AUTHOR

An 'author' is any person(s) or entity(s) that originates and assumes responsibility for an expression or communication. Authors should be responsible for acknowledging contributors.
Frequently, the word 'author' is used to suggest a person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article, or the like, whether short or long, fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, technical or literary. For purposes of copyright, an author may be a corporation as well an individual.
In literary theory, the 'author function' is the writer of a work as seen by the reader. Each work by the same author has a separate author function, and each work by numerous or unknown authors has a single distinct author function. In the wake of postmodern literature, Roland Barthes in his seminal essay ''Death of the Author'' (1968) and other literary critics have questioned this function, i.e. the relevance of the authorship to a text's meaning.

Contents

Some historical financial arrangements between authors and publishers

Legal usage

See also

Some historical financial arrangements between authors and publishers

A percentage (calculated on a wholesale or a retail price) or fixed amount, on each book sold. Publishers, at times, reduced the risk of this type of arrangement, by agreeing only to pay this after a certain amount of copies had sold. In Canada this practice occurred during the 1890s, but was not commonplace until the 1920s.

★ Commissioned: Publishers made publication arrangements, and authors covered all expenses (today the practice of authors paying for their publications is often called vanity publishing, and is looked down upon by many publishers, even though it may have been a common and accepted practice in the past). Publishers would receive a percentage on the sale of every copy of a book, and the author would receive the rest of the money made.

Legal usage

In copyright law the term "author" is used to describe the creator of any work, be it written, painted, sculpted, music, a photograph or a film. A work can have multiple authors, defined under the and a work made for hire can be "authored" by a corporation or other business entity.

See also

★ Novelist

★ Writer

★ Lists of authors

★ Lists of poets

★ List of novelists

★ Professional writing

★ Academic authorship