45 ms·

Writing books is not really a good idea

• rahimnathwani 5y ago
  1000 books sold does not imply 1000 true fans. Just because someone spent $10-$30 on a book, that doesn't mean they read the book, or like the book, or are willing to drop $100 for the author's next book (or next 12 months' output).
• JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > perhaps it’s time to face the music and realize that writing books—like knitting or playing the harp—is nothing more than a hobby I've approached every creative endeavor in this way. I see no reason writing should be any different. I'm not trying to be overly cynical, I'm just not surprised that writing is any different than music, painting, etc.
  • moksly 5y ago
    I don’t think you have to approach creative endeavours as hobbies at all. If you chose to approach them as a job, however, then I think you should do exactly that. If your writing is your business, then how can you justify spending 2-3 years working on a single project with no prior funding and a sales projection of less than 2000 copies priced at whatever a book costs? Imagine if build software startups the way some authors try to become full time writers... I get it of course. We all know the romantic story of the creative master who only puts out a single master piece per decade, but that’s something you do when you’ve made it. Not when your projected sales are less than 2000 copies.
  • psyc 5y ago
    As someone with many lifelong creative outlets, I can think of 3 reasons to create. 1. You love doing it for it’s own sake 2. You can’t help it 3. You believe in your heart you have something to say that must be said. You may well be delusional about the last one, but I still consider it a good reason.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • rikroots 5y ago
    I agree. When I started to treat my writing endeavours as a hobby rather than as a path to fame, glory, riches and world domination, I also started to enjoy the writing process a lot more. Nowadays I only write when I want to write, and I only write what I want to write. It's a freedom I've come to cherish.
    • bluGill 5y ago
      Do you finish anything though? A lot of writers find that the effort of finishing the story is a lot more work than writing the early parts and so they have half-finished novels in their files that realistically they will never finished. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that is okay or not. For me, I know I have too many unfinished projects and so my stories will remain dreams that never get written down.
      • tonyp2121 5y ago
        Thats most of everything though. The hardest part of finishing your programming project is the last icky bit that you really didn't want to do yet, or bug fixing, or polishing. The last part of painting is the touch ups, and thats also the longest part. Its much easier to just come up with a sketch of a piece of art (or any project) than it is to get into the nitty gritty painstaking details that it requires before you can say its finished.
      • rikroots 5y ago
        I've finished 3 novels, and one remains half-written. My downfall is always the world building - I often find it's more fun daydreaming the world rather than having to deal with cantankerous characters who refuse to go where the plot needs them to go, and always argue about everything.
  • munificent 5y ago
    I look at the question of money and art at two levels: 1. As an individual, what is the right mindset to have about my creativity? At this level, I agree with you. Looking at the economic trends, the only sane way to create and feel good about it is to do it in my free time, focus on the intrinsic reward and have some other job that pays the bills. I'm very fortunate in that my other job takes good care of me. But there is another level I think about a lot: 2. At the cultural level, is it good for a society if people can only make art in their leisure time? I consider art to be (among other things) the mechanism by which we define, share, and propagate our culture. Our artworks teach each generation what we value and how we think one should live. They show us what it means to be human. If that art can only be produced by people wealthy enough to have sufficient spare time (books, poetry, and painting) or giant corporations (film, TV), then you place complete control over your culture in the hands of the rich. Do you remember in the 80s and 90s when it seemed like almost every movie had an anti-corporate angle to it? Did you notice that they all stopped doing that? What should we expect when huge corporations are producing almost every film we see. Should we be surprised to see that our society is failing to solve inequality when most books are written by the wealthy, about the wealthy, for the wealthy? How are those at the top supposed to understand and care for those at the bottom when those at the bottom don't even have the time to share their stories with them? I think a just society needs art-makers to be able to focus on their art without worrying about money because it's the only way to ensure that everyone at every economic level gets to participate in defining our culture.
    • JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Agree. It's why I love indie films, indie games, garage rock, zines....
    • alektorophobiae 5y ago
      This is well said and puts into words something I have struggled to articulate for a while.. Thanks. Always nice to see other people value the arts in the tech sphere. :)
    • burntoutfire 5y ago
      > about the wealthy Most books are written about the wealthy?
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Some things at work here: 1. Leisure reading is at an all time low and declining [1]. I think reading books will go the way of live theater and classical music performances. It won't go away, but instead of a common, "every-man/woman" type of outing, it will be more niche/special occasion. I.e. whereas tons of people used to read often for pleasure in the early part of the 20th century, it is heading more towards a "only on vacation" or other special-occasion type activity for most folks. 2. Publishing has always been a hit-driven business, but my thought is that, like many other industries affected by the internet, it has consolidated even more (i.e. it's much easier to search and buy just based on "top" lists than it was previously - a popular book can reach a ton more people, but it's much harder to be popular in the first place). [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisu...
  • jawns 5y ago
    I don't think it's going to turn into a "special occasion" activity. Rather, I think you're going to have a smaller and smaller number of voracious readers, but those readers will continue to consume books at a pretty steady pace.
    • Aerroon 5y ago
      And for those readers it's about consistency. Looking at the Chinese translated web novels: the stories don't even have to be great, but they have enjoyable characters and there's an enormous amount of content. People read machine translated stories! Sometimes you can't even tell what's going on based on those translations, but people still read them.
  • mortenjorck 5y ago
    The parallel to performing arts is the most plausible, yet optimistic counter I've seen to "people don't read books anymore." Fiction has its Harry Potters just as theater has its Wickeds, and Patreon is set to enable the closest literary equivalent to an urban live theater scene.
• jtolmar 5y ago
  Most of what I read is serial fiction, and it has been for years. The most popular site these days is Royal Road, with authors offering a Patreon subscription for early access to chapters. It has the same lopsided power law distribution of funding as any platform for paying artists, but there are plenty of authors making a living of it. It's strange to see people speculating about whether this is possible, since it's already here.
• kpwagner 5y ago
  In the month it will take me to finish reading Storm of Swords, I will watch ~10 movies. Plus, I'm reading Storm of Swords, which needs no additional support from readers to be discovered or validated--though I still want to read it. Plus, I digitally loaned it from my local library. I own a number of books (~200) and have probably owned x4 that total in my lifetime. Maybe 1/3 of those I paid full price for new. The rest I sourced either cheap on Ebay or about free from second-hand stores. I've spent probably less than $4,000 total on books, not counting textbooks, while being in the minority of people who buy and read books. I don't really know where I'm going with this, but the question that comes to mind is something like this: how many people like me does it take to support one professional writer? Non-fiction writers are way more likely to have other income sources than fiction writers. For example, I'm reading Marketing Made Simple (Donald Miller), which was free with Amazon Prime. I'm quite sure Donald Miller and his company are not sweating how much money they get from a Prime reader: getting anyone to read their book strengthens their overall sales funnel.
  • wccrawford 5y ago
    A lot, but it's not just people like you. I buy quite a few books. Almost all digital now. I probably buy a book every other month now. It'd be more, except that... I also subscribe to Amazon Unlimited and read a lot of books on it. I never buy movies now. If the theatres were open, I'd see 2, maybe 3 movies in a year with my wife. The rest I watch on Netflix/etc when they come out for free. I watch maybe 6 movies a month, and 4 of those are because we have a virtual movie night with a lot of friends every week since Covid started. We watch a lot of TV, but again, Netflix/etc. We don't even pay for cable. We never buy TV series unless it's something really special.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    While there are some that make meaningful amounts of money, all my experience suggests that writing non-fiction tech books for example, is overwhelmingly reputational. I certainly still own--though I've gotten rid of a fair number--a lot of books but, no, I don't read a lot any longer. Maybe about 10 a year which is probably 20% of what I once did.
  • lacker 5y ago
• tobias3 5y ago
  I don't know where she gets the idea that serial publishing isn't done currently. Pirateaba, creator of wanderinginn.com has 4342 patreons (10k per month at least). At that point who cares about the NYTimes bestselling list?
  • spookybones 5y ago
    Do you happen to know how this author grew her audience? I'm curious.
    • tobias3 5y ago
      Being good at writing servicable prose and story. Writing for a genre that has an online following (litrpg isekai in this case). Consistent output (e.g. twice per week -- in this case it is kind of insane: a novella per week). Then post it to sites where the readers for that niche are (e.g. royalroad.com , topwebfiction.com).
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Very excited to check this one out. Thank you!
• asgraham 5y ago
  These are two completely different statistics: 1) last year, new releases sold poorly, perhaps unexpectedly (NYT article's claim); 2) last year, a relatively small portion of all currently released titles sold a lot of books, and most titles sold few books (linked article's data). Pulling from the central table, last year: one title sold over 1 million copies; ten titles sold a collective 5-10 million copies; 267 titles sold a collective 26-133 million copies; 7,294 titles sold a collective 70-700 million copies; and 2.6 million titles sold between 0 and 2.6 BILLION copies. My guess is that last number is way closer to zero than 2.6 billion, so I'll exclude it when I say: the table the author cites shows that last year sold 100-840 million copies. Digital copies! Nearly double that when you include print books. So there's no support for the author's claim, "Books as a medium just don’t have an audience—or rather, they have a very niche audience." Was last year bad for new release sales? Seemingly, according to NYT. Was last year relatively bad for all book sales? Maybe, I don't know. Does the data support the implication that 0.0001% of new authors will make a living? No. It says that 0.0001% of all currently selling books will single-handedly earn a living for their author in that year. My wild guess is that authors make most of their money from new releases, so we'd really need to see the data underlying the NYT article on new releases, not this article on all online book sales.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Hmmmm, I think you're looking at that table wrong. Ten titles sold between 500,000 and one million copies (not 5-10 million copies). And 267 titles sold between 100,000 and 500,000 copies, (not in the millions). That top line is the highest one.
    • asgraham 5y ago
      Isn't it saying that ten titles each sold between 500,000 and one million copies? So collectively they sold 5-10 million copies? (I really enjoyed the article, by the way, once it was past claims about this data-- the points about fanfic and story monetization are important ones)
      • ellegriffin 5y ago
• bombcar 5y ago
  The "revenue earned self-published" is the key take-away - if you can sell 10k books a year (either 10 1k books or one 10k book) you can have a moderately comfortable income, especially if you have other work (or your book can come out of other work - thing books that are mainly compilations of blog posts or articles).
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Yes! Exactly! It seems doable....
• ricardobeat 5y ago
  There are plenty of people selling their own e-books online and taking closer to 100% (minus processing fees) of revenue. Agreeing to 15% only makes sense if you have a huge distribution deal. No mention of Patreon either.
• PaulRobinson 5y ago
  Worth noting that serial fiction is far from a new creation or invention. Charles Dickens wrote most of his work as a weekly or monthly serial, and that's why his stories rip along with regular cliffhangers. His single volume works were mostly less popular and less well known today with the exception of A Christmas Carol. He wasn't alone either - his success with The Pickwick Papers led many others to follow, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes stories originally serialised in The Strand magazine. This model of quality fiction being in magazines never really entirely went away in terms of a mark of quality - even though they now print short stories rather than serialisation, it's likely much harder to get your fiction into the New Yorker than it is to get a publishing contract - so it's interesting to me that it's making a return. As somebody who has wanted to write fiction for some time, but could not conceive of sitting down and writing a book in the traditional way, this appeals to me. As a keen reader, I'm excited to see what comes out of it, too.
• chasingthewind 5y ago
  I really enjoyed this @ellegriffin and it's something I wrestled with about twelve years ago when I wrote my first novel. I had gotten some positive feedback from a few friends and started to wonder if it was "good enough to publish." Luckily I moved very quickly from that question to "my" answer which was "no" and mirrors your thought: > If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies on Amazon, perhaps it’s time to face the music and realize that writing books—like knitting or playing the harp—is nothing more than a hobby. Something I can do for fun on the weekends but should never hope to earn a living from. It seemed very obvious to me that I was neither a good enough writer nor a dedicated enough self-promoter to ever make it work. Twelve years and 16 novels later I am happily churning out 1-3 bad novels every year and loving every minute of it. All the best as you continue to chase the dream!
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    This is the best thing I ever heard of. I want nothing more than permission to write badly and still love it.
• ben_w 5y ago
  That’s more than I was expecting given the 98% selling less than 5000 referenced in the opening paragraph. But then again, that 2.6 million books were sold is also more than I expected.
  • nullandvoid 5y ago
    2.6 million would mean 1 in 3000 people on earth, bought at least 1 book in the last year. That doesn't seem very surprising to me? Although I think you meant to write 27 million (268 * 100k) edit - ignore, I missed that it was 2.6m unique in the article
    • rmah 5y ago
      I think the 2.6 mil refers to the # of titles available for sale, not the number of copies sold.
      • nullandvoid 5y ago
        Oops I skimmed the article and missed that - thanks.
    • contravariant 5y ago
      Somehow I get the feeling that people are dropping qualifiers left and right. For instance the 2.6 million is books sold online. And more importantly I strongly suspect someone somewhere failed to mention this was all U.S. only. At least I suspect it is.
    • lazide 5y ago
      The data is also quite sparse and almost certainly missing a large chunk of the worlds population. Looking at their website, I doubt they’re covering the Chinese domestic market. I’d also be surprised if they’re covering say Bangladesh, or Indian non-English books or content. Same with Indonesia. That right there would probably throw all the numbers off dramatically world population wise.
  • phillc73 5y ago
• mxcrossb 5y ago
  I wonder how serializing a novel would mesh with most author’s work flow. I guess most would want to write it first and release monthly an already finished product?
  • michaelt 5y ago
    There are quite a few writers who publish a chapter or two a week on Patreon. It can produce some strange incentives: For one thing, they start getting reader feedback after every single chapter, if they want it. Some writers develop really fast-paced styles. For another, they often start releasing chapters as they are written - meaning they can't have an editor who reads chapter 20 advise them to go fix an inconsistency back in chapter 4. Also, some writers realise the moment they bring the story to a conclusion, they stop getting paid. That's OK for comedy/slice-of-life/X-of-the-week content - The Simpsons has no need for character growth or overarching plot lines - but works poorly for other genres: What good is a romance where the characters can never kiss, or an epic fantasy where the one ring can never be thrown into mount doom? Of course, some of these incentives are hardly new: Other media have been subject to them for years.
  • GCA10 5y ago
    A lot of 19th century fiction was done this way. Authors (Dickens, etc.) tended to work from a loose outline and construct the details as they rolled along. Peer at those books closely and you can see some odd detours that were shut down. Also some padding to get more segment-by-segment payments. But it's workable
    • Mauricebranagh 5y ago
      Which is why there are page long descriptions of horses and carriages in the count of mote cristo.
    • kingsuper20 5y ago
      Serialization was quite common in science fiction pulp magazines also. It's interesting to consider the meta-version of serialization..novel sets. Nothing new here, the Oz books being an obvious example, but it's funny how it plays into a human need to both read about familiar characters or places and to have physical sets of books that match.
• jihadjihad 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
  • failwhaleshark 5y ago
    Yep. This is the consequence of differential equation-like behavior of accumulating attention, popularity, power, virality, reach, wealth, big name publishers, etc. The rate of change is roughly proportional to the amount present. The biggest gets even bigger, faster.
• NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  Why would anyone consider this shocking, there is a massive amount of content out there, and the human race is finite.
• giantg2 5y ago
  I would have been happy if my toddler book was published and sold even $5k copies.
• kaesar14 5y ago
  Is there somewhere to find the names of the 268 books?
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Bookstat didn't share the list of 268 books with me, but they did share the one book that sold more than a million copies in 2020: it was a Kindle-exclusive Thomas & Mercer title called “If You Tell” by Gregg Olsen…
    • kaesar14 5y ago
      Wouldn’t have guessed! Thanks, and really interesting article :)
      • ellegriffin 5y ago
        Thank you!
• AS_of 5y ago
  How is audible factored in here? I've 10X'd my audible intake over the past year.
  • solomonb 5y ago
    Three paragraphs into the article is a chart that includes audio book sales.
    • AS_of 5y ago
      Does that accurately represent the model of audible credits? Or just actual purchases of audio books?
      • Karunamon 5y ago
        Is the model reasonably different? The publisher doesn't get paid unless you spend a credit on their book.
• andrewzah 5y ago
  I feel like I'm one of the few people that still does purchase books. In 2020 & 2021 I bought music theory books from amazon + jazzbooks.com, and I had some Korean books imported by a friend. I have the space and bookshelves to house them though.
  • moksly 5y ago
    I’m not sure where the author got the whole “people don’t read books” either, unless it is meant to be taken literal, this excluding audiobooks. I’m on 20+ books read in my good reads challenge for 2021, all paid for, many through audible but some directly from the black library (yes it’s very stupid warhammer fiction), but all of them have been audiobooks and the ones I didn’t get through audible cost me 33 euros a piece. So you’re not the only one buying books, there is at least two of us!
  • AS_of 5y ago
    Most people just don't read any books. Whether I buy physical or audible mainly depends on the books content. Story-heavy books (most) are great on audible, more technical stuff deserves physical.
    • gtk40 5y ago
      For me, technical stuff is much better in eBooks because of the search functionality.
      • andrewzah 5y ago
        I prefer both for this reason. With physical it's easy for me to mark it up/add tab bookmarks for fast reference. If I buy a book I try to find it on libgen as well so I can carry it around / search digitally.
  • _joel 5y ago
    I don't think you're alone (I much prefer hardcopy) but possibly a dwindling demographic. One thing I have noticed is a decreased quality in print. I ordered some Rust books from Amazon (printed in house) and they basically seem to be ebooks that have been printed out, loads of whitespace in random areas and no signs of proof-reading. I don't think this helps the cause. Have been using Waterstones more recently but they are a little slow on some more of the ecclectic subjects.
• beambot 5y ago
  > there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and only 268 of them sold more than 100,000 copies I'm confused... just the top 0.0001% (268 x 100k) is 26.8M, yet they claim only 2.6M books were sold total for the full year. Am I missing something obvious?
  • rmah 5y ago
    I think they meant 2.6 mil titles, not copies.
    • beambot 5y ago
      Ah, I'll bet you're right! Wow, that significantly changes the meaning...
  • warent 5y ago
    2.6 million different titles sold, not 2.6 million copies
  • chanakya 5y ago
    2.6 million different book titles. Not total sales of books online, which is about 500m, I believe.
  • rjp0008 5y ago
    The 2.6 million is the choice of books available. Like baskin robins has 31 flavors but only 5 of them sold more than 100k scoops.
  • iscrewyou 5y ago
    It’s confusing but the percentage figure means that 2.6 million individual titles were sold or available to be bought. Only 268 of those titles sold over 100k.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • tksmith151 5y ago
    I think the 2.6 million books refers to 2.6 million different titles that were sold rather than the total number of book sales across all titles, which as you pointed out is significantly higher than 2.6 million.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tarr11 5y ago
  I used to read a lot more books 10-20 years ago. Now, I mostly read books on vacation. I think I have an unspoken budget of “words read daily” that is consumed by work and my mobile devices.
  • pier25 5y ago
    > I think I have an unspoken budget of “words read daily” that is consumed by work and my mobile devices. I agree. Considering word count, I read more now than ever but I read a fraction of the books I used to read 15-20 years ago.
    • randomswede 5y ago
      For me, the main reason for lowered annual books read is "no commute" (it IS possible to set time aside just to read, but over the decades, I have gotten used to read on buses, tubes, trains, planes... and thus frequently forgetting that I can actually just read whenever I want to). Pre-COVID, I usually managed 120 to 150 books per year. Now, it is probably down to about 40.
      • pier25 5y ago
        Totally. The time of my life where I read the most was when I spent about 1 hour daily on the metro.
  • AS_of 5y ago
    As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a great place for that! Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Decisions/dp/1627790365 https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... There are probably a lot of single people here that would benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem) We all "know" the algos. But reading/hearing how they can be applied and what effect they can have on your life can be enlightening.
    • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• stakkur 5y ago
  "98 percent of the books that publishers released" is the key phrase, and it's nothing new; the sell rate in traditional publishing has always been quite low. But this does not include books sold in all the other self-publishing ways.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    I'd be skeptical that more than a handful of self-published books sold more than 100K copies (if that).
    • stakkur 5y ago
      I don't agree. Self publishing has not only arrived, in some genres it outsells trad pub books. One discussion: https://mashable.com/article/self-published-authors-making-a-living/ https://mashable.com/article/self-published-authors-making-a... From that article: "According to Amazon's 2019 review of its Kindle sales, there are now thousands of self-published authors taking home royalties of over $50,000, while more than a thousand hit six-figure salaries from their book sales last year." And 'self publishing' encompasses more than just Amazon, etc. --there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of authors selling books directly online.
      • NullInvictus 5y ago
        It wouldn't surprise me. In many genres, I'm not sure there is a huge difference in the product put out by traditional publishers vs. that put out by direct publishing. I own a lot of books, and a sizable chunk is fiction. Maybe I'm just picking up the best, but it feels like the freely published ones have the same amount of advertising, editing, and type-checking as the traditionally published ones. Which is to say - absolutely none. It feels like in many cases, traditional publishing has decided to play the same numbers-game as the self-publishers and have given up on adding quality after they receive the manuscript. Ironically this may be why they're receding under the waves. Commodities is a hard place to get rich.
  • ChrisRR 5y ago
    Is it though? I highly doubt many self published authors are selling over 100k copies. That's a ton of logistics to deal with
• mikerg87 5y ago
  Any idea if there is a similar source of sales figures for non-fiction/technical ? Is it as bleak or skewed as the fiction side ?
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    These stats are total book titles. Not just fiction. So non-fiction is somewhere in there!
  • o_nate 5y ago
    There were more than twice as many adult nonfiction books than adult fiction books sold in both 2019 and 2020 in the US, according to Publishers Weekly.
• MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  How many of these were politically oriented and had sales bolstered by political organizations to get them on a best seller's list?
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    Good point. More than a few I would wager. It's also a way to pay a politician in a backdoor way. Having said that, I'm amazed that so many of those titles are actually bought, they do appear to be at least somewhat popular. Any thrift store has piles of Presidential biographies and outraged-about-a-President books, they're over by the microwave cookbooks.
    • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Yeah, for example, the Republican National Committee spent over $300K on Donald Trump Jr.'s book, which it then turned around and gave to donors, and $100K more on one of his other books. It spent over $400K on Dan Crenshaw's book and almost $100K on Tom Cotton's book. When Herman Cain was running for President, his campaign committee bought up pallets of his book that happened to be on sale at the same time as his political candidacy. The RNC also spent over $100K on a Sean Hannity book. The DNC spent nearly $100K on Chelsea Clinton's book. The FEC is apparently on board with all of this, as long as the candidate isn't... using the books their campaigns purchase for their personal use. I guess the next time Ted Cruz gets shamed into staying home during an ice storm, he'll be disappointed to know that he can't burn his own books for warmth.
      • selimthegrim 5y ago
        So the ex-mayor of Baltimore should have had the Maryland Democratic Party buy her children’s books instead?
        • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
          Either that or her own campaign committee. If she got her campaign to buy the books and give them away to campaign contributors, it's totally fine as far as the FEC is concerned.
• troelsSteegin 5y ago
  "The one where writing books is not really a good idea". Griffin cites 1000 true fans [0], where for $100k target income, you want 1K fans at $10 month. For me the consumer, that's $100/year per author, times I don't know how many subscriptions I'd budget. It's weird to think that the creative marketplace runs on patronage, but I suppose that's true going back at least to the Renaissance. She's opting to serialize her fiction on substack, toward the possibility of greater scale at lower unit cost. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
• asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  It would be interesting to have a timeseries plot of this sort of information. Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? Presumably there was some point at which the ease of making a living as an author peaked. This article suggests that time is in the past, but how far in the past? Has the absolute number of people who can make it as an author decreased, or just the relative fraction of the human population? So many questions. I do also think that the expectation/standard of a $100k/year salary is a bit high. That's almost double the US median household income, for a job that can be done (some would argue is best done) from a house in the woods. I also know that some authors are turning to Patreon. N.K. Jemisen famously started a Patreon that allowed her to quit her job and begin writing full-time. I personally have donated >$100 directly to favorite midlist authors who have made a big impact on my reading life. FWIW, I used to read more, but I still buy at least three or four full-priced books a year.
  • andi999 5y ago
    If you have a scalable product there is usually no middle ground. Either you are getting rich or just getting by, or even not getting by (last one the most likely one)
    • Siira 5y ago
      Isn’t software a big exception to this?
      • andi999 5y ago
        Is it? Can you elaborate? I think if you have a SaaS with happy 100 customers paying 10$ each per month it is easier to scale up to 10k customers than if you only have 2 customers to get to 200.
      • watwut 5y ago
        No. Software follow the same pattern.
      • muzani 5y ago
        Well you have this at roughly $2000 total: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sarasarasa.lifeup https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sarasarasa... And this at almost a million dollars: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.modelmakertools.simplemindpro https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.modelmaker... I'm not sure if these are outliers, and my "random" sampling is just picking out highly visible apps. But I've made good money off an app built in a month, and I've made relatively little from a book written in 3 months. Software has a lot more variety. You can make say, a communist themed productivity app vs a forest themed one and these will appeal to different people.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I've decided this article is so unclear in its terms that it is unusable - for example: "According to Bookstat, which looks at the book publishing market as a whole, there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and only 268 of them sold more than 100,000 copies—that’s only 0.0001 percent of books. By far, the more likely thing is to sell between 0 and 1,000 copies—and there were 2.6 million of those last year (96 percent)." what is up with that 2.6 million, it isn't explainable by just being 'the number of titles!'
• hodder 5y ago
  Books, stocks, apps, websites, songs...the list goes on. Winner takes all is becoming the new normal.
• dovrce 5y ago
  Most new books aren't very good, and there's so much noise that only reading old books is a perfectly good strategy. The only recent stuff I buy and read is technology related, if I'm going to read a narrative book it's going to be > 1 year old
  • dudul 5y ago
    > Most new books aren't very good I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books. The choice is often "Do I take a chance with this thing published last year? Or do I just pick up one of the 'classics' that I haven't read yet?" I usually end up going with the latter simply because I don't want to spend many hours reading something that ends up being "meh" and I assume that going with something considered a "classic" is safer. Though they do occasionally end up disappointing :)
    • zelienople 5y ago
      Most new books are about people. A few good new books are about things. Very few great new books are about ideas. The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every book is a big disappointment these days.
    • joebob42 5y ago
      Plus, for whatever it's worth the classic is already guaranteed to be culturally significant. Other people will have read it and you can talk to them about it, which can be a fun exercise and may not be true for whatever random book you could otherwise read.
      • dovrce 5y ago
        Exactly, anything that has survived 100 or 1000 years is most likely worth your time
        • failwhaleshark 5y ago
          The Epic of Gilgamesh is roughly 3800-years-old. One has to wonder though if something has survived as an artifact only because there were a zillion copies of the then "Steven King's" latest, or if it truly was great and preserved with care by those with taste. You have to wonder if the then Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs down compared to other contemporary works.
• lumost 5y ago
  Is this the natural outcome of having larger retailers? In the era of small local book stores, the store owner had large discretion on what to stock. Different book stores would naturally stock different books and cater to different preferences. The customer would have options to discover new books, but would also have popular books sometimes "hidden" by the book sellers preference. If every book reader is hooked into the same recommendations/search feed will they naturally move to reading the same books?
  • GekkePrutser 5y ago
    On the other hand the large retailers can stock huge amounts of books. There is no limit anymore. That said, I tend to pick my books from the top lists. But I'm not a frequent reader.
  • runevault 5y ago
    Yes, but more specifically, large retailers track the way books sell and order authors based on prior success. So if an author has a down book it can trigger a spiral where the big stores order less and less. Amazon isn't impacted by this in the same way because technically everything is on their shelves, but the B&Ns and the like of the world it does (and before they went under Borders as well).
    • bluGill 5y ago
      On the other hand B&N had a lot more books. The small bookshop was typically filled with the same trash that I'd never read. (that is the definition of trash book: one the person making that claim would never read - those retailers stocked them because that is what most people read)
      • runevault 5y ago
        Small bookstores can be more driven by personal taste of someone, be it a book buyer if they have one or the staff. Like the way a lot of indie bookstores will have tagged books recommended by the staff in each section, sometimes the normal big names (Game of Thrones) but sometimes by far less big name authors they are passionate about.
• macksd 5y ago
  As others have pointed out, I don't think we have all the right data to really make conclusions, especially in a historical context here. But if the trend is exactly what the title is implying, I wonder if social networks are a contributing factor here and amplifying virality: more of the people who read are sharing / discussing what they're reading, and that's influencing more people to then go and read the same thing. Fewer people going and browsing the entire selection to pick out something they want to read. I'm reading (well, listening to audiobooks) more than ever, but indeed I'm selecting things that are already significant topics for conversation, or books that were already made into movies (and thus are also popular). Beyond that, I'm consuming podcasts, etc. and things with business models closer to that the author is suggesting.
• kingsuper20 5y ago
  One thing that has bound to affect new book sales, especially on the tail, is the increasing ease of buying used books online. It's kind of like the way that eBay altered the music store instrument business. Pirated e-books probably have chiseled away some of the business. Having said that, the book business looks to have been in a slow decline for some time. I don't doubt that social media and internet reading generally have made people less able to read long-form work. I'd add that it looks like authors have been falling down a slide of lessening language complexity over the decades.
  • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    Pirated ebooks have definitely chiselled away at the business. I haven’t paid for a work of fiction in nearly a decade thanks to ebook-sharing communities. Just 2–3 years ago LibGen was something known only to a niche of torrentfreaks, but it seems like suddenly all of my bookish friends know about it and use it. (The exception is when I like a classic work of literature enough to want to buy a hardback copy that will last the decades. But that almost always means buying on the used market, because older hardbacks had quality sewn bindings, while hardbacks today are likely to have flimsy glued bindings. So, thanks to publishers skimping on quality, the author gets no remuneration even when a reader of the ebook decides to purchase the physical artifact.)
    • kingsuper20 5y ago
      I agree with everything you've said here. I haven't bought a paperback for years (decades?). Now that I think of it, practically every book I have any interest in is OOP or there is a nicer version of it available from some time ago. In terms of ebooks, it'll be interesting to see if we continue to live in an increasing land o' plenty in terms of copyright violation (also including music and video) or if the hammer will come down on that. It's easy to imagine a legion of paratroopers outfitted in Disney uniforms doing a bit of digital axing on servers throughout the world. One implication might be that this is the time to become a data hoarder.
  • GekkePrutser 5y ago
    > Pirated e-books probably have chiseled away some of the business. Not just that but also licensing. I live in Europe and it happens a LOT that I can't get a book I want here. Either it's not yet released because it's released in phases. I read English only, however publishers tend to wait to release the English version until the local translation is out, so they don't lose potential sales of the translated version. Also, some books are simply not sold here for some reason. It happens so often that I go through the Kindle app and then end up with the "This item is not available in your region" message. At that point I go the easy way. I could get a US prepaid card and use a VPN or whatever but I'm not going to go out of my way to throw money at them. If they don't want to take my money, then they won't get it. I know I'm hurting the authors more than the publishers but I'm just not going to wait for it to become available here.
• GekkePrutser 5y ago
  > As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers. She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with each chapter being released individually. I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters. Or long delays. Episodic gaming was a big hype in the game industry for a while but it suffered really heavily from these issues and it's now pretty much defunct. A few companies like telltale made it work but even telltale is now out of business. The 'early access' model was also tried there but is failing for similar reasons: There is no incentive to ever finishing a game, in fact the incentive is to never finish it. It also means you'd be spending $100 on a single book. In this model you pay $8-$9 a chapter, normally this is the price you'd pay for an entire book. I also wouldn't want to wait for the next chapter every time. I don't see this working out at all. I don't know what the answer is. But I don't think this is it. Edit: As many people have pointed out this model has been around much longer, even before the internet... I didn't know that and thanks for pointing it out! I still don't think it will work for me as a reader though. I view a book as a unit, and having reading sprints of a few hours per month will dilute the story for me.
  • edu 5y ago
    Sherlock Holmes started with this model (being published in The Strand Magazine with other stories and articles) and it's still used for manga. It's a little bit different as they were not single-author, but I don't see why it couldn't work again.
  • lightveil 5y ago
    This is almost exactly what a subgenre called LitRPG does. The authors usually run a Patreon where patrons can read chapters in advance. If you look at this [0], there are 4345 patrons and the lowest tier is $1.00, giving a lower bound of $52k per year. Although it's likely to be far more higher than that, if you look at the patron->dollars ratio here [1]. In general, the model seems to function very well in some specific scenarios. [0] https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba [1] https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth
• localhost 5y ago
  I was curious about the oft cited quote "x% of Americans never read another book after high school" and I found this interesting StackExchange post with links to older studies by the National Endowment of the Arts [1]. It shows that reading rate has droped 16.5% from 1982-2002 for high school graduates from 54.2% to 37.7%. The trend is higher education::more reading, but it is dropping across the board. [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9446/do-33-of-high-school-graduates-never-read-another-book-for-the-rest-of-their-li https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9446/do-33-of-h...
• sltkr 5y ago
  > There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author). I think she missed a few authors in other categories. Examples: - https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow (over $6,000/month) - https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3814558 ($8,203 per chapter, roughly 1 chapter/month) - https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba (no dollar amount, but 4,345 patrons and a $1/month minimum tier should translate to roughly $8000/month) etc. None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    The author of The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound $5262/month: https://www.patreon.com/puddles4263 https://www.patreon.com/puddles4263 The author of Azarinth Healer has 3317 patrons at $2 minimum: https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL Basically, you can look through RoyalRoad, Scribblehub, WebNovel, and various other places where quite a few people seem to find success. And that's not even mentioning the people who write novels and publish them on Amazon. >None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell. They're not. Or at least were not. They wrote web novels and acquired success because people liked their stories.
    • ellegriffin 5y ago
      These are amazing! Thank you so much for sharing. I will look into these as case studies.
      • Aerroon 5y ago
        One more thing to consider is that some (many?) of these authors are from poorer countries. $1500 a month for them might go a lot further.
      • CobrastanJorji 5y ago
        There's also the path of the "Kindle Unlimited" after-the-fact self-publisher. I've seen several times now where an author does this: 1. Publish their novel serially on a site like Royal Road. Build up a subscriber base, get on the leaderboards, try to grow. 2. Publish it to Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited requires that no other copies be available online, so remove it all from the original site. 3. Continue writing new content as "book 2" on the original sites to try and stay discoverable and on top of the leaderboards. Hope new readers will read the first few books on Amazon, thereby finally earning some money.
• Aditya_Garg 5y ago
  This is expected and falls under the Pareto distribution. All human creative endeavors follow this distribution (movies/ tv shows/ music) at different scales. Even some weird ones like most commonly used words follow this. Jordan Peterson has an excellent lecture on describing this phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEWRykSgwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEWRykSgwE
• obviouslynotme 5y ago
  Computers and the Internet have democratized culture in a way never seen before. This is both good and bad. Newspapers are dying. Television is dying. Hollywood is dying. Books are dying. Now we have people co-creating on blogs, YouTube, self-publishing, and fan-fiction websites. The production quality is certainly down from the peak of professional culture, but software tools are helping individual creators gain an edge. The consumer is absolutely winning right now. There is a lifetime of free diverse content just a click away. Traditional publishing and distribution cannot compete with that. The era when you could win a short story award and receive a decent advance on a novel to support yourself is going away, if not gone already. The future model for all upcoming artists is going to be pushing out content for free for years while building up a fan base until your advertising and Patreon can sustain you.
  • KittenInABox 5y ago
    The scariest part about the latter model is how the hell are we going to find any more Susanna Clarkes, J. D. Salingers, and any other author that doesn't want to or isn't able to buy into the parasocial nature of patreon and similar platforms? What if the author isn't hot, charismatic, or pleasant to listen to?
    • gpm 5y ago
      I don't look at Patreons that often, but if I think about the dozen or so that I have (maybe half of authors) none of them have had pictures of themselves on it, or audio recordings of themselves. So, I mean, it takes being somewhat charismatic in writing, but of the other properties you list... I don't seem them as important at all. Moreover, being charismatic in writing seems to be practically a requirement for being a good author. Nor is it like the previous model did not have biases, you needed to be good at selling yourself to publishing houses and the like instead of to readers directly, but you still needed to be good at selling yourself.
    • ellegriffin 5y ago
      I used to be that way. I created social media accounts this year (and started writing this newsletter) because I realized it was the only way to get my work read. There are so many amazing books out there that only ever see a couple readers because they don't market. It's just a hard reality (unless readers decide to go all indie and hunt for obscure books on the internet, like I do. But I'm sure I'm in the minority).
• analog31 5y ago
  I'm a musician. Good luck with the creator economy. As they say in music, don't quit your day job.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Ha! I definitely won't...
• offtop5 5y ago
  I've actually seen a boon in interactive fiction. Maybe authors can pivot to that. But I fear with the very low barrier to entry, most creatives won't be making money.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    What boon do you see in it?
    • offtop5 5y ago
      Visual novels, games like 80 Days or Sorcery
• peter303 5y ago
  I often attend the annual literary scifi convention. They have plenty of panels on how to increase sales. Becoming a popular "brand", e.g. Asian zombie novels, helps. Writing sequels and prequels to a modest central hit can help. Interestingly this group has lasted decades, from well before digitalization and the internet. The latter is a two edge sword, providing more market and competition at the same time.
• naomiajacobs 5y ago
  The idea of charging per-chapter (yes, I know it isn't a new model, Charles Dickens, etc) is interesting for: - the restrictions it'll impose on the authors - it means authors will have to know the entire plot up-front and can't redo or rearrange chapters - the pressure to have every chapter end with a cliff-hanger or something else to get the user to buy the next chapter - the effect on the reader (will people finish fewer books?)
  • bluGill 5y ago
    There is opportunity to rearrange things, but it is limited. You need to tell your readers what happened, and make sure the plot works for both readers who accept the change and those who don't. I'm guessing it works best to limit this to corrections ("last week I said that Joe did X, but of course he died last month - it was supposed to be Joe's cousin Frank"), but it is an area that I doubt it well explored to see how much readers will accept.
    • richardwhiuk 5y ago
      You could write the novel beforehand and then just release it month by month.
      • bluGill 5y ago
        That is one idea ,but enough novels have made that mistake over the years that I wouldn't trust it
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Power law distribution. You have to assume no one will read the book and you won't necessarily get rich but make it good for your own work ethic and prepare just in case it were to blow-up. It's sad that fewer and fewer people read books anymore, most people are too glued to screens looking for notifications, swiping, or playing games. (I almost ran-over a guy glued to his phone who nearly avoided being ran over by a bus through dumb luck and walked right in front of my car.)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• DVassallo 5y ago
  As an example of that middle ground mentioned in the article, I spent 2 weeks writing a short technical book about AWS, self-published it, and sold 6,587 copies and $133,030 in sales in 1.5 years.
  • spookybones 5y ago
    I've seen a few success cases like this with technical works written over a short period of time. I think it's an achievement distinct from fiction publishing because you're tapping into a lucrative market and answering a need. Congrats nonetheless on the success. How much do you charge for a copy, and how much marketing do you do?
    • DVassallo 5y ago
      The price is $25, but I’ve experimented between $15 and $38. I spent about $8K on ads (Reddit) but most of my marketing was organic from my Twitter account initially, and later it was mostly word of mouth.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    This is great!
• lacker 5y ago
  I feel like the article glosses over a key point: Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies. If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top-selling author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of this post is just assuming that they are not that great a writer, that they cannot reach the top 1% of their profession. Writing books is like making video games. Many people dream of creating one, and the vast majority of them are pretty bad. Nevertheless, some incredible books and video games are created, and the stars make a lot of money. Writing books may not be a good idea if your plan is to write some average books and make an average amount of money, but if you think you can write an amazing book, then what else can really compare?
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    a great book can have much more social impact than any movie, tv show, or other medium. Books allow for detail and development that is unrivaled by other mediums
    • greedo 5y ago
      I think this is very open to debate. How many people in the world have seen Star Wars? I would argue that no book short of the Bible has had a higher impact.
      • paulpauper 5y ago
        but what is the social impact of star wars besides spawning sequels?
        • bluGill 5y ago
          A ton of cheap plastic light sabers at birthday parties. And millions of Yoda one-liners all over.
      • Applejinx 5y ago
• paulpauper 5y ago
  >The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.” this is somewhat misleading. It includes tiny publishers, niche publishers, niche non-fiction, and so on. Such as "top 100 hiking trails in the Bay Area" and niche stuff like that. Fiction debuts by top publishing houses tend to be much more lucrative for the author and sell way more copies. Most aspiring authors tend to write fiction for a general audience, not niche non-fiction.
  • bluGill 5y ago
    Perhaps, but most aspiring authors are in the 98% that don't get significant sales. Once you get into the big publishers they will throw the marketing you need behind you - but they won't touch you unless they believe Opera will love you (or whatever the big promotion they needs)
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    I disagree that fiction by top publishing houses tend to be more lucrative for the author. I wrote an article about that one too if you're interested. https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
• setikites 5y ago
  Another feasible option is finding a niche market and publishing quality books that are either new or out of print to build that community. https://lostartpress.com/ https://lostartpress.com/
• lurquer 5y ago
  We’re getting very very close to the point where a group of amateurs can make a ‘major motion picture.’ Not quite yet... but it’s getting closer. CGI can create sets and even characters; AI tools to assist with rotoscope and backfill are becoming quite incredible. These tools are still packaged in relatively inaccessible environments (such as Blender and AfterEffects and others.) But, that’s changing too. In short, it’s going to become increasingly tempting to a creative type to ditch the book he’s writing and, instead, make a movie. Sounds silly. But, what occurred in the musical realm (where rank amateurs can simulate an entire orchestra on their PC if need be) is going to happen with Movies. Books — as a vehicle for drama — may not be coming back.
  • bambax 5y ago
    I think you are right with the analysis and prediction but wrong with the conclusion. What will happen when anyone can make a movie on their home computer that looks just as good as a Hollywood production is not that current book writers will make them. It is that the market will be flooded by visually fine, but structurally inept movies that no one will want to watch.
    • lurquer 5y ago
      Yeah. Ironically, what you’ve described has also happen to books to some degree. The self-published ‘Createspace’ or ‘KindleDirect’ books are usually cringeworthy. It’s the old curator problem... if it becomes trivial to create something in a medium, it’s more important then ever to have a gatekeeper or curator to help identify the good stuff.
• yoru-sulfur 5y ago
  The writer of this article seems to be unaware of existing communities of exactly what they are taking about. They mentioned Jemisin's patreon as if she's invented the idea or is the only one who's had success doing it, which is simply not true. Go to https://royalroad.com https://royalroad.com, view top rated stories, click on basically anything and you'll see patreon links of authors making thousands of dollars per month/chapter.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Yes, I totally understand that there are authors earning money from their AO3, royal road accounts. But, very few are making a living doing it. Jemisin was an exception. Of the fiction writers that currently have a Patreon account: "only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author)." I hope that there are more, and if you can find them please let me know!!!
    • yoru-sulfur 5y ago
      Hmm, now that I look into it more closely, most of these authors are making less than I expected. I've never actually visited most of their patreons to actually check, but yes most of them aren't making that much from it. It doesn't actually counter your main point, but I do think I have dug up more than 1 making more than $5000/month. https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL has 3317 patrons with a minimum donation of $3 per month, so even though the actual number is hidden that should be more than $5000 https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4240617 https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4240617 is similar, but with more patrons and a lower minimum. https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow is simply at more than $5000 per month. Where did you get those stats you quoted?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• sublimefire 5y ago
  The thing not mentioned or at least something which is quite opaque here is an easier access to foreign markets (did stats include those?). This sounds almost like a no brainer to me: self publish and translate your books to other languages - maximize the reach with additional investment. Obs I do not know the costs involved in translating the books.
• 8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
  This seems to match how music is consumed as well. You can release a great EP or album, but unless you're a marketing savant or you're well connected to someone who has a large following, your work will not be discovered or listened. There's simply too much music being released every day for anybody to discover it, so your best bet is to target a rather slim niche where you might have a chance to come to the surface with a small clique of rabid fans of the genre, and slowly build mass appeal one fan at a time.
• munificent 5y ago
  > Not to mention, an author would have to come out with one book a year to maintain that salary. Your math looks odd to me. You look at the amount a book earns in a single year and extrapolate that to the author's annual salary, but seem to assume that once the first year is up, the book stops earning. Does books earning passive over multiple years affect the numbers? For what its worth, my single non-fiction book has generated passive income for about seven years now. I fully agree with your larger point that earning a living off fiction is exceedingly difficult these days. I hope fiction authors can find new revenue models like you're exploring that are successful. But I fear that fiction will go the way of poetry and theatre where it becomes a niche art beloved by some but rarely lucrative enough to devote yourself full time to it.
  • ska 5y ago
    True - in order to do this analysis properly you need some idea of the distribution of royalties, and publication intervals, etc.
  • dalai 5y ago
    Agree. My non-fiction, niche book generated some income for almost 10 years even though it was outdated after the first 5 or so. I am guessing that in fiction they can earn for a lot longer. There are also other effects to take into consideration: Even a moderate hit will generate interest for previous books; books in a series or in a trilogy will boost each other’s sales. Not that getting the moderate hit is easy in any way.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Yes, I am basing that off the research I did for this article: https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth "Most books peak in the first 10 weeks after their debut, then exit the market." This is "most" so of course there are exceptions. And it sounds like you are one of them. That is amazing! Did it have a big bump at front, and then decrease over time? Or have you seen other bumps later on? I do wonder if serial content might be better. Because you get a bump every time you have a release, vs. only every three years when you have a whole book release. Either way, I'm fairly certain that it's like you say, and that fiction will go the way of poetry and become to niche to make a living from it. But I'm going to at least give it a go and see what happens!
• ameister14 5y ago
  She's WAY off with her data, because she's only going classic publishing and ignoring the fact that the 'new and untested' serialization model has many successful practitioners and has for a long time. To get to NK Jemisin's 5k per month on Patreon, she went down past 22 writers on the graphtreon rank. This part: There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author). That's just wrong. Pirateaba, Zogarth, Kosnik4, Shirtaloon, Wildbow, SenescentSoul and more make more than $5,000 a month - there are a bunch. There's a model here and it's working. She didn't have success on Patreon because she didn't use a platform like webnovel, royalroad, her own website or something similar to release the free tier and link to the patreon like everyone successfully using patreon to pay for their writing does.
• scottrogowski 5y ago
  This is a manifestation of the general rule, "don't do things that scale" - at least if you're not the absolute best in the world at what you do. Whenever something has high fixed and low marginal costs, this sort of winner-take-all distribution results. It's the exact same for indiegames, smartphone apps, or digital music.
• subpixel 5y ago
  A friend of mine is a genre fiction writer and he makes good money the hard way: by getting his books optioned for film & tv. He has no kids, is married to someone whose family has a lot of money, and spent twenty years achieving very little while writing a lot. But he worked like a dog on his fiction and currently has multiple books in various levels of 'development' and a film set to be shot this year with a known leading actress (not known to me, but certainly to fans of the genre). Ultimately I think some success can only be achieved by grinding, and not everyone is in a position to do that mentally or financially.
• coliveira 5y ago
  > Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views. So, this really means that the problem is not with writing, but the medium (book). Because all these Netflix films were written by someone. Instead of concentrating on the 11 books, the writer who wants to make money should concentrate on writing movie scripts for Netflix or similar.
  • notahacker 5y ago
    The medium (movie) requires getting someone to spend millions on crew and actors to shoot your script This is not necessarily any easier to achieve than writing a bestselling book, especially for a first-timer, and by the time the Hollywood accountants have finished calculating your share of the revenue, not necessarily any more lucrative.
    • coliveira 5y ago
      But it was never easy for someone just starting. You'll probably have to write books for close to free until something becomes successful. The equation is the same both for books or movie scripts.
      • notahacker 5y ago
        The first book you self-published or practically gave away to the publisher will be a book, if not a bestselling one. On the other hand the first movie script is vanishingly unlikely to get turned into a movie, and the fact you've written movie scripts that weren't developed won't help you get your next script taken more seriously.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  As someone who reads novels continuously, I find it really depressing that there might not be new novels to read much longer.
• eslaught 5y ago
  I've seen this type of analysis show up in a couple places, and I think it usually misses one critical factor: The vast majority of books frankly suck. I say this as an aspiring writer and as someone who (as part of that) has critiqued a bunch of books and parts of books. Even published books can be mediocre or bad. And this is even more true now in the days of self-publishing, where there's basically no barrier to pressing "go" before you're ready. What I see in the central table in the post (a couple paragraphs down from the top) is a power law distribution: at each successive level, roughly 10-30x more titles are able to get there. Sure, some percentage of those successes are due to a pre-existing platform. But how many writers are truly writing at the level of quality of the best-selling authors? I know, for my part, that after doing half a dozen or so major passes on my book, I still get critiqued for a variety of issues, some of which are embarrassingly basic. Look, I'm not saying writing is a great way to make money if that's your primary goal. But I do think there's more correlation here between quality of writing and sales than most people give credit for. It takes a lot of work to get there, so most people just don't. But that's not to say that the opportunity doesn't exist. I do appreciate the thoughts on alternative platforms though. Just because the journey is hard doesn't mean I shouldn't be trying to maximize the money I can make along the way. :-)
  • gcatalfamo 5y ago
    I would anecdotally counter argue that brand/audience/community building drives far more sales than the book quality
    • eslaught 5y ago
      It's possible that both of these are true. To be clear, when I say quality, I don't just mean this in the narrow sense of following the rules that writing teachers say you should. Harry Potter and Twilight both became popular because of some essence that they had---in my opinion, probably related to the world building and a certain difficult-to-describe experience of reading. Both of those books had "flaws" that were widely criticized. But they really hit home with their respective audiences. Why did the first Harry Potter succeed, before J.K. Rowling had made a name for herself? In my opinion, it's because readers loved it so much that they went out and told their friends to read it. That's what I'm talking about when I mean quality---the irresistible quality that makes me fall in love with everything the author is doing. Most books I see, even traditionally published ones, just don't have that.
• goopthink 5y ago
  Specifically for technical books, reaching a niche audience is perfectly fine and these things tend to grow an audience over time as they become reference material. Perhaps more importantly, writing a technical book is professionally akin to doing a PhD: you show a depth of subject matter knowledge and ability to sustain a long form project.
• plorkyeran 5y ago
  > There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author). This is just incredibly wrong? There are quite a few web serial authors making more than $5000/month on Patreon.
  • armorproof 5y ago
    Perhaps they didn't fit a search criteria? Got examples we can see?
    • dtech 5y ago
      Graphtreon records all pledges [1] [1] https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing
    • plorkyeran 5y ago
      A few I'm aware of: https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow $6000/month https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth $6500/month https://www.patreon.com/Magic_Smithing https://www.patreon.com/Magic_Smithing $10,000/month https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon $17,000/month https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba 4300 patrons with no $ listed but I've heard it's well over $10,000/month
      • ellegriffin 5y ago
        Thank you!!!! This is very helpful. Looks like they aren't tagged as fiction which is why I couldn't find them. I'll definitely dig into these as some amazing case studies!
• II2II 5y ago
  > Not to mention, an author would have to come out with one book a year to maintain that salary. I wouldn't classify releasing one book per year as a full time job, at least not based upon on the data provided. Turning a writing into a full time job means: - Investing considerable time into promoting a book, in an effort to net more than 10,000 copies sold. - Writing books that are heavily based upon research, in which case your book should be selling for more than $15 per copy. - Publishing more than a book per year, most likely in forms other than books (unless you're an established author). I'm not going to pretend that consistently writing 300 words of publication quality material per day is easy. Some of us are lucky if we can do as much one day in a year. On the other hand, it should not be easy. At the very least, an author is implicitly asking each reader to invest several hours of their life into the product of their labors. Authors need to be willing to put as much effort into writing as readers put into their livelihood.
• synergy20 5y ago
  I thought about writing books (technical stuff) but then realized there is nothing I can do about piracy, pdf/epub/etc are just a few clicks away. unlike music and movies that you have some leagues to enforce IP laws once a while, for books there is essentially none. It's hard to get motivations considering writing books are so demanding.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    I believe most authors of technical books get most of their payback from it in the form of enhanced status for consulting gigs, being as they are the person who "literally wrote the book" on topic [x]. I have heard that has been the case for quite some time.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    I won't say piracy is a non-issue. OK, it's a non-issue. The issue is if no one knows or cares that you wrote a book on a tech topic. To the degree people do, the far bigger deal in general is that you have now written a book on tech-related topic that can be career-enhancing in many other ways. This is not universally the case perhaps, but it's the way to bet. TBH, I find a downside of publishing through a traditional publisher is that I can't just freely distribute in digital form.
• CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
  Unlike movies/TV shows, books tend to 'age' relatively slowly. Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today. Not only that, but there are a literal ton of books out there that have been read by hundreds of thousands of people and reviewed extensively. I have found my personal enjoyment of a book to be loosely correlated with the goodreads / B&N scores. This gives me at least some signal with which to choose a new book. So why should I, as a reader, try out a new author / book that hasn't been read by anyone else? I'm sure there are a few jewels out there, but I'm sure there are even more duds. Reading a book takes time, and I don't want to waste my time / money on random selections of books.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    This is so relatable. I hunt out obscure books, but that's because I love really old surreal things and that is not the norm. And that's why only a few books get all the sales. Because they are the ones that turn up on Goodreads/etc. It's not bad that it works out that way. It's just, how do those other authors turn up on goodreads?
  • gnulinux 5y ago
    When I read books, I enjoy it a lot more when I read a "known great" book. It's easier to just pick up a Dostoyevksy, Kafka, Saramago, or Murakami or whatever. Chances are I'm gonna like it, or it'll be entertaining enough. When I try to explore my own likes, it ends up being frustrating because it takes a lot of trial and error. Consequently, I have no insensitive to read books that are recently published. It makes a lot more sense to wait for people to read books for me and tell me what are the great ones every decade. Meh, it works for me. Yes, I end up reading mostly 19th and 20th century stuff, but it feels sufficient.
    • ellegriffin 5y ago
      ME TOO. I pretty much only read classics. They are just so philosophically complex! I wish that we read now, like we read then. But I suppose television and video content are an art in their own way, and I could adapt my writing preferences to the screen. But I just have no interest there. Perhaps I'm just stuck in another century!
• kbenson 5y ago
  > But could fiction do the same? That is a yet unanswered question. There are a few serial fiction writers on Substack—but none are paid. There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author). I think those statistics are extremely suspect. I subscribe to a few fiction authors on Patreon, and there's a few I did subscibe to but don't any more. I know of at least 4-5 fiction authors making a lot of money, like $10k+/mo ($15k+/mo in some cases) writing fairly niche content (litrpg and/or xianxia type work). Then, when they get enough chapters for the current long-running fiction together, they bunfle it into a book and release on Kindle Unlimited, as an additional source of income. Here's some examples: - https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul - 2163 patrons as of now, minimum tier is $2.50/mo, but I suspect most people are paying $5 since that gives access to all advance chapters and not just some, and you can read delayed chapters on royalroad.com. So, probably somewhere between $4k and $8k a month, and this is their side hustle while in college I think. - https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels - 1393 Patrons. There is a $1/mo option, but various tiers from $3/mo to $10/mo give you up to 50 advance chapters from where it's publishes for free on royalroad.com. - https://www.patreon.com/jdfister https://www.patreon.com/jdfister - Page says they are making $4,116/mo from 517 patrons, similar situation as above with royalroad.com and advance chapters, as a point towards how much to expect the above people are making. - https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth - $12,753/mo from 1,886 subsribers. Same situation as above with free publishing on royalroad.com and advance chapters. - https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL - 3,317 patrons, my guess is they are making well above $5k/mo. - https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon - $17,297 from 2,403 patrons. Similar as above. Books showing up on Kindle Unlimited. These are just some people I actually read or read at some point in the past for a while, not a bunch I searched out that includes the top people. This is an answered question, IMO. If random web serials I'm reading are making this much money, I suspect there's a large amount of people making money this way.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    Thank you so much! These are excellent case studies. Will look into all of these.
• sheikheddy 5y ago
  > There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author). These numbers are off [1]. There are a few creators who do earn more than that, but don't disclose their earnings, only the number of patrons. But even if we restrict our discussion to only those who disclose their earnings, there's at least 10 people who make more than $5000 a month on patreon in the creative writing category. https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing
• aj7 5y ago
  This neglects the effect that writing things down has on the other media.
• aj7 5y ago
  A lot of books are written to claim “ownership” rights over certain ideas. These “rights” are convertible to other items of value: lectures, consultancies, academic appointments, jobs of all kinds, etc. This is almost the sole rationale for technical books- the value of being considered an expert.
• smithza 5y ago
  There is always Asimov's approach. Just publish more books. Over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1,000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years, I published an average of 1,700 words a day. - Isaac Asimov
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• fencepost 5y ago
  Content is not the problem, there's a ton of content out there (even more now that self publishing is so easy). Discovery and discoverability are both the big problem and where the industry has been - be it books or music. This reminds me of indy musicians who are able to make a living by working with and for their relatively small groups of fans. It's the approach pushed by the Beatnik Turtle guys in a book 15 years ago (Indie Musician Survival Guide or something like that), but I know both published and unpublished authors who've done the same (notably a few books in Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe, which was then picked up by Baen).
• annexrichmond 5y ago
  > Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views. This is a pretty unhelpful comparison as I'm not aware of any major read as much as you want book subscription service that pays dividends to the author. What's the value in purchasing a book versus merely "viewing" a movie?
  • jagged-chisel 5y ago
    > I'm not aware of any major read as much as you want book subscription service ... Kindle Unlimited > ... that pays dividends to the author. I'd like to learn whether KU does this, pretends to do this, or does nothing at all.
• NoOneNew 5y ago
  I have one big issue with the book industry... many actually... but related to the article, all this whining is self imposed. Literary books are marketed far heavier than genre. This is the equivalent to arthouse films vs what actually makes money as a movie/show. Let's take one similar plot. A chemistry teacher is diagnosed with cancer, cant get treated and eventually dies. Literary and arthouse will do a discovery piece on how this person copes with death and cries with their family, then character dies. Genre... the dude builds a meth empire and everything the arthouse did, the genre adds in. Let's be serious about which was really going to be successful and why. Entertainment is about escaping boring. You fail that, you fail in general. Most book lists are boring people with boring problems doing boring things. The book industry did this to themselves by shitting on the genre writers. The publisher that does a marketing campaign, "to hell with boring literary books" and pushes mysteries, scifi, cozys, fantasy and others, they'll open up to the demographic that's not "regular readers". Thats about 70% of a population is an untapped market. Most people who dont read on a normal basis have been trained by school and the book media that fun books are "wrong". I have zero sympathy for the book industry in this regard and I'm an avid reader. I've converted more non-readers than any guilt tripping article regarding this problem.
  • KittenInABox 5y ago
    Every major publishing house has a SFF imprint with its own marketing budget and does marketing campaigns. Tor dot com (Macmillan), Orbit Books (Hachette), etc. They have marketing campaigns on youtube, tiktok, instagram, twitter and more. They have little video trailers, cover reveals, physical and collectible advance copies etc. Or in simple words, could you clarify here?
    • NoOneNew 5y ago
      The average person who doesn't visit a bookstore has zero clue. If you're a reader, its all duh, but you're acting like an elitist then. Just because you know, doesn't mean outsiders know. At that, the "right books to read" attitude pisses me off. Its everywhere in some form or another in popular media where someone can accidentally see it. The industry is constantly marketing to their diminishing demographic instead of trying to figure out how to increase it again. Talk to non readers to find out their knowledge set of what kind of books are out there. Again, I convert folks all the time. I get zero a year readers to an average of 6 to 10 a year. Mostly because i used to hate reading until i got converted as well. I know the pain points.
• drivers99 5y ago
  I didn't see anyone mention The Long Tail by Chris Anderson so figured I would. Here's a summary: https://fourminutebooks.com/the-long-tail-summary/ https://fourminutebooks.com/the-long-tail-summary/ Sounds like being the aggregator of a bunch of niche products can be profitable, but I don't think it explains how the producers of that content actually make money off the situation while being part of the long tail.
• ableal 5y ago
  If memory serves, Gore Vidal said something like "a famous writer will be like a famous ceramicist". Ah, here we go: https://www.npr.org/2012/08/01/157696354/gore-vidal-american-writer-and-cultural-critic-dies?t=1620670820172 https://www.npr.org/2012/08/01/157696354/gore-vidal-american...
• peterarmstrong 5y ago
  One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.) Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store). For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/ https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/
  • mritchie712 5y ago
    This is self promotion done well. Provide insight into the problem you solve and explain where you fit into this story. Nice job.
    • peterarmstrong 5y ago
      Thanks :) Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons. If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...
• vidarh 5y ago
  A large part of this is that writing a book is easy. Writing a good book is hard. Writing a good book and getting it packaged well is harder. Writing a good book and getting it packaged well and marketed well is really high effort. I've published a novel. It's part of a series (#2 is being proof-read; link in my profile). Of the time I've spent on this project, writing is the smallest. I've found I can churn out ~20k words a week if I put my mind to it, so a 60k-80k novel is doable in a month. But then it needs to go through an editor (and you need to spend money on a decent one), and a proofreader, and a cover designer (no, unless you're an artist with some design flair your self-designed cover will rarely cut it for fiction), and then you need to market it, including putting in high effort into getting people to review it (but caution: soliciting reviews is a minefield - Amazon does allow you to offer a free copy, but you must be careful not to influence the reviews). All that, and you still will very likely not sell very much at first (irrespective of quality; and of course part of the challenge with self-publishing is that there's a lot of self-delusion about writing quality going on). Charlie Stross mentioned on Twitter a while back that it took many years (10?) before he made more than 5k/year from his writing. That was with building up a back catalog. So if you want to write for money, you need to decide whether you see this as buying a lottery ticket (write and submit to traditional publishers and hope you have the next Harry Potter etc.), or if you're ok with being paid per word (submit queries to magazines). Or if you want the long, hard slog to build up a back catalogue and fan base. People do manage to build serious income streams that way even with small sales per book, but it takes time and a focus on writing fast and churning out as many books as you can. My favourite example is Kjell Hallbing, who under the pseudonym Louis Masterson wrote 100+ western pulp books - the most well known is Morgan Kane (the books were released from the 60's onwards; warning: the originals are very pulpy and dated to start with, but the recent English translations are apparently particularly bad). He sold ~20 million plus during his lifetime - an astonishing number for a Norwegian author (given the Norwegian market is only 5m). The key was the number of books, and getting translated to 20+ languages, and time. On average each book only sold about 10k per language - some more, some less, of course - over a period of decades. But write enough and sell it over many enough years in many enough markets that are not as saturated, and it adds up. (Or maybe you don't really care about the money, in which case you can do exactly as you please.) For my part, the writing is a hobby. If it starts to accumulate income over time, then it'll be a great bonus. I'm writing pulp-y, short sci-fi novels in part because I like reading that, in part because it's easy to write as a part-time/hobby project compared to some 250k word monstrous volume. The TL;DR is that writing a book is a really great idea if you like writing, but if you do it because you want to make money, you need to realise from the start that the writing will be a relatively small part (doubly so if you're planning to self-publish), and that short of figuratively winning the lottery you'll need to write a lot of a long period of time for it to start paying off. If you want a get-rich-quick scheme, writing books is probably a bad idea.
• toomuchredbull 5y ago
  Hasn't this always been the case? It's like being a playwright or any artist really. A very few successful ones, and lots of people who do it as a hobby. Even some of the successful ones are only successful in death, not life.
  • ellegriffin 5y ago
    This is true, the creative arts have always been volatile as a career choice. And it's true that some of those artists become successful as a fluke or as an accident of their death. But it's also true that many of the successful creatives intended to be successful, or at least tried very hard to be, and those were the seeds that set up for some kind of "big break." For example, in the case of Dan Brown, one of the most successful authors to date, he scheduled his own press tour, booked his own interviews, sent out press releases, etc. And his early books actually did pretty well, selling about 10,000 copies each because of his promotional efforts. Of course he went on to sell millions of copies, but I don't think he would have accidentally become a best seller without developing a platform for his work with those early novels.
    • richardwhiuk 5y ago
      Yes, but there's also probably a mass of people who did what Dan Brown did and sold < 10k copies.
• Forricide 5y ago
  I feel that this article might suffer from being a bit hyperfocused on specifically publishing novels, and therefore ignoring other forms of fiction. > The real success story here is N. K. Jemisin who was earning $5,068/month publishing fiction on Patreon before she received a traditional publishing contract and went that route instead. But she is the only real case study we have. In particular, this line rings false, considering Wildbow is currently publishing fiction at $6000/month and has been steadily growing for years. Taylor Fitzpatrick[1] is publishing fiction at a per-story rate, which is harder to calculate a strict number for, but could easily be up there. SenescentSoul[2] is making at least $5000/month, but doesn't show the actual number on their patreon. I could go on; although I've read Wildbow's work in the past, I've never heard of the other two, and just found them by searching "writing" on patreon. Of course, none of these are strictly writing novels: Wildbow is a web serial author; SenescentSoul appears to be the same, and the other is a short story author. This is perhaps why the author (intentionally? unintentionally?) seems to have left such a large area of successful fiction writing out of their article. However, not mentioning the huge success of self-published LitRPG, romance, web serials, etc. in an article that is centered around positing the question "Could the creator economy work for fiction authors?" seems like a rather large oversight to me. None of these people mentioned are making the prized $10k USD/month that the author holds so highly (although [2] might be), but they're all extremely successful even relative to the world of traditionally published novels, and they're far from the only examples. I understand that this author is quite focused on novels specifically, but self-published novels from romance/litrpg authors can also be quite successful; this is much harder to find numbers for than patreon-based authors, of course, so this is only an anecdote. [0] https://www.patreon.com/wildbow https://www.patreon.com/wildbow [1] https://www.patreon.com/imogenedisease https://www.patreon.com/imogenedisease [2] https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul
• spoonjim 5y ago
  “Novelist” is not a job where lots of people would be expected to be making healthy middle class incomes. An average person is going to be able to read maybe a few thousand books in their life and the older books don’t get any worse so there is more competition every year. How many basketball players are earning more than $100,000 a year? Not many, because everyone who likes basketball wants to watch the same few people who are really great at it. The same is true with novels, so unless you have the talent and drive and hustle to get to the top of the game, then you should consider your writing a hobby just like the suburban dad playing basketball with his buddies harbors no thoughts of trying out for the Chicago Bulls.
• tomcam 5y ago
  OP mentions that the publishing business is ripe for disruption but I believe that happened a decade and a half ago: it’s called self publishing. The problem is there’s no way to collect the data. Many self publishers have been kind enough to document their successes on this site, but many more have a reason not to do so. There is often perfectly good reason not to reveal a lucrative niche.
• gdubs 5y ago
  One book that really changed my life was "Feeling Good" by David Burns. It kinda popularize Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But the book wasn't an overnight success. It languished for years as his publisher refused to put any marketing dollars into it. They made it clear that his book wasn't really gonna get any love. Anyway, one day he got a call from Phil Donahue's producer. If I recall correctly, Burns had spent years doing any local spot he could get, and made it a point to be extra appreciative and grateful to anyone who interviewed him. One of these people went on to become one of Donahue's producers. (Donahue was in the class of Oprah back in the 80s and 90s). Overnight, his book became a huge success. There's a lot of stories of 'overnight' successes actually being many many years in the making. Anyway, this was just one relevant one that came to mind reading this.
• TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  > Traditional publishers are looking for a sure thing. They want an author who already has an existing platform and can guarantee an audience. This seems factually untrue. Obviously, that's the ideal author that they will pay out big advances to, but publishers publish tons of books by unproven authors. They publish a lot of books hoping to find a few that take off and sell well.
• tyrex2017 5y ago
  imho, for most, the biggest advantage of writing a book is to upsell consulting after that. together with that, it is a great learning opportunity for the author. all in all: not for me
• steelframe 5y ago
  I put some effort into writing a sci-fi novel some years back, but I've since realized that the highest income-per-word ratio that I can hope to realize from my creative writing efforts has to come from my perf self assessment.
  • zffr 5y ago
    I’ve always wondered how much of a direct impact your self assessment actually has on your compensation adjustment. At least in my current job, I feel like my manager already has a ball-park idea of the Comp adjustment to give me. It feels like I would probably get more or less the same adjustment no matter what I write so long as I write something reasonable
    • steelframe 5y ago
      Yeah, I hear you. I've always put considerable effort into my self assessments, trying to pick just the right words to make sure it's concise yet potent. However I had already made up my mind to leave my previous employer by the time perf review cycle had come around, so I decided to understate everything as much as I possibly could, basically eliminating all superlatives and just stating as flatly as I possibly could all of the things that happened. My project was "late" -- as in, later than an arbitrary deadline everyone around me was trying to hoist on the project versus what I said all along the timeline was actually going to be. Eschewing metrics, I focused on "soft" issues like supporting members of my team who were struggling with the sudden work-from-home transition. I deliberately kept any mention of ARR, growth, or anything like that out. I still ended up with an "exceeds expectations" rating. My management must have made up their minds ahead of time about that, because what I wrote for my self assessment didn't support it.
    • Tycho 5y ago
      Even if your manager will mostly rely on their own judgement, the write-ups will be the only thing that future managers (at the same org) can rely on to learn about your work, and also for things like promotion, your manager will probably need to convince a committee, so being able to draw from your self-assessment will help them argue your case.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months, even for authors that I absolutely love. With my reading habits, I couldn't even afford to pay that much across the volume of books I read if most of my favorite authors switched to such a model.
  • edgartaor 5y ago
    >I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months Me neither. Maybe I would buy the book in a presale, but that's it. This kind of selling just work for early adopters, the kind of people who stand in line for hours to buy a new product.
  • autarch 5y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If I paid $8/month to every author that I like enough to buy most of their books, that'd easily end up at $500+/month, and maybe $1,000/month. Compare that to buying all their books (even in hardcover), which is around $1,000 per year. Plus I have no interest in reading things a chapter at a time. I read one book or series from start to finish at a time. I don't like jumping back and forth between many different novels.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  How many apps do really well? How many albums do really well? How many movies do really well? While the outliers (read: successful) are as sexy as a gold rush, they are rare. That's not to say you should not try. Do what you must. Someone has to be the next outlier. The reality is, the combo of quality and quantity is a unicorn. You have to have something exceptional in some way. The scrapheaps of history say that's easier said than done. Put another way, in order to get to that golden 1,000 fans at $100 per year, how many months will you have to publish? 24? 36? More?
• rland 5y ago
  Maybe we should restructure our value system a bit to value writing a book more. The takeaway from this article is "writing books doesn't produce value, so less people should do so." Everyone agrees (or professes to agree) that books have value. So why don't they have value? We can decide, we're not slaves to the market economy.
• m1117 5y ago
  Yeah, writing a book is something that you not only do for the money, but because you love it.
• secondcoming 5y ago
  This seems to contradict this guy [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27108326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27108326
• Sebb767 5y ago
  > Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views. Reading a book takes far longer than watching a movie. Assuming ten hours for a book, that's 5 million "read hours" compared to 102 million "watch hours" (assuming 90 min) for the top movies. Plus, movies can be watched in the background or socially in a group. I'm not saying reading is not a niche - it probably is far smaller than it used to be -, but it's not as niche as this statement makes it out to be.
  • nemo44x 5y ago
    But you can’t possibly make a work like “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “infinite Jest” into a movie. Hell, most adaptions of Hemingway are awful (original “Old Man and the Sea” not withstanding) because literature is not easily adapted to other mediums. It can only exist as writing because it is writing that challenges what reading is. Lots of non-literary fiction, like “Game of Thrones” translates well and having read the books and watched the show I’d probably agree with your assessment here - optimize for time. But real literature is only good as literature.
    • Sebb767 5y ago
      I'm not saying one should optimize for time - I fully agree that movies and books can be quite distinct in what they accomplish. My point is that you can not stack up movies and books 1:1 for sales, as people have limited free time and one person watching exclusively movies, for example, would generate far higher watch numbers than a person only reading books would buy books (everything else being equal). While not ideal, I think comparing them by time spent gives a far better comparison of what is currently popular than simply comparing sales numbers.
      • nemo44x 5y ago
        I’d isolate literature from this though. Literature has always been a medium with a limited audience. In the past due to most people being illiterate compared to modern times where it isn’t accessible to many people due to literary complexity. The last 100 or so years has been an anomaly in that for the first time in history we had a highly literate population that could read fiction. And for much of this era movies and TV were not as accessible to create or consume. But today it is both affordable to create, distribute, and consume fiction via the motion picture therefore making written fiction niche as the audience for it isn’t interested in the literary aspect of it so much as the story telling element. So as we’ve had cumulatively more content disseminated at at accelerating pace it has made most written fiction as obsolete as the parlor singer or traveling news reader. Implanting the stories would do to TV what TV has done popular books. May be it time or effort, modern story dissemination technology allows people to consume more fiction per hour. I only think most people weren’t reading because they liked to read. They wanted to consume stories and now fiction books are just not able to compete with TV streaming. But literature should be continue on as it has.
• DanielBMarkham 5y ago
  Goals are very important to acknowledge. If you're only interested in income and are writing fiction, the numbers are against you. In general, as the author shows, writing isn't a great source of direct income. If, however, you've accumulated a lot of research on a personal topic and want to gather the threads together and reach some personal conclusions, long-form non-fiction is probably the only tool that's going to work, whether you publish or not. There are many more indirect benefits for various niche genres. If you reduce it all to money, you're not going to be happy. Everybody can publish now and as a result of that, most books are not that great. One wag said that the great majority of books published today shouldn't be published at all. I tend to agree, at least in terms of publishing for a wide audience. It's just that book publishing doesn't have to be like that. I'm starting on another book this year. Each of my previous books has had less than 1,000 readers and I'm happy as a clam. In fact, I really don't want to start publishing to a mass audience. In my opinion, looking at writing only in terms of a mass audience is the best way to start writing a lot of highly-targeted trash. Everybody is already trying to write the next version of serialized pulp fiction. That's why, in my opinion, no matter how well you write for any sized audience at all it's only going to end up being mediocre (by comparison). If, however, you write reasonably well on a laser-focused extremely small niche that you have great passion for? You win even if you get only seven readers. Beat the game by not playing by the rules they give you.
  • megameter 5y ago
    Related is also to choose to work in the appropriate medium. There are many things called books, but not all of them are defined by numbered chapters, carefully outlined paragraphs and artful prose - and it's the obligation of such that tends to act as a barrier. A 8-page zine can usually get the essence of an idea out of your head, and the format lends itself to thinking about the overall aesthetic as part of the message.
• dang 5y ago
  All: large threads get paginated so to see all the comments you need to click More at the bottom, or on links like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055&p=2 It's a good thread; I recommend it. (Comments like this will go away once pagination does—it's just a performance workaround. Sorry for the annoyance.)
• makstaks 5y ago
  One challenge I had with the opening statistics in the post is that it treats all books being equal in writing quality and market demand. Just because I write a book, doesn't entitle it to be bought.
• alphabet9000 5y ago
  move 100% of books to ebooks and make them as obnoxious as possible. start adding things like loot boxes. pay a dollar to read a TOP SECRET crucial bit to the storyline that you simply wont get the Full Book Experience (tm). give it Social (tm) capabilities. show indicators where everyone else is reading and allow comments on any sentence in the book. feature self facing cameras on the ebook so you can live stream yourself reading. Allow users to Like your live streams and display metrics on every page.
  • ALittleLight 5y ago
    Kindle let's you highlight or comment on any section of the book. Highlights are somewhat shared across readers in the sense that I will sometimes see a passage that the Kindle says has been highlighted "315 times" or some such number. The popular highlight annotations always make me wonder how so many highlights came to collide on a single phrase. Do some people highlight a passage because it's been highlighted by many other people?
• Tycho 5y ago
  Another thing about books is: why take the chance of reading a book that is new? There’s thousands of classics to occupy yourself with as a reader, or even books from 20 years ago that have stood some test of time.
• glaberficken 5y ago
  Follow me on a naive exercise here: Zoom out from books only let's look at some media that are competing for people's attention in 2021. (not exhaustive:) - Video-games (including mobile) - Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc) - Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc) - Music (single purchase and streaming) - TV (yup still going) - News (TV, and online mostly) - books (print and ebooks) Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years. Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing? The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period). My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though. We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it. Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff. The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content. I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.
• whall6 5y ago
  Show me an actually good book and I will pay for it. Until then you can keep your pulp fiction and trashy romance novels.
• TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
  Stephen King's book on writing is really good: https://stephenking.com/works/nonfiction/on-writing-a-memoir-of-the-craft.html https://stephenking.com/works/nonfiction/on-writing-a-memoir...
• alexnewman 5y ago
  The hardest job i ever had was writing taxonomies, bibliographies and chapter 3 of CLASP. It later became OWASP. Anyone who writes books for a living is doing the worst job ever in my humble opinion
• yamellasmallela 5y ago
  I am planning on writing a book but only to say I did for my professional career. Money from it would be nice but its ultimately just an investment into furthering my main source of income. People really trust your opinion on something if you say you literally wrote the book on it... for some reason.
• tima101 5y ago
  I encourage all authors to self publish. I self published two books, prices are $99 and $199. I only sold 2500 copies in 3 years but it's a nice supplement to main income since there is no publisher and only fee is Stripe's. I often read online about authors who sold 50,000 or 100,000 copies with big-name publisher but made less money than me. Which is ridiculous. I recommend having some knowledge for free, for example, open source project. Charge more per copy and expect lower number of sales. Continuously improve project and book. Collect reviews in respectful way. I am happy to answer any questions.
  • LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
    Could I ask which type of contain?
    • tima101 5y ago
      Web development, building complete projects JavaScript and TypeScript.
• nemo44x 5y ago
  It’s probably worthwhile to consider both fiction and non-fiction and literature. I’d imagine fiction in particular is dying but literature and non-fiction are selling as well or better than historically, which means not mainstream but sustainable to the (very) limited count of authors capable of making it, literature in particular. I’m not concerned if we don’t uncover the next Stephen King (he’s got a few great books though!) so long as the next Pynchon is published.
• EamonnMR 5y ago
  You could write a similar article about producing music or writing games.
• machiaweliczny 5y ago
  I think it's good, otherwise it would end with too much commercialisation and flush of crap content.
• lenkite 5y ago
  Was self-published books even considered in this assessment ?
• whoChumpedwho 5y ago
  writing books isn't for everyone, but we need books from some people
• lbriner 5y ago
  But writing really good books surely is? The numbers are quite frightening but honestly, it is a crowded market with millions of professional, semi-professional and hoobyist authors all trying to stand-out. I have read a few books recently, that are quite well-known, and didn't really find the quality very high. These are books that have gone through the high barrier of publishing and distribution so they can't be "garbage" but yet, they were underwhelming. On the other hand, I have read some books which are outstanding and unique. They have a USP over other books, which is why they should and could succeed. In such a crowded market, one should not expect to make a good full-time salary, just like most footballers and musicians would be lucky to make enough to live on, let alone a good salary.
• ehvatum 5y ago
  Who else here read like 50 Black Library 40k novels, last year? It’s a reminder that HN is a community of communities of outliers.
• 20thCB 5y ago
  Reading books has always been a niche activity. Many (most?) people don't have any books, and haven't read any since they were forced to at school. Of course HN readers will skew towards readers but they are the minority.
• kixiQu 5y ago
  I really liked this piece and I'm quite curious how genre fiction's overall subsidy of traditional publishing houses factors into this. The answers to all these questions are very different for e.g. genre romance authors than for e.g. literary nonfiction authors.
• tumbleweedwords 5y ago
  https://tumbleweedwords.substack.com/ https://tumbleweedwords.substack.com/