls for several mags (a few who are shrubs right now), and three gods.

Books, however, are expensive, and I can't afford to keep doing that.

Yeah, I misread the original post. I was thinking the suggestion was something like a popularity "score" for each book based on how often it is checked out or how many copies exist; the author then gets some reward based on that score. Depending what that reward was (honors line or rankings for instance) some people would probably just spend a lot of gold to boost their book's score.

Straight royalties from checkout fees or added copies though, I got no problem with.

That's what I meant when I said, "An honors line IC for a year." A book is usually forgotten over time as new books enter into the writing plethora. So say:

Iraen has written a book entitled, Crime and Punishment .

And of the % of the database of players, 69.9% check out the book during the first year all throughout the given city or commune. The database would find the highest checkout percentages and grant Iraen an Honors line since her book was read the most over a spand of a year. Novices should not count, as any memorabelia that's needed to teach the novice should either be a GHELP file or a book in their own libraries (if this what is going to happen in the future. Guild libraries, that is).

The Honors line should last for a year, and at the end of the year, will dissolve.

The honors line could be something like:

"She has written a prestigious book."
or
"She was found as a writer of a top selling/check-out book."
or something like that.

We already have people pumping out scroll after scroll of drivel for CFs and culture points, we don't need them doing it for honours lines too. Although having them for prestiege winners would be fitting. Or perhaps just have prestiege books add points to your bardic score.

There's always the bardic line, and I think that if your writing is good enough, you could submit for the bardic contest, and get that line.

Very few books ever make much of a profit worth mentioning in the real world and I can't see it happening in Lusternia unless the system is abused. I am happy how it is and more than just a little excited to see the future developments.