Most of the ones that do, makes a pittance.
The percentage of authors that actually makes a living publishing novels is vanishingly small.
If the possibility of making lots of money writing novels is a big incentive for you, presumably you're the type of person who also think they have a good shot at making it big in Vegas.
I'm not necessarily dead set against copyright, but if these people are largely incentivized by money, then society could solve that issue far cheaper and with far fewer restrictions than what copyright provides for, and still pay these people more money than they get today, by creating grants awarded based on some measure of popularity.
Now, the current copyright of "life of the author plus seventy years, and oh, wait, is that expiring? on second thought, let's go ahead and add another fifty years unless we decide to go ahead and tack on another fifty years at some point in the future"... that is utterly unjustifiable.
But keep in mind, even the EFF put out a comic satirizing both extremes IP protection ("information, like, wants to be free").
Why should the only person rewarded for a digital good be the best salesman? Without copyright, anyone who writes a book will immediately have it taken by a big publishing company with the best distribution channels and be crushed in the market. The little guy will never be able to compete with that. Whatever small chance at financial reward from writing now will be replaced by the ability to get a contract in place with the dominant market leader before you even start writing. Sure some people will still write for the love of writing, but it will be the kind of thing that terrifies parents even more than does now, and it will be discouraged by popular opinion.
Honestly, what is the argument against giving someone limited exclusive rights to their own work? 14 years was the original term of copyright, and that doesn't seem like an unreasonable time to wait for something to enter the public domain, after which we all get the full public benefit. Again, just because Disney lobbied for and raped the law doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
I think the ridiculousness of software patents has caused a disproportionate number of hackers to go totally fundamental on the concept of intellectual property even though there is a very strong common sense legitimacy to certain forms of it.
Doesn't pass my personal "plumber test": the plumber works hard on plumbing an office, should he have commercial control on those tubes for 14+ years?
And I think that 14 years might be OK, but currently it's more like 70 years. Even AFTER the author is dead, which is ridiculous.
At that point, after years and years of studying to be the best plumber he can be, Joe Plumber goes out and does a job only to have some joker come up, scan his work and then provide his own plumbing service for 1/4th the price. How is Joe Plumber to compete? He could try dropping his prices to 1/4th but then the joker will just drop his again (since he has nothing invested he can do this). At some point, no one would be stupid enough to invest in learning to be a plumber ever again. Everyone would just get this magical copy device. Of course, the problem is that when that finally happened we would be locked into whatever we had when the last plumber stopped producing.
It's called China, and that's why prices for units of work in most industries have been falling, in real terms, for the last 30 years.
An author's unit of work is the same unit of work as a plumber's; the difference is that, in the author's case, the client is not the real client: the work is commissioned by a reseller (the editor), and the reseller wants to enjoy all the advantages of cultural work (low costs, infinite duplication) without any of the downsides. Whenever they find a downside, they force a law to remove it artificially.
If you release a digital copy of your novel online, it's quite likely that at least a few people will copy it. However, there's also a pretty good chance it will attract more future customers.
Right, so if you provide a service you can charge what the market will bear but if you provide an art that happens to be convertible to digital form you need to get on your knees with your hat outstretched and beg for your income.
Do you people actually think about what you're saying?
You don't have a right to make profit, only to try.
In this case copyright only exists as an explicit tradeoff by society in order to gain other benefits. If those benefits can be obtained cheaper and/or without the limits imposed by copyright through other means, or if society decides the tradeoff is not worth it, then tough.
I personally don't think it's an unreasonable restriction until some way is figured out to compensate creators of digital media for their efforts that doesn't care about digital piracy. I do have a problem with some of the efforts that are being put in place to enforce these rules though, much in the same way I have a problem with the TSA.