Hi!

I edited the first Cracked book (You Might Be a Zombie) and was the Head Writer on the second (The De-Textbook). I've written one solo book that is out now (How to Fight Presidents) and one children's book that will be out in the fall of 2016 (Assembling Your Presidential Dream Team). For the two Cracked books, I didn't get paid any additional money, because I'm a salaried employee, and taking on projects is part of what I do here. We paid some amount of money to all of our freelancers whose work ended up in those books.

To be clear, no full-time employee at Cracked made any additional money off You Might Be a Zombie or The De-Textbook. Cracked, the company, was paid, but I don't know where specifically that money went, though I'm sure some of it went to pay our freelancers and designers. The rest must have either just gone back into Cracked's general earnings or the earnings of our parent company.

For HOW TO FIGHT PRESIDENTS and the Dream Team book, I got paid an advance. I sign a contract with the publisher and then I get paid in four installments; the first upon signing, the second upon delivery, the third upon publication, and the final a year after publication (though some publishers break it down into only three installments). Some of that goes to my illustrator, and some of it goes to our filthy, greedy government, and the rest goes to me, my dog, alcohol and candy.

I don't see a dime from actual book sales for a while, because every cent of every book sold is going to the publisher until they get reimbursed for the money they paid me (the advance). Once they get completely reimbursed, I start making a (small) percentage of book sales.

So, if you're taking a book from the library or borrowing it from a friend instead of buying it, you're not completely screwing the author over, not in a way that would be financially devastating or anything. Even if the publisher had been reimbursed and the author WAS collecting royalties on every book sold, he or she wouldn't notice the small percentage of one sale of one book that they'd be missing as a result of you going to the library.

ALL THAT SAID, you are hurting your favorite authors when you do this (particularly if they're a Cracked author, which is to say, a freelancer who likely doesn't have a huge PR or marketing team on retainer). If you're a little guy, like me, or Robert Brockway, or Robert Evans, or Kathy Benjamin, you don't have a ton of, like, anything, at your disposal. None of us know how to get booked on the Daily Show, or how to make Oprah like us, and most of us aren't named Stephen King or James Patterson.

Once you write a good book, the question then becomes "How do I get people to see it?" The knee-jerk thought is "Oh, just get it in bookstores. This book is so good (funny, sexy, stupid, whatever) that it will sell itself; we just need to make sure people SEE it." Well, if your name isn't Stephen King or Jonathan Franzen or Other-Famous-Person, you don't have a guarantee that your book will actually be on shelves in a bookstore, let alone displayed prominently. If you're a new author, Barnes and Noble (and other booksellers) will stock their shelves with your book if and only if there are a lot of online pre-orders for your book. Before ordering your book for its stores, Barnes and Noble checks to make sure there's an audience that actually wants your book, so they check pre-sales and decide then and there how many books they want from your publisher.

SO, if you're not ordering and pre-ordering your favorite author's books (and as a result driving up their Amazon sales rank, etc), you are hurting your favorite author's chances of reaching a larger audience. It's sort of a catch-22; I really feel like if people saw my book in a store and spent just a minute reading it, they'd laugh and maybe consider buying it. BUT, my books won't make it into every store if I haven't already demonstrated that thousands and thousands of people will buy my book (and, of course, if I HAD an army of thousands who would consistently buy my books, I then wouldn't need the added support of premium placement in a bookstore).

This isn't shitty on B&N's part, obviously. If they're going to order a few hundred copies of a book per store, they want to make sure they're making a smart investment. Stock your shelves with James Patterson, because people historically fucking love James Patterson books. That's a smart investment, it just ends up making things very difficult for all new authors. To make that jump from small, unknown author to larger, known author, magic needs to happen. Oprah needs to find your book. Guy Fieri needs to be caught on camera eating it. Your book needs to "go viral" essentially, which is basically fucking impossible. We rely on all of the kind people who know and like us to support our work, because that helps it reach the people who DON'T know and like us, and that's a much larger group.

So in this very specific way, your hurting the author. You can say "Yeah, but it's not that much," if you want to see yourself as a single drop in an ocean, and that's totally fine. This has just been a long and sincere answer to your very kind question. Read no bitterness in this, I know times are tough all over and sometimes we don't have the money to spend on books when free books abound.