I try to support authors I really love by buying new, but I do live on a budget, so sometimes I wait to hunt a used copy. Or sometimes I don’t discover an author until they are out of print. I know there isn’t any way for an author to get any royalties for books already sold once, but does anybody know whether or not amazon or anyone tracks the numbers and uses the information on resale of books to determine whether or not to re-release? Or possibly how popular the next book might be? I guess I feel a little guilty sometimes that the writer isn’t getting any money from me when I am enjoying their work, and want to know maybe they are getting some kind of benefit! :rolleyes:
Short answer, no. Nobody has a good handle on what sales of used books for any individual title might be. And nobody, i.e. no publisher, that I know of determines future publication or reprintings on the basis of used book sales.
Don’t feel bad. I am an author, and a regular bookfinder.com habitue. I even direct people there on my website: I’d much rather people buy my books used than niot at all!
I used to correspond with a well-known and very prolific science fiction author. I asked him once whether he felt cheated when people bought his books used. He said that, far from feeling cheated, he was delighted, since the redistribution of his older books built a larger audience for his newer ones.