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How to Be a Professional Author and Not Die Screaming and Starving
- einr 7y agoWow, this is just far beyond terrible web design. On a 1920x1080 monitor I have to scroll down four and a half entire screen heights before I get to the text of the article. The headline alone takes up about half the screen...
- Santosh83 7y agoOn a 1366x768 laptop it is three screen lengths for me. But this seems to be the common format for news/blog articles these days, there is nothing particularly egregious about this site...
- blackoil 7y agoOn mobile just 1.5 screen. Do these hero image valuable for SEO or are they just for looks?
- reallydontask 7y ago> But this seems to be the common format for news/blog articles these days, there is nothing particularly egregious about this site... normalization of deviance, i'd guess
- cs02rm0 7y agoIt's pretty obnoxious on a 5k2k screen even.
- yoz-y 7y agoAlso what is the value added by these massive hero images? I had to stare at the top image for a few seconds to realize what was on it anyways.
- jsinai 7y agoSeems like a good strategy for getting comments on HN
- Jaruzel 7y agoUsing Chrome dev tools (F12) I can see that it only looks any good (and that's a relative term) on an iPhone X, and a Pixel 2 XL. Even then only the hero image and the title is visible.
- snowwrestler 7y agoWhy is scrolling bad?
- flywithdolp 7y agoI think that nowadays authors have many more ways for revenue streams than before Doing some ghost writing, being contributors in large publications and selling backlinks (doggy I know) and more stuff writers can do beside their being full time Author The money they can make from those small jobs can help them to have some more freedom to continue their profession as Authors
- baud147258 7y agoHow do authors find ghost writing work? They advertise it on their site?
- agota 7y agoProBlogger jobs board is the best place for that in my opinion. There's also UpWork, but I'd avoid that, because it's a race to the bottom. You could also try applying to marketing agencies directly.
- nestorD 7y agoPlus translation if you are not a native english speaker.
- quantumhobbit 7y agoI absolutely have to plug the author’s latest book, Wanderers. It was pretty amazing.
- Matticus_Rex 7y agoI've only heard really good reviews, which doesn't happen that often with long books. Definitely planning to read it!
- viach 7y agoThis is the first time ever I see an author is mentioning his book without a link to Amazon. Impressive and refreshing.
- keiferski 7y agoAt the end of the article, there is a link to a product page, which links to Amazon.
- cryptozeus 7y agoNothing wrong with pointing to your work. Would you say the same if developer writes a blog about his work without pointing to his github account?
- agota 7y agoThis sentiment that there's something wrong with promoting one's work is just bizarre. It's even more bizarre in the context of an article that discusses how to make a living as an author.
- viach 7y agoMy perception is that the difference is the message an author communicates. The message could be "I will tell you something important" or "Go buy this thing, in the meantime I will do some hand waving". There is no need to add a link to a book in the article which is not about this book, as much as adding a link to Github account in a blog post about unrelated stuff. Otherwise it makes a piece of writing look cheaper in my, probably wrong, view. Maybe be it's just me, seriously.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoWhat a fantastic article. Only cringed at the humour once. Good takeaways.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoGlad to hear that there are some authors who can make a living of their writing. Unfortunately, this mostly only applies to the English book market. I'm writing in German, where it is estimated that only a couple of hundred authors can make a living from writing novels. Moreover, science fiction is pretty much dead in Germany. People are reading English novels or translations thereof, which means less risk for the publishers and access to many great and professional authors.
- fastball 7y agoSo write books in English? What about German makes you want to write novels in German specifically?
- vonseel 7y agoMaybe he is German and the majority of his non-professional communication is in his mother tongue?
- taneq 7y agoMaybe it’s their native tongue?
- agota 7y agoI'm not the person you were replying to, but I'm also a writer, and I think you are underestimating the command of language required to write fiction. I'm fluent in English, I write in English for a living, but I doubt I'd be able to write decent fiction in English. "Just write novels in your second language, bro" comes off as extremely ignorant.
- fastball 7y agoLolita is considered one of the greatest books of all time. It was written by a non-native speaker in English. Thinking a non-native speaker can't write great English novels is the ignorant view, in my opinion. Is it difficult? Of course it is. But all writing is difficult.
- Merrill 7y ago>"Have plans on top of plans. What if your genre collapses? What if your agent quits? What if your next advance is way too low to survive upon? What if the economy shits the bed? Have a plan for next year, for five years, for ten. Envision how you remain in this game. A writing career is, as I’ve noted before, a CLIFF MITIGATION EXERCISE. You are eternally speeding toward the cliff’s edge." That seems like good advice for any career - even if you are comfortably cocooned in an uber-successful corporation. Things change! Your career could be collateral damage from and anti-trust proceeding.
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoAt first I thought this was on becoming a professional author, now after I read it I understand this is on how to maintain professional author as a career. One thing I'm curious about though- the author in question never brings up cover designers or editors, but does advise to listen to the agent and ask a lot of questions. I do know that cover design can be controversial and that editors can often encourage changes that make the author feel like garbage (eg. 'change the entire tense of the novel' or 'kill this beautifully written scene'). What is the advisement for that?
- turk73 7y agoAfter reading this I realized why I started down the road to being a writer and made a sudden turn away from it into more lucrative and timely pursuits such as developing shitty corporate software. I co-wrote text books in my field, but saw very little money from that work. "How to stay broke in six easy steps!" But had I continued I might be pulling in some decent royalties by now. I had some early successes and was on my way, then...splat, dead stop. I think it was the recession after 9/11. 2003 was the pit of hell. I ran away. I wrote plenty of short stories, but never tried fiction as an enterprise. It's just too crowded a field. Starving to death as a fiction writer without a marketing plan is a highly likely outcome. Or having to have a day job cleaning up puke or something heinous like that is the most likely plan, but so unappealing. All the while with a spouse berating you because their own out-sized expectations fail to align with your day to day reality. E-books and online marketing put you in the driver's seat. You...and fifty million other authors. Good luck all of you aspiring writers. My best advice is to go out and get some life experiences.
- cafard 7y agoSomebody, probably Trollope (employed by the Royal Mail during most of his writing career) quoted Sir Walter Scott as saying that literature is a good staff but a bad crutch.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- criddell 7y ago> Let’s say 10% per hardcover sale, or 25% of an e-book. Are those percentages of the MSRP or of the actual sale price? I use a price tracker for ebooks where I add every book I want and set an alert for $5. When it hits that price, I buy it. If I do that for Wanderers, will the author get 25% of the $13.99 list price or of the $5 sale price?
- throwaway123x2 7y ago> My understanding here is, it depends on who initiates that sale. Amazon initiates, you get it on full. Publisher initiates, you get on the publisher’s choice of price.
- faet 7y agoGenerally, MSRP. It depends on the bookstore's agreement with the publisher. But, most are based on cover price. So, if a store sells the book for $5. The author still gets $3.50 This generally doesn't apply if the publisher reduces the price for a 'sale period' though.
- finestkludge 7y agoOne thing that always annoys me about these sorts of posts is how much they oversell the competence of publishers. I've worked in book publishing most of my career, both with publishers and with independent authors. Trust me, the publisher's marketing strategy is nothing special. The difference between a successful book and a middling book, barring the impossibly rare "so good it organically becomes a world beater," is the size of the author's platform. Publishers have a rigid PR/marketing process they run for every book, involving sending galleys (press copies) to the same press contacts, and sometimes those efforts net press coverage, and sometimes that coverage will result in some sales. If a press is very forward-thinking, by industry standards, they may invest in building the author a website or helping manage social. However, books that hit bestseller lists are typically written by authors who have a large, engaged audience they've built on their own. The impact of a publisher's marketing budget is typically small, and definitely not worth giving up 80%-plus of your sales due to royalties.
- ivan_ah 7y ago> [...] the publisher's marketing strategy is nothing special. So true! I'm self publishing for this reason—the 10% of profits as royalty just doesn't make sense... I mean I get it that developmental editing, copy editing, cover design, typesetting and other pre-publication services are useful add ons, but still not worth the publisher's 80% cut. In one thing mainstream publisher have going for them is the reputation, especially in the academic space (textbooks). Seeing that a book was "vetted" by a serious publisher gets you some immediate respect from the reader—something self-published authors have to earn on their own. Like you say though, the author's "platform" is the key thing, and who better than the author themselves to build that?
- rm445 7y agoI feel like 90% of this advice to authors comes down to: your advance is just that, an advance on sales royalties. Non-recoupable, but if you're 'lucky' enough to win a bigger advance than your eventual sales, it's not a great sign for your career anyway.