[HN Gopher] Writing books is not really a good idea ___________________________________________________________________ Writing books is not really a good idea Author : ellegriffin Score : 382 points Date : 2021-05-10 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (ellegriffin.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (ellegriffin.substack.com) | giantg2 wrote: | I would have been happy if my toddler book was published and sold | even $5k copies. | sublimefire wrote: | 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. | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | 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. | Vvector wrote: | > I do also think that the expectation/standard of a $100k/year | salary is a bit high. | | Agreed. Most writers do it because they love writing, not | because they expect $100k/year. The money comes after the | success. I wish her luck | ellegriffin wrote: | I would call it more of a hope than an expectation. Really | what I'm trying to figure out is if it's possible to monetize | a niche audience (with fiction content) and make a living | from it. I guess we'll find out... And thanks for the luck! | bun_at_work wrote: | There's an interesting book [1] that talks about how media | changes over time. In short, new media forms replace older | forms, pushing the older forms into niches. An obvious example | is TV replacing radio, where radio used to be full of story- | based content, but when that content moved to TV, radio became | largely a niche form of media, focusing on music (and talk | shows and weather etc). | | This paints a picture of media forms along some continuum, | which describes what you're looking for. | | [1] Media Literacy, W. James Potter | salamandersauce wrote: | Yes. Needs comparison to past years to be useful. Would also be | helpful to compare books that came out in past year or few | years to see how their sales trends. We also need to know what | those books that are tracked are. Are they just in print | titles? Or does it count 60 year old used biology textbooks for | sale on Amazon no one wants? Or dated romance novels long past | their prime? Because if those are included I'm not surprised | they are struggling to sell 1000 copies. Even new books in | niche academic fields can struggle to sell 1000 copies as the | audience is so small. | ellegriffin wrote: | I did mention Alexandre Dumas as a case study in a previous | article. Here's a snippet: | | "But there used to be another way. When Alexandre Dumas | debuted The Count of Monte Cristo it was published as a | feuilleton--a portion of the weekly newspaper devoted to | fiction. From August 1844 to January 1846 his chapters were | published in 18 installments for The Journal des Debats, a | newspaper that went out to 9,000 to 10,000 paying subscribers | in France--and readers were rapt by it. | | In the forward to a 2004 translation of the book, the writer | Luc Sante wrote: "The effect of the serials, which held vast | audiences enthralled... is unlike any experience of reading | we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like | that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after | day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked | of little else." | | It was basically "Game of Thrones." Readers could not wait to | get their hands on the next chapter and that bode very well | for the writer who was not only paid by the newspaper in | real-time for his work (by the word), but also grew the | popularity of his work over the entirety of the time it was | being published. | | "The 'Presse' pays nearly 300 francs per day for feuilletons | to Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, De Balzac, Frederic Soule, | Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau," Littell's Little Age, | Volume 10 wrote in 1846. "But what will the result be in | 1848? That each of these personnages will have made from | 32,000 to 64,000 francs per annum for two or three years for | writing profitable trash of the color of the foulest mud in | Paris?" | | That "profitable trash" earned those writers an annual salary | of between $202,107 to $404,213 in today's dollars--and the | obvious disdain of that Littell writer who, even then | preferred the merits of a bound and published book. The same | volume goes on to say that Dumas earned about 10,000 francs | ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The | Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845." | | https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth | narrator wrote: | Ever read Boswell's life of Samuel Johnson? Samuel Johnson | was a poet, which was about as close as you could be to a | rock star in terms of popular culture fame in the 18th | century. | selimthegrim wrote: | Feuilletons still exist even now at least in Germany but | they are more devoted to cultural commentary. | coliveira wrote: | But these authors were the 19th century version of Dan | Brown. They made far less than a modern writer of similar | success would make. | cafard wrote: | Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, and Sand? They turned out some | hack work, no doubt, but also a fair bit that is still | read. | coliveira wrote: | I'm talking in terms of success. Of course any French | writer of the 19th century is better than Dan Brown. | salamandersauce wrote: | A comparison to the recent past and not the most successful | French authors of the 19th century. For every Dumas making | $200,000-$400,000 there was probably a hundred authors | you've never heard of making $2000. And the market has | changed so much since the mid-19th century as there is way | more alternatives for people's time like movies, TV shows, | video games, etc. with completely different distribution | methods because of things like the internet enabling people | to get content out for free. | | You need to look back at the recent past and not just the | most successful authors to see what the trends are. Is a | random sampling of 100 authors from 2000 making more than | those in 2019? Has the total number of books sold sharply | declined? | ghaff wrote: | >Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? | | My assumption is almost certainly yes-- _provided_ you made it | through the big publisher gatekeepers. (And were able to parlay | that into shelf space at the store.) | | - People probably read more books. There were fewer other | demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online | content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I | used to. | | - There was less competition once you got through the | aforementioned gatekeepers. | | - There was less discounting. Books used to be sold at list | price. And, subsequently, maybe at a small discount in some | places. | | - Publishers often provided support with marketing activities. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | For fiction publishers were small houses with semi-amateur | owners. They had an interest in what they were publishing, | and if they liked an author they'd provide opportunities and | invest in a career. | | For example Penguin, which was launched in the 30s to provide | cheap literary paperbacks for the mass market - a kind of | cultural levelling up instead of dumbing down. | | Now publishing houses are relatively small departments in | unimaginably huge media corporations. Penguin is now part of | Penguin Random House which is part of Bertelsmann, which also | owns BMG (Bertelsmann Music), RTL TV/Radio in Europe, and | Arvato, which is a general purpose corporate offering | logistics, finance, IT. | | So it's not a family-owned business any more. And it is much | more business than family, with the usual MBA culture of | targets, ROI, and the rest. | chipotle_coyote wrote: | You're right, from everything I've read, but there are two | other interesting data points: | | (1) The idea of the "midlist novel" or "paperback original" | basically disappeared for a couple decades -- these are the | old mass market paperbacks that you used to see all the time, | about 4.25" by 7", that you almost _never_ see anymore. (So, | there was a _kind_ of discounting: softcover books were a lot | cheaper, even when adjusted for inflation.) There were | authors who made a good living pumping out these midlist | books at the rate of one or even two a year. The self- | publishing boom has brought this back to a degree as ebook | originals, although I 've talked to more than a few ebook- | first indie authors who insist they need to get out _four or | more_ books a year to make a living, so it 's arguably harder | for most. And of course that "most" is "most of those who | manage to make a living that way," which is, well, not | actually most! | | (2) Short story rates used to be much, _much_ higher than | they are now when adjusted for inflation, to the point where | there were people who made a successful living selling | primarily -- or even exclusively! -- short fiction. I 've | never been able to get a good read, pun intended, on what | happened here, other than a nebulous sense that readers' | tastes just changed over the years (the "fewer other demands | on attention" you mention was likely a big part of that), and | those markets became less viable. | ghaff wrote: | In SF, at least, the magazine ecosystem associated with | short stories has taken a pretty big hit which means new | authors tend to not get into the genre that way. Of course, | that's a bit self-referential because "Why did that | ecosystem largely go away?" and the answer is that I'm not | sure. Though I'll note that a fair bit is online these days | so maybe new authors felt that was a better way to build | their name. | | I'd also note that some of the better SF short story | writers these days tend to write in a mix of genres and | often publish in places like The New Yorker. | sdenton4 wrote: | Short fiction was being bought by magazines with large | reader bases. Magazines have essentially died as a medium | over the last twenty years, and fiction magazines were on | their way out well before then. | | If you've got a larger reader base and lots of competition, | you can pay a lot for content. If you don't, you can't. The | various TV subscription services are playing the same game | that the sci-fi magazines used to; they pay a huge amount | to produce content for recurring revenue, in fairly tight | competition with the other streaming services to have the | best stuff. (Think the expanse vs the mandalorian vs | unbounded quantities of star trek.) The primary medium for | consuming sci-fi changed as it went more mainstream, but | also magazines died generally. | TchoBeer wrote: | >People probably read more books. There were fewer other | demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online | content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than | I used to. | | I'd imagine the number of books sold per year is strictly | increasing. | jbay808 wrote: | If it's increasing because of a growing number of readers, | then that's a winner take all scenario where Harry Potter | sells more and more copies as each new reader hasn't read | it yet. | | If it's growing because of one extremely voracious reader | buying up every book they can get their hands on, that's a | scenario that favours more obscure authors. | bluGill wrote: | Closer to the later for most authors. Though every few | dozen years there is another Harry Potter that everyone | in the world buys and reads. For most you need to target | those voracious readers and what they are willing to pay | for - but be ever on the lookout as to how you can jump | to the Harry Potter world where everyone buys your books. | | Harry Potter was good (in the first few anyway), but if | you like that type of thing there are ton of much better | books that never made it. | Rerarom wrote: | Please name one. | jholman wrote: | If you particularly wanted books that "didn't make it", I | don't know anything about that. But maybe you just wanted | books that are like HP but better than HP. | | I read the first few HP, and thought they were dreadful, | and thus never read the later ones, so maybe I'm not the | person you want advice from, but here are some | recommendations of novels/novelists in the same genre | (fantasy novels, written for children, that hold up for | adults): | | Nearly anything by Dianna Wynne Jones, but I particularly | enjoyed The Lives of Christopher Chant, Archer's Goon, | and of course Howl's Moving Castle. | | Susan Cooper's famous Dark is Rising series. Half the | series is more normal-kid (starting with Greenwitch), | half is more special-magic-kid (starting with The Dark is | Rising). | | Garth Nix's Old Kingdom, starting with Sabriel. | | While China Mieville is very much not a children's author | (really! don't buy a random mieville book for your young | niece/nephew, really don't!), Un-Lun-Dun is an amazing | book in this genre. | ghaff wrote: | This suggests otherwise. (Although this is obviously not a | complete set of data. I'd actually probably have expected a | bigger falloff but maybe ease of acquisition leads to more | people buying books they don't end up reading.) | | https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about- | publish... | bryanrasmussen wrote: | I suppose the assumption is predicated on a rising | population. | | Also you'd think last year might have led to more people | reading books. | kevinmchugh wrote: | Vonnegut I remember writing somewhere that radio and especially | TV had killed the market for short stories in magazines, which | were a great way for authors to get started. | | Here's some other things he said on making a living as a | writer: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vonnegut- | writing-i... | | Note that he got paid $750 for his first short story in 1949! I | don't know how many places are paying first time authors that | much today, and then you remember to calculate inflation. | iib wrote: | I assume even in radio and TV, not all segments are created | equal. Maybe live, ad-libbed shows had a more detrimental | effect, in the sense that at least scripted shows employ more | writers? | | Also, would it not make sense to look at writing even from a | more indirect point? For example, millions of people enjoyed | the creativity of the /Friends/ writers, without actually | reading a single word. Should they be counted as successful | as a book writer with millions of readers? | vidarh wrote: | In the US, for scifi, the SFWA requires a market to offer 8 | cents a word or more, I believe, to be considered a | "professional market" for the sake of counting towards | membership criteria. That means most of the bigger scifi | magazines are exactly at 8c (a very few above) | | Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A | handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld | for example, last I checked). Many will prefer much shorter | works. | | And of course that is before taking into account the | competition - the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine | mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue | was 1400-1500 stories. | | I've submitted a couple of stories, but decided that effort | vs. relatively low potential payoff was so low that since I | wouldn't really be profitable when factoring in time spent | anyway it was better to just put my stories on my website | _and pay_ to promote them to relevant twitter followers to | pull in readers for my novel and increase my following at the | same time. | | The few short stories I've published so far has as a result | reached a much wider audience than most of the main scifi | magazines reach. E.g. even Analog was reportedly down to 27k | readers by 2011. | | But of course being able to afford to do that is a pretty | privileged position to be in. | floren wrote: | > the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention | on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was | 1400-1500 stories. | | That's surprising; I subscribed to Asimov's for about 6 | months back in 2015 and based on what I was reading, I | assumed they must be publishing everything that comes in | the door. | padobson wrote: | 750 dollars in 1949 is about $9,000 in 2021. | | Vonnegut had to convince at least two gatekeepers: his own | agent and the editor at Colliers. | | I spent a large chunk of time a few years back looking into | the questions OP is asking, and the ultimate truth I came to | is this: whether you're self publishing or going the | traditional route, you're going to need some established | gatekeepers to support you if you're going to make it. | | In 1949, those gatekeepers were traditional publishers. In | 2021, we still have traditional publishers, but we also have | content curation algorithms, social media influencers, | podcast hosts, and platforms like Substack and Patreon. If | you can get any of them to put resources into promoting you, | you'll have a real opportunity of making it - that is, if | what you're offering is any good. | | If you can't or don't want to get the attention of those | gatekeepers, it doesn't matter how good your content is, no | one will ever find you. | pie420 wrote: | Yep, in almost every industry it was always been 50% how | good you are and 50% who you know. Over time, who you need | to know to be successful has changed, and new artists need | to adapt, as they always have. Getting an audience is | easier than ever in history. That is amazing for hobbyists | who just want some readers and recognition, and not great | for those who want to earn a living while writing. | ghaff wrote: | And, as in many other creative endeavors, all the | hobbyists who just want some readers (or viewers or | whatever) end up competing with people trying to put food | on the table. Even if individually many do not have much | of an effect, in the aggregate they do. | bluGill wrote: | You can hustle up who you know. Late night talk shows are | looking for anyone who is willing to be interviewed at | 2am. And once in a while some big name will happen to | have insomnia and notice you. However you have to do 2am | shows with no idea if anyone will notice for a long time. | While of course writing the next edition. | hardtke wrote: | I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak in the 1990's and I remember his | saying something along the lines of "I am one of the 100 | people that are able to make a decent living writing fiction" | [deleted] | munificent wrote: | _> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author?_ | | One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is | the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is _right | there_ and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go | on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in | gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That | random dude who wrote a series of posts on some story-telling | Reddit ends up getting it optioned by Hollywood and is now a | major screenwriter. The sea shanty Tik-Tok 'er is a major label | recording artist. | | Our culture's positive values of egalitarianism and opportunity | say that whatever you want your life to be can be, if only you | work hard enough to get it. | | The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in | particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is | relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years | ago, most people didn't even _think_ of becoming an author. It | was a rarefied activity done by people who went to college and | moved to New York City. For more, authors felt like an Other. | It 's not that their personal dreams of authorship were crushed | by the lack of opportunity, it's like they never thought to | dream it in the first place, any more than people dream of | being howler monkeys or velour sofas. | | But today, media is more than happy to show us all possible | dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all of the | lives you're _likely_ to lead and show you only the best ones. | | So I think today many many more people _consider_ and _try_ to | become authors than ever before. But the total amount of time | spent reading isn 't growing enough to accommodate that. While | some will find success (for however they choose to define | that), the end result is probably a much greater number of | dreams thwarted than attained. | | I love this TED talk by Alain de Botton on success: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY | | He says: | | "It is probably as unlikely nowadays that you would become as | rich and famous as Bill Gates as it was unlikely in the 17th | century that you would exceed to the ranks of the French | aristocracy. But the point is it doesn't _feel_ that way. It 's | made to feel by the media and other outlets that if you've got | energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage, you too | could start a major thing." | cortesoft wrote: | This makes a lot of sense. | | In the past, the big hurdle to becoming an author (or a | musician, or a model, etc) was getting past the gatekeepers. | You had to convince a publisher, or a label, or a modeling | company that you were worthy and then you were in. | | This seemed like an impossible task to most people, and many | people gave up without even trying. But for those who did | persist and attempt to get past the gatekeepers, there was a | very clear goal, and the gatekeepers were very clear to you | when you didn't make it. | | The traditional gatekeepers to a lot of professions are being | bypassed these days, so at first it seems like it should be | easier now. You don't have to have any connections or | convince a single person your stuff is worthy. | | However, in reality that game is even harder now. The demand | for the content hasn't changed much, and it is still just as | rare to succeed in these fields as before. However, people | never get the clear 'pass/fail' response from a gatekeeper, | so people who will never make it are likely to pursue the | career longer than they might have with a more clear | rejection. | coldtea wrote: | > _The dark side of this is that many of us won 't. And, in | particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is | relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years | ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author._ | | It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less | people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. | | Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND | less absolute people reading books (perhaps as today they | also compete with tv, the web, youtube, netflix, social | media, videogames, and so on as everyday entertainment | options). | | So it's much much harder to make a living as an author today | than in 1921. | cortesoft wrote: | > So it's much much harder to make a living as an author | today than in 1921. | | And much easier to make it as a television screen writer. | | The mediums have shifted | cardiffspaceman wrote: | One of the scenes I enjoyed in "Patton" was when Patton | defeats Rommel through knowledge of Rommel's tactics. He | yells, seemingly across the field to Rommel, "I read your | book". (The movie actually makes it seem like Patton could | read unpublished manuscripts of his opponent [1]) This | exemplifies that famous people wrote books. They wrote | memoirs and they wrote manuals. I couldn't say how the | gatekeepers dealt with such books, nor how the potential | readership found or regarded such books. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_Attacks | gurkendoktor wrote: | Great comment! | | > A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of | becoming an author. | | The following is a bit tangential, but I keep thinking about | it: | | I was watching this video on the Barnum effect recently, | which basically says that people are likely to believe in the | accuracy of vague descriptions of their personality (think | horoscopes; "Libras need security"). | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw&t=4m23s | | The super-vague personality assessment, which was tailored to | describe as many people as possible, included the wish for | writing a novel (at 4m23s). That's how common this desire | is/was? I wonder if the modern version of it would say "you | have considered opening up on YouTube". | munificent wrote: | It's a little different. I think there has long been a | thing were many people dreamed of spending a fraction of | their retirement writing their memoirs, or something along | those lines. It was a dream in roughly the same category as | owning a sailboat or moving to the islands. Kind of a "one | of these days" leisure aspiration. | | Today--because we are all so intensely culturally obsessed | with financial success--"being a writer" means writing | stuff _right now_ and doing it well enough to make a living | off of. Where before, many dreamed of writing as a thing to | do _after_ they 've earned most of their wealth, now it is | a _means to it_. | ellegriffin wrote: | I love this. Thank you for sharing! | scubbo wrote: | > the total number of brass rings | | TIL of the associated phrase, thank you! | ZephyrBlu wrote: | > _But today, media is more than happy to show us all | possible dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all | of the lives you 're likely to lead and show you only the | best ones_ | | Ironically it's those same social media aggregators that make | the stars these days. | | You can literally be an overnight success if you get lucky. | michaelt wrote: | _> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author?_ | | I suspect there is now a middle ground that didn't exist | before: In the 1970s you were either selling >10,000 copies, or | you weren't a published author. 'Self-publishing' had a | reputation as a scam to extract money from naive would-be | authors. (I'm not sure what the academic book market was like | at the time) | | It's only with the rise of ebooks and print-on-demand that | niche, low-selling authors have become a thing. | allturtles wrote: | I don't think this is true. Niche and vanity presses have | existed for a long time | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_press#History) | | Academic presses are also mostly very low volume. But | academics don't expect to make a living from selling books | (at least not directly - books help to establish reputations | which can help you in the academic job market). | spoonjim wrote: | "Vanity Press" means you spend money to get published. | Modern self-publishing means that you're attempting to make | an income, however meager, from your writing. | michaelt wrote: | Vanity presses have indeed existed for a long time, but 50 | years ago they were widely seen as a scam, rather than a | realistic route to a writing career. | | Vanity publishers would tell every author their work had | great sales potential, then charge them $2000 for $500 | worth of editing, printing and marketing - so authors would | not only fail to make money, they would actually make a | large loss. | allturtles wrote: | I don't think that's a huge difference. It will still | cost you money to get your Word doc into publishable | shape (cover and interior design, editing, etc.) And | you're still unlikely to make a significant profit on | that upfront cost as a self-published author of PoD or | eBooks. | | As to whether either form of self-publishing 'scam' or | not, that depends on the expectations of the author. I | think it's always been common to publish just to be | published with no expectation of making money, hence the | 'vanity'. But I have no data to back that up. | bluGill wrote: | The difference is with print on demand you can actually | control your losses. When print was a printing press, the | effort to setup the press meant that nobody sane would | print just one book, it cost a few thousand to setup to | print, and then each book was a few pennies. Inflation | has raised the latter cost, while print on demand as | lowered the previous to near zero. | | Today you can decide how much your editor is worth. If | your grammar and spelling is good you can pay less, or if | you know it is bad (like me) you can pay extra until the | quality is where you want it. You might even have a | friend who will do the early editing for free (a trained | editor shouldn't be wasted on spell check duties, but | they are probably worth it once you think the book is | done for final tweaks) Whatever this investment is, you | can limit the costs. | jhbadger wrote: | And they would generally sell the authors hundreds of | copies of their printed book (because it wasn't | economically feasible to do print-on-demand like today), | which the author was expected to find buyers for. Most | didn't, and many people clearing out the houses of dead | relatives found dusty boxes of unsold books which cost | the relative a lot of money. | vidarh wrote: | I talked elsewhere about Louis Masterson - the Morgan Kane | series sold 20m+ copies in his lifetime, but _each individual | edition_ of each book sold mostly on the order of thousands | over multiple printings over a period of decades. | | Low selling authors have been a big thing since always, | because there are a huge number of markets that are small | enough that it was (and is) not unusual for publishers in | smaller markets to print on the order of a few hundred books | per run for unknown authors. | | E.g. in Norway (where Kjell Hallbing/Louis Masterson is | from), 10k sold used to mean you were a big deal, and high up | on the bestseller lists. | majormajor wrote: | 100k isn't what it used to be. | | I often suspect we haven't noticed the inflationary effects on | this as a "high" salary as much as we otherwise would because | of the psychological effect of the change from five to six | figures. Yeah, the median salary is low, but that's been well- | covered elsewhere about how it hasn't risen in line with costs | or upper-percentile income - so think of this as just another | example of "here's a field where you can't make a comfortable | income anymore." | KittenInABox wrote: | I know offhandedly that at one point it was possible to live on | one's short fiction but now that's been entirely squeezed out. | (Unless you're Ted Chiang.) | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | That is sad. :( In happier news, I wonder if you can look at | things in terms of "creators of entertainment" rather than | just authors and get a happier picture. | | Like, for example, let's just consider authors and video game | creators. Let's suppose that in the fifties, before video | games, there were, say, 100,000 full-time fiction authors in | the US. (That number _sounds_ awfully high to me, but maybe.) | Today, according to this article, there can only be at most | about 7,000 full time fiction authors in the US. But | according to this page[1], there are 260,000 people working | in the videogaming industry. So if we only consider these two | industries, that 's 160,000 _more_ people getting paid full | time wages to create entertainment. | | That's sad if you want to be an author, but if you're | concerned about the overall creation mix of society, then | maybe it's not so sad. | | [1]: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry- | statistics/employment/vid... | [deleted] | dragonwriter wrote: | People "working in the videogaming industry" aren't | comparable to "fiction authors" but to "people working in | the slice of the publishing industry involved in publishing | fiction". | | And the slice of the videogaming industry that _is_ | analogous to authors is probably a vastly smaller | proportion than of print fiction publishing because there | is so much more non-authorial stuff to do. | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | That's a good point! From what I can find about 750k | people are working in the publishing industry overall. | It's hard to find statistics just for fiction publishing. | | I have to admit I'm a little surprised. I would have | thought by now the videogame industry would be bigger | than books, but maybe it's not. | bluGill wrote: | Don't forget the population difference. There are a lot | more people now than back then. (I intentional didn't | specify world population of some subset - interesting to | think about each) | KittenInABox wrote: | Writing novels isn't comparable to writing video games | outside of very niche genres, which are probably in a | similarly sad state to fiction overall. | [deleted] | Semiapies wrote: | From TFA: "There are thousands of paid fiction authors on | Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month". | $1000 * 12 < $100,000 | | But I get that HN isn't a place for usefully discussing this | sort of issue, because it's packed with the people who are | absolutely certain they'll be one of those 25. | blululu wrote: | 100k is not that unreasonable of an expectation as the | necessary base for a freelancer. Keep in mind that you will | need to cover additional taxes that your employer would | normally cover, and you will need to plan on variability so you | need more cushion than a salaried employee. Add in the fact | that an author would need to be in the top 10% of a competitive | field and you need to start considering the opportunity cost of | not getting an office job. | ghaff wrote: | And no benefits, including insurance. That $100K for a fairly | to very successful author starts to look a lot like a pretty | middling $60K or so income in an office job. | jimbob45 wrote: | You two make excellent points. Although the author seems | greedy for wanting a 100k salary, that 100k is going to | _feel_ closer to 50k for reasons outside of their control. | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | To be clear, I never said that it was _greedy_ to want a | $100k salary. It 's a perfectly rational and ordinary | thing to want. I wondered about how reasonable to was to | expect to attain that level of financial success in | writing. | ellegriffin wrote: | Well reasonable is a whole other thing. And I'm | definitely not being reasonable! :) | asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: | "Never tell me the odds?" :) I wish you the very best of | luck. | ellegriffin wrote: | I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k | salary would be possible. I've made that as a writer and | editor throughout my career, why not hope for it as a | novelist? (or at least try for it!). It might not turn | out that way in the end, but better to reach high than | low! | akiselev wrote: | I disagree with the GP's characterization that it's | greedy and you should definitely try for it, but I'm | going to rephrase your statement thus: | | _> I 've made that as a pitching coach and umpire | throughout my career, why not hope for it as a pitcher?_ | | Writer/editor are fundamentally different roles than | novelist. In the former, the people with the up front | capital already know what they want, at least in a more | concrete sense than "something that makes us more money | than we put in." The focus is on selling whatever makes | them money, whether it's a product or a trade publication | or ad space. They don't really need the best, they just | want to avoid the worst so that the writing/editing | doesn't bring down the rest of the product, magazine, | marketing, etc. That's where most of that $100k comes | from: the value writing/editing brings to the rest of the | operation that is actually generating the cash. | | As a novelist, you _are_ the product. Your story & | marketability, the quality of your prose, how closely you | follow the cultural zeitgeist, and so on become the | dominant factors. Instead of derisking the money making | part of the operation, you the risky money making | operation. Such roles are almost universally on a bimodal | income distribution. Major league pitchers get paid | anywhere from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions | but the next run down is the AAA leagues, which pay at | most $50k a year. There are far more people making | $100k/year supporting the pitchers than there are | pitchers making $100k. | | Think of it from an economics perspective (rough math | here): according to [1] "only 690 million print books | were sold in 2019 in the U.S. in all publishing | categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction." Lets | assume physical to e-book sales are 1:1 (they're not) so | a total of 1.4 billion books sold. Let's assume the | average price per book is $20 (a tad high). There were | 17.1 million new cars sold that year, lets assume at an | average of $30k each (a tad low). That's a total market | of $28 billion vs $513 billion dollars. Assuming 30% cost | of goods sold for the former and 70% COGS for the latter | that's $21 billion left over for the novelists or $153 | billion gross profit from selling the cars. | | Now there's certainly lots of room for you to make | $100k/year as a novelist in that $28 billion but that is | for _all novelists_ in the US and - I suspect - academic | textbook authors are probably making a disproportionate | chunk of that money while inflating the average price per | book. My assumption is very little of that $153 billion | goes to writers but that number includes over 16,000 | dealerships, all of whom need their copy for sales and | marketing. The average dealership in the US sells | 500-1000 cars a year with upwards of $10-20 million per | year revenue so $100k /year for a writer would be a drop | in the bucket for them, especially with freelancers. | Multiply that by all the other industries and the numbers | grow to overwhelming amounts: if 0.01% of $21+ trillion | in general industry spending (going by GDP) goes to | writers in a gaussian distribution, there's going to be a | lot more $100k/year authors in that group than among | novelists. | | [1] https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about- | publish... | ellegriffin wrote: | This is certainly valid, but it also assumes the current | publishing model (as in, how could I, one writer, make | $100,000 of the $28 billion pie). Which also assumes that | I would need to reach mass appeal (re: sell lots of | copies) as an author to be successful in that paradigm. | | What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already | has a niche audience for my writing, to have those | followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough value | to that small audience, that they want to pay to | subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100/year? | Or 2,000 people pay $50/year? | | This is different from selling books. It's selling a | platform. | | It STILL might not work. And I STILL might never reach | that income. But it's an entirely new way to think about | books and publishing and I'm curious to see if there's | still a path for fiction writers in there somewhere.... | akiselev wrote: | _> What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who | already has a niche audience for my writing, to have | those followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough | value to that small audience, that they want to pay to | subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100 /year? | Or 2,000 people pay $50/year?_ | | That's a completely different concept that a novelist so | data from the classic publishing industry are likely | useless. You'll have to find out for yourself | -\\_(tsu)_/- | | I know of some niches that certainly are supporting | multiple independent authors at that amount per year or | more, but they're all unique markets in their own right | and I'd hesitate to extrapolate one from the other. In | truth, I'd call most of those people analysts who write | well and the few who work in fiction have semi- | formulaic/restricted niches like writing material for GMs | of hardcore D&D groups. Hardly work that allows one to | flourish artistically. | | tldr: Short answer: no. Long answer: ...is left as an | exercise for the reader. | Mehdi2277 wrote: | This is commonish in translation community. There are | sites like wuxia world and woopread that have a lot of | translations of east asian web novels that you can pay to | see chapters earlier. Some do it as pay per chapter | others as a subscription model for early access. I do | also see a few self published fantasies/romances that do | this on tapas but would guess few do well enough. Normal | model here is short chapters of about 5ish pages sold for | l0-20ish cents per chapter. This leads to many series | having massive chapter counts. 1000 chapter stories are | pretty common here and longest popularish one I know is | like close to 4k chapters. | ska wrote: | > I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k | salary | | I don't think it's greedy either, but it's also obviously | past the point of "can I make a living doing this". After | all, median individual income is less than half of that. | | "a living" and "the kind of living _I_ want " are | different things, obviously. | cafard wrote: | Recently in Boswell's _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ , I | noticed the passage | | He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of | the Rambler, the description in Virgil of the entrance into | Hell, with an application to the press; 'for,' said he, 'I do | not much remember them'. I told him, 'No.' Upon which he | repeated it: Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque | in faucibus orci, Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia | Curae; Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, | Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas, | Terribiles visu formae; Lethumque, Laborque. [Footnote: | Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell, Revengeful | cares, and sullen sorrows dwell; And pale diseases, and | repining age; Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage; | Here toils and death, and death's half-brother, sleep, | Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep. DRYDEN.] | | 'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an authour; | all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.' I proposed | to him to dictate an essay on it, and offered to write it. He | said, he would not do it then, but perhaps would write one at | some future period. | | (entry of Thursday, 14th October) | defen wrote: | Did he ever write it, or is this the Fermat's Last Theorem of | authorial metacommentary? | cafard wrote: | The latter, I suspect. I don't remember any note to it in | R.W. Chapman's edition. | ineedasername wrote: | I used to work in the industry. At least when it comes to | fiction, it has _always_ been hard to make a living as an | author. A very large number of first-time authors never earn | out their advance and therefore aren 't able to get another | book published. A reasonable portion of a publisher's authors | are "mid-list", which consistently turn out books that earn out | the advance plus a decent amount on top, and each new book also | gives a slight boost to that author's back catalog. Long-term, | this is how the average author earns a decent living: Output is | maybe 3 books every two years. Early on, the advance might only | be $15k to $30k per book, though once they earn out the advance | they begin getting royalties. Once they have 6-8 books | published, they have an audience and enough of a back catalog | that they may earn up to $50k/book with royalties from the back | catalog adding on a healthy bit on top. However "mid-list" | encompasses a wide range, so this can also be lower or higher, | especially because a mid-list author with 20+ books, turning | out 3 books every two years, may still only get $40k advances | based on new book sales, but with so many books in their back | catalog even selling only 1000 copies of each book each year | can add another $30k on their annual earnings. More if they're | popular enough to get audiobook deals as well. | | These are the authors that basically keep the lights on for the | publisher. Overall though, profitable publishing is a business | of breakout hits, the authors that sell 50,000+ copies and hit | the best seller lists. Failed first-time authors and mid-list | authors may mostly cancel each other out on profit, and it's | those few hits that push publishers into the black. | andi999 wrote: | If you have a scalable product there is usually no middle | ground. Either you are getting rich or just getting by, or even | not getting by (last one the most likely one) | Siira wrote: | Isn't software a big exception to this? | andi999 wrote: | Is it? Can you elaborate? I think if you have a SaaS with | happy 100 customers paying 10$ each per month it is easier | to scale up to 10k customers than if you only have 2 | customers to get to 200. | watwut wrote: | No. Software follow the same pattern. | DVassallo wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | This is great! | spookybones wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | ableal wrote: | 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... | makstaks wrote: | 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. | kaesar14 wrote: | Is there somewhere to find the names of the 268 books? | ellegriffin wrote: | 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 wrote: | Wouldn't have guessed! Thanks, and really interesting article | :) | ellegriffin wrote: | Thank you! | ricardobeat wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | 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!' | chasingthewind wrote: | 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 wrote: | This is the best thing I ever heard of. I want nothing more | than permission to write badly and still love it. | subpixel wrote: | 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. | smithza wrote: | 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 | lacker wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | but what is the social impact of star wars besides spawning | sequels? | bluGill wrote: | A ton of cheap plastic light sabers at birthday parties. | And millions of Yoda one-liners all over. | PeterisP wrote: | Reaching the top 1% of their profession still means 1k-10k | copies sold, nothing you can make a living on. | | As the article states, just 0.01 percent of books sell more | than 100k copies, it's not enough to be a great author (not | average, but better than 99% of them) you'd need to be somewhat | exceptional (better than 99.99%) in order to earn a salary from | books. | | IMHO there's just too much competition, there so many more "top | 1%+" authors in any genre than anyone can read, and given the | economics described in this article, many of them don't even | bother with publishing and offer their amazing writing for | free. | michaelt wrote: | Selling a million copies would put them in the top 0.00003% of | their profession - merely being in the top 1% only puts you in | the ramen-eating 1k-10k sales bracket. | nixtaken wrote: | You are assuming that the top 1% got there based on merit and | not money laundering -- a major feature of the business these | days. | armorproof wrote: | You've reminded me of a Stephen King quote: | | "While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad | writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great | writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard | work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of | a merely competent one." | armorproof wrote: | Even in the video game development industry, the stars have to | start somewhere. Notch himself started as a developer at King | before moving on to Jalbum, then Wurm Online, before even | starting Minecraft. | | How else do you get the skills to create a masterpiece without | starting on average titles for average pay? | whimsicalism wrote: | For anyone else who was surprised by that stat, don't forget | that this is for books _sold online_. | HWR_14 wrote: | > Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top- | selling author, selling over a million copies? | | Pretty much not. The vast majority of best selling books are | produced by the same few authors year after year. It's far more | marketing than meritocracy. Some of those authors farm out | ghostwriting duties to numerous authors who will get paid some | fixed rate (not royalties) to do most of the writing. | | Or, to put it a different way, the odds of becoming an author | that sells more than 500,000 copies are probably similar to or | less than the odds of becoming a successful Hollywood actor. | And probably similar to creating a video game like Minecraft or | being one of the founders of a unicorn. | II2II wrote: | > 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. | AS_of wrote: | How is audible factored in here? I've 10X'd my audible intake | over the past year. | solomonb wrote: | Three paragraphs into the article is a chart that includes | audio book sales. | AS_of wrote: | Does that accurately represent the model of audible credits? | Or just actual purchases of audio books? | Karunamon wrote: | Is the model reasonably different? The publisher doesn't | get paid unless you spend a credit on their book. | andrewzah wrote: | 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. | _joel wrote: | 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. | andrewzah wrote: | "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. | | Yeah, there were multiple books that I read the reviews on | amazon and people were complaining about the poor print | quality. One of the Ted Greene books I got had a typo on the | 2nd page in the table of contents, so I'm not sure if any | proof reading is being done really. | rchaud wrote: | I purchase books as well. I have read numerous books on epub, | but physical is better, easier to take notes on the side of the | page. | AS_of wrote: | 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 wrote: | For me, technical stuff is much better in eBooks because of | the search functionality. | andrewzah wrote: | 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. | moksly wrote: | 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! | alphabet9000 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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? | peter303 wrote: | 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. | beambot wrote: | > 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 wrote: | I think they meant 2.6 mil titles, not copies. | beambot wrote: | Ah, I'll bet you're right! Wow, that significantly changes | the meaning... | warent wrote: | 2.6 million different titles sold, not 2.6 million copies | chanakya wrote: | 2.6 million different book _titles_. Not total sales of books | online, which is about 500m, I believe. | rjp0008 wrote: | 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. | fredgrott wrote: | they are comparing apples and orangs as total books sold is | those sold online + those sold through bookstores. | | That being said it points to not that writing books is not | economical viable but that have someone else publish it is not | economically viable! | | My bias, I am self publishing my first book at the end of this | year in flutter app dev with using paid article writing using | Medium.com to pay the costs of setting up the LLC, and other | costs such as purchasing a brand new mac laptop. | | Note, since most people in tech do not buy 2nd screens just to | read and use a book it's some skewed towards the 45k number in | those niches, my own opinion. Most publisher advertising gets | one to the 15k number which is why I am using a social-media | and Medium article combined route to advertising the book. | iscrewyou wrote: | 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] | tksmith151 wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | Yes, that is correct. 2.6 million different titles were sold | (not total copies.) | AS_of wrote: | Besides the shoddy number work, does this really tell us | anything? | | I mean, if everyone read "exactly what was needed" then that | would significantly change the distribution since the current | is based on "what marketers make me think I need." | | Therefore, this article could be viewed as positive improvement | of efficiency in the book buying market. Ie more people buying | "the book they need" vs "want because of flashy marketing" | based on increased access to search and reviews. | [deleted] | Finnucane wrote: | It's also not clear if those numbers are just 'trade' books | (i.e., books sold through regular bookstores), or includes | academic titles, textbooks, reference books, etc. I mean, | there's a _lot_ of stuff published that has a fairly | specialized or otherwise limited market. Probably the | overwhelming majority of books fall into categories that are | _never_ going to sell 100K or more no matter what. | JKCalhoun wrote: | > 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 wrote: | 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. | rikroots wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | munificent wrote: | 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. | psyc wrote: | 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] | 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: | 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. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | 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/leisu... | mortenjorck wrote: | 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. | jawns wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | hodder wrote: | Books, stocks, apps, websites, songs...the list goes on. Winner | takes all is becoming the new normal. | tomcam wrote: | 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. | paulpauper wrote: | >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. | ellegriffin wrote: | 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 | bluGill wrote: | 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) | [deleted] | dovrce wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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 :) | ska wrote: | > I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with | finding recent interesting books. | | Sturgeons law definitely applies. | | Reading (or watching, or whatever) only older stuff is | basically using survivor-ship as a curation filter. It's a | viable approach, although will definitely miss good stuff. | | If you don't do this, you need some other way to discard most | of the crap. | failwhaleshark wrote: | Absolutely. | | Popularity and taste rarely coincide because most people | have no taste. | | (Me covets a _The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell_ | first edition.) | | The other thing is to read books that are important, not | just ones that are preferred or pleasant for a wider | perspective: | | - Mein Kampf | | - Capital (Das Kapital) | | - Technological Slavery | | - The International Jew | | - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies | | - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Vol. 1-6. | | - (ones by ideological opposites) | | - America: The Farewell Tour | | - Sorrows of Empire | | Also, people who don't own any books, paper or Kindle... | that's a big "nope." | zelienople wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Exactly, anything that has survived 100 or 1000 years is | most likely worth your time | ellegriffin wrote: | Maybe this is the case for books after all. None of our | television shows or movies will make it this long. | failwhaleshark wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | I think about this all the time when it comes to | archeological finds. How do we know this wasn't one of | their worst works? | naomiajacobs wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | You could write the novel beforehand and then just release it | month by month. | ineedasername wrote: | _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. | autarch wrote: | 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. | edgartaor wrote: | >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. | coliveira wrote: | > 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | sheikheddy wrote: | > 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 | jtolmar wrote: | 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. | lumost wrote: | 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? | runevault wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | GekkePrutser wrote: | 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. | fencepost wrote: | 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). | kpwagner wrote: | 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. | ghaff wrote: | 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. | weeblewobble wrote: | I've been an Audible paid subscriber for 10 years. I have 138 | audiobooks in my library. At $10/month, that means I've paid | Audible $1200 for ~2000 hours of "reading". Using the 25% | royalties mentioned in a child comment (no idea if that's | accurate) I've paid authors only $300 for all of that. That | seems super low! And I imagine I'm in the top quintile in terms | of paying for "books". | snet0 wrote: | Forgive me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that buying | second-hand books gives no money to the author. | | I don't know, morally speaking if this should be the case. It | does feel wrong for people to get the experience without paying | the price of admission. Can this be solved logistically, | though? And do publishers factor this into their RRP? | matsemann wrote: | But things I cannot resell I would pay less for. For certain | items the amount I'm willing to pay is a function also | including what I can sell it for when I'm done with it. | snet0 wrote: | Yes, I absolutely agree. When you buy something you imagine | yourself reselling, you can factor the resale price into | the total cost. | | I don't think this is a counter to my argument, though. I'm | not saying it is wrong to be able to resell books, I am | just pointing out that reselling books _without the author | receiving any money_ strikes me as morally improper. As I | mentioned in another comment, I 'm not convinced that there | exists a decent solution to this problem, and I imagine | that it's at least in part factored into RRPs, but I just | thought it was something to consider. | spoonjim wrote: | Well technology is solving this problem, e-books are not | transferable so there is no secondhand market. Problem | solved! (but don't expect to ever inherit a book collection | that has titles you'd never heard of, that opens your eyes to | different things). | jogjayr wrote: | Buying a house from a homeowner gives no money to the | original builder, or the first human being to inhabit that | piece of land. Do you feel guilty about getting shelter | without paying the price of admission? | snet0 wrote: | I think this is a disingenuous comparison. Builders get | paid _to build_ houses. Authors, to my knowledge, do not | frequently get paid _to write_ books, they get paid when | they sell books. | | When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders | anything. When you resell a book, you are (possibly) | denying the author a sale. | jogjayr wrote: | > When you resell a house, you are not denying the | builders anything | | You're denying the builder a sale of a new house. | | Re-selling books is already legal. You bought a physical | item, not the right to use the item. Ownership implies | the right to dispose of the item as one wishes. You asked | whether it was morally correct. I was showing you that | many other things are frequently resold with no moral | implications. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Once you go down that path, it starts getting kind of | dystopian. Should it be illegal for me to lend or give a book | to a friend without paying a fee, because then they are | "getting the experience without paying the price of | admission"? I'm reading a book to three kids, should I have | to pay more than reading the book to one kid? That's three | times as many kids "getting the experience", same "price of | admission"! Taking the book to my brothers house to read to | his kids -- nope, that's illegal unless you buy another copy? | snet0 wrote: | I absolutely agree, I don't think solving this problem is | something that can really be considered. I do think it's a | problem, though. | | I think you're taking my analogy of tickets too far, | though. It was simply to highlight the fact that, by | reading the book without paying the author a dime, you are | getting permanent access to the materials without the | author being paid, which I think is an issue. | | I think the only feasible solution is a kind of royalty fee | on resales, but I can easily imagine this becoming a | logistical nightmare. As I said, I'm not sure this problem | has a workable solution. | jrochkind1 wrote: | In fact, I think maybe in Europe second-hand bookstores | do pay some kind of royalties? Maybe libraries do too? | | In the US, the "first sale doctrine" has legally | preserved the right to give, rent, or sell an object | legally in your possession, without the permission of the | copyright holder. | | For 100 years (I believe the first sale doctrine was | first established in 1908), it did not imperil the | business of writing and selling books. | | In 2021, that market does seem imperiled, as the OP is | about... but I don't think the 100-year-old first-sale | doctrine is to blame, or eliminating it would | fundamentally change the market forces. I mean, if it was | the issue, then the market for books would be | fundamentally different (and better for copyright | holders) in Europe than the US, but is it? | whimsicalism wrote: | No, because second hand markets influence the first hand | price. | ghaff wrote: | That same logic presumably applies to libraries. Books are | physical objects at the end of the day just like a piece of | pottery someone made. First sale doctrine explicitly allows | the owner to lend or resell it to someone else. | Ekaros wrote: | Some countries solve this by paying the authors for each | lend. Ofc, not nearly similar amount, but over long term | it's not unreasonable. | ellegriffin wrote: | Yes! Exactly! Right now the ebook library model is based | off the physical book library model where the library | purchases a certain number of ebooks (say 10) and the | author only gets a portion of the royalties on those ten | copies, and then the library loans those copies out to an | unlimited number of people. | | It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be | read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties every | time someone reads their book. (Similar to how an artist | gets paid everytime their song is streamed). I might | actually write about this for a future post. | snet0 wrote: | This is what I think the best course looks like. I know | there are issues with Spotify's model (at least, I have | heard people make this claim), but given that music had | to transition to a streaming-based model (and considering | that written text looks to be slowly going this way, too) | the per-consumption royalty looks good to me. | | Of course, instantiating this in the real world is | another question. For ebook libraries, it certainly seems | plausible, but for regular libraries? | ellegriffin wrote: | Right, exactly. And we could learn from spotify (pay the | creators more). But the ebook library is huge now and | could easily be transformed. The only problem is that | they aren't charging a monthly subscription fee (like | Spotify) and so they would have to use donation dollars | to fund that. And yet, I have to wait 15 weeks to get a | book on my kindle because other people are reading it | first, which seems very outdated. | ellegriffin wrote: | NFTs are trying to solve for this, but I'm not sure how | mainstream that will become. | | For instance: https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26 | udpISw_raXkoE... | | In this case, Emily crowdfunded her novel using the | cryptocurrency ETH. People "invested" in her book buy | purchasing the NFT, so that they can later sell their | investment again (and the writer will get royalties if they | do). | | I think this might be a little too out there to become | mainstream. HOWEVER, I do think the library model could be | tweaked to favor the author. | | Right now the ebook library model is based off the physical | book library model where the library purchases a certain | number of ebooks (say 10) and the author only gets a portion | of the royalties on those ten copies, and then the library | loans those copies out to an unlimited number of people. | | It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be | read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties every | time someone reads their book. (Similar to how an artist gets | paid everytime their song is streamed). I might actually | write about this for a future post. | lacker wrote: | _how many people like me does it take to support one | professional writer?_ | | Back of the envelope, I would estimate authors get 1/4 of book | sales as royalties, so you've sent $1000 to authors in your | lifetime. I don't know how old you are, maybe that's $100/year | since you were at book-buying age. If an author gets by on | $30k/year then it takes 300 people like you to support a | professional writer. | | That's not bad, really. If you watch 120 movies a year then | you're probably supporting the movie industry more than the | book industry but it sounds like you prefer movies to books | anyway so that's fair. | whimsicalism wrote: | Many problems with this analysis, I'll leave it as an | exercise to the reader to notice what they are. | FirstLvR wrote: | when i was young and poor i wouldnt mind being a pirate | | but now, being a professional i wouldnt mind paying ... i would | gladly pay $50 for winds of winter if GRRM could finish the | book! | | look at the expanse saga on primevideo, the books were selling | ok but now is a hit box world wide | wccrawford wrote: | 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. | DanielBMarkham wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | Tycho wrote: | 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. | setikites wrote: | 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/ | TheCoelacanth wrote: | > 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. | dang wrote: | 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 | | 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.) | lurquer wrote: | 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. | chiefalchemist wrote: | 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? | yoru-sulfur wrote: | 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, view top rated stories, click on | basically anything and you'll see patreon links of authors making | thousands of dollars per month/chapter. | ellegriffin wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 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 is similar, but with | more patrons and a lower minimum. | | https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow is simply at more than $5000 | per month. | | Where did you get those stats you quoted? | [deleted] | tarr11 wrote: | 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 wrote: | > _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. | peter303 wrote: | I check a 100 books out of the library each year. But probably | read just a third before they are due. Book greed! | | Pre-covid I'd mainly use the new non-fiction shelf. Since our | libraries arent open in person yet, I mainly get book ideas | from book reviews like in HN or NYT. | AS_of wrote: | 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-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. | hashkb wrote: | > should | | Why? | martincmartin wrote: | _should_ | | why is that? | dudul wrote: | I don't know if you _should_ but it 's not a bad advice. I do | that occasionally, re-read a book I read as a teenager or | young adult and it is interesting how sometimes one can pick | up different details or understand things differently. | sremani wrote: | If one is reading to apply the acquired knowledge, the above | is an excellent advice. | | Also, do not underestimate the power of re-reading great | books, new and deeper insights are attained during the second | and third reads. | sidibe wrote: | I'm always surprised when people talk about rereading books. | I get absolutely nothing out of books I've already read. Do | you also rewatch TV series? | leephillips wrote: | I do both. And movies. If it's not worth reading or | watching a second or third time, it wasn't worth it the | first time. I read _Hamlet_ every year or two. It gets me | every time. I've seen the _Maltese Falcon_ about five | times, and it still amazes me with its perfection each | time. I've seen the _Pickle Rick_ episode of _Rick and | Morty_ three times, and I fully intend to watch it three | more times. Pure genius. Anything good has layers and | details that usually can not be fully appreciated the first | time through. Do you only listen to a song you like once? | macksd wrote: | Actually, yes. I haven't done it with books, but there are | a few shows I've rewatched. Usually it's something I enjoy | having on in the background while I do other things, | similar to having background music. It started as me just | knowing I liked the show, and not needing to pay full | attention to it to follow along. But I notice a lot of new | things on subsequent viewing, and knowing the basic plot | already I'm able to appreciate how the writers are setting | things up, establishing the characters, etc. in ways that | become very significant later. And the first-time through I | just don't notice that kind of thing or appreciate it. It | feels like getting more depth in the art of it rather than | just experiencing more breadth from another artist. | andreilys wrote: | The value of re-reading will be low if you're reading high | noise to signal books that could be compressed into a blog | post (e.g. anything by Adam Grant). | | If you read more dense books of philosophy, literature, or | otherwise you'll get a lot more value out of re-reading | since you likely have missed things upon first read. Same | thing with tv shows that contain a complicated plot vs. | ones that are churned out for quick consumption. | HumblyTossed wrote: | I'm the same for fiction; I can't read a fiction book | twice. My SO can re-read the same fiction over and over. I | just don't get it. Now, there are some movies I can watch | again. But only once or twice and then I'm done for a very | long time. | alasdair_ wrote: | > Do you also rewatch TV series | | Good ones, with a lot of depth, absolutely. | | I also look at paintings more than once in my life, consume | my favorite meals more than once and so on. For those | without a perfect memory, re-reading a good book can often | teach us new things. | marcus_holmes wrote: | I always find something I missed the first time around. Or | I feel differently about the story. There's always | something different. | Minor49er wrote: | Rereading a book, one could pick up on things that were | missed previously or that have been forgotten about. Also, | one might be in a different life situation or mindset from | one read to the next which could alter the perception or | enjoyment of what's being read. Not to mention that some | prose can be appreciated for its beauty. | | TV shows, movies, and albums are often revisited by people | who enjoy them. Even as I write this, I'm listening to an | album right now that I've heard dozens of times before. I | may not always be in the mood to listen to it, but my | enjoyment of the music has not been eroded by how many | times I've already heard it. Rather, being familiar with | it, I appreciate both how it's composed, played, and the | nuances that are now apparent to me that I certainly missed | on my first listens. | | One of my favorite books when I was younger was | "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud. | It was visually appealing to me at the time, but after | several readings, I started to really grasp its concepts as | an educational art book. | matsemann wrote: | > _Also, one might be in a different life situation or | mindset from one read to the next which could alter the | perception or enjoyment of what 's being read_ | | Catcher in the Rye springs to mind. Interesting reading | at different times. | | One additional point is that when you know where the plot | is going and things that are "unknown" at the time, one | can appreciate some of the hints or world building even | more. Like a detective novel or so, on re-read knowing | the killer one can analyze everything and get a new | experience from the same content. | | I also re-read like people listen to music. I read Harry | Potter 1-3 a few times waiting for book four, then | 1-2-3-4, then next year 1-2-3-4-5 etc, and then each exam | period at uni I would read it when relaxing. Like, just | turn my brain off, I don't want new input, just replay | something. So I've probably read the first 3-4 books 30+ | times (I had a count up to 20 or so). | sandyarmstrong wrote: | Books, TV series, movies, music...if I make some emotional | connection while experiencing it, I'm likely to want to | repeat that experience later. | | When I buy a book (or in the olden days, a DVD/etc), I'm | factoring rereadings into the value proposition. If I don't | think I'm going to want to reread, I'll prefer to get it | from the library. | | So, most content in my personal library is there because I | expect to experience it repeatedly. And I'll tell you, it | can be fascinating to take some experience you treasured as | as preteen, and then experience it anew from the | perspective of a parent. It's pretty funny relating more to | the dopey dad and less to the hero. | | But not everything is about getting a different take on | repeat experiences. Sometimes I just want another hit of | whatever that piece of media made me feel. | sremani wrote: | Re-reading Pop-Psy and Airport literature is not the | recommended reading. How about reading Hayek, Strauss for | second time? How about reading man's search for meaning for | the third time? | | You re-read great works, not NYT best shiller! (sic). | arsome wrote: | Why would you re-read them when you could read something | new? Do you find you're actually getting a significant | amount of value or joy from it the second time around? | | I ask because I think a good portion of the reason I | enjoy software development is the absolute and total | hatred I have for repetition in my life. | iNate2000 wrote: | 1. It's totally easy to miss things when reading: | certainly little delightful details, or even whole ideas | or plot points. | | 2. It's not like there are millions of great books out | there. Some entertaining ones, some informative ones, a | few that are both, and a very few life changers. | phaemon wrote: | Well, to your first point, because I value depth over | novelty. The second time should be better. | | To your second point, to quote Prince, "There is joy in | repetition". | psyc wrote: | More than 90% of things that are new to me disappoint me. | I don't know how to find new things, especially fiction, | with the expectation that it will hold my interest. | Whereas something new from my favorite author has much | better odds, and rereading my favorite novel is a sure | thing. | SamoyedFurFluff wrote: | For some highly complex books, a reread is more like a | re-analysis of the text based off of ones existing | knowledge. There will be nuances and details that were | missed the first go around, that is uncovered the second | time around, making the understanding of the piece | richer. It's like mathematics- everything is built on | fundamentals. | | (Some people also derive comfort in familiar stories.) | canadianfella wrote: | Gatekeeper | teucris wrote: | Quite an assumption to make about those that don't like | to re-read books. I love reading, I'm very picky about | the books I read, and yet I find I'm only re-reading a | small handful of books, many years after I last read | them. | | What am I to read in the mean time? | sremani wrote: | I had to make some assumptions - given the OP said they | did not see any value in re-reading. Not every thing is a | candidate for re-read, for the fact of the matter 90% of | airport literature is not worth single read let alone re- | read. | | Take any good from my post and leave the rest. I am not | the most finesse commentator.. but at least I am not | accusatory. | psyc wrote: | I'm as surprised at your surprise! I've seen The Office in | its entirety more than 10 times, my other favorite shows | 3-5 times each, and most generally popular shows at least | twice. Often when a new season arrives, I start again at | season 1 if it's been a while. Same goes for my favorite | novels, of which there aren't as many. | | Perhaps it's relevant that I have a terrible memory for | plot. | kpwagner wrote: | I think this really varies from person to person. | | I re-read maybe 5% of books, and I tend to get a lot out of | re-reading. Nassim Taleb said something like "if it's not | worth re-reading, it was not worth reading in the first | place". | | My re-watch rate on movies and TV series is much higher, | probably 85% of movies I will watch more than once. TV | series, maybe 50%. | | Some people just read or watch and never care to think much | about it after. That's cool too; doesn't hurt me any. | crumpled wrote: | The complexity of A Song of Ice and Fire... You get a lot | out of a second read-through. There the density of the plot | development is so thick that you don't even know what | you're supposed to focus on. Some things that are mentioned | in the first few hundred pages can resonate much stronger | after reading the last few hundred pages. | | That's just one example. It obviously depends on the book. | Getting "absolutely nothing" out of something seems more | like a choice. | ssully wrote: | Rereading (or "reexperiencing") something can be very | valuable. Since you already know where the destination is | going to be, you get to focus your attention on more of the | little details you might not have picked up on the first | time through. | | With that said, I only occasionally do it for books because | of the time commitment. I have a large list of books I want | to read, and only read about 25 books a year. So if I am | going to reread something, it's usually for a specific | reason or I am was in a specific mood. | leephillips wrote: | When Vladimir Nabokov was teaching literature, he | instructed the students to read each novel twice, to get | over the plot suspense so they could concentrate on the | details. When they appeared for the final examination, | they encountered questions like, "Describe the wallpaper | in the Karenins' bedroom". | runevault wrote: | At different points in your life great stories can impact | you in different ways. A simple example of one that could | do this is The Road by Cormack McCarthy. I never had kids, | but from what I've heard people who read it after becoming | a parent are hit with far stronger emotions than those who | don't have kids. | NoOneNew wrote: | While I understand the idea of rereading a few books here | and there, it's pretentious assholery to imagine you | shouldn't read new books because you're getting older. | That's just an idiot who pretends to be the smartest guy in | the room. There aren't too many types of people more | pathetic than someone who never tries new entertainment. "I | only like the old stuff". Because someone is only a good | artist or writer after they've been dead for a century. | csunbird wrote: | I also find re-reading books frequently have diminishing | returns, but after some time, you and your world changes, | which results in you having a different point of view when | you re-read the book. | | As you change, the meaning of the book to you changes as | well, and gives you new perspectives along with new ideas. | E.g. a specific villain or a side character in the book | might not be attractive or simply confusing to you, but as | you re-read the book, you realize that you get them and | they now make perfect sense. | arsome wrote: | Maybe it's just me, but I find marginal joy drops | exponentially by repetition. | sumtechguy wrote: | It has been about 15+ years since I had watched TOS star | trek. I recently started watching them again. I recently | went back and am watching 1 a week, same with Stargate. I | find them very enjoyable again. Some books/movies/shows | work better at a particular pace. I found that binge | watching them makes them decidedly less enjoyable. Other | shows are basically designed to be 10 hour movies. So those | are OK to do that with (westworld being an example of | that). | | Sometimes it is worth taking a break and give it a decent | amount of time. Then watch it again. I have a few dozen | shows I know I liked when I was younger. I could even give | you a 'outline' of one of the shows that I could make up. | Yet for the life of me I could not tell you exactly what 1 | episode was about without looking it up. I know I liked | them. Yet I no longer really remember them. Those are ripe | for revisiting. But sometimes it is best to leave them as | 'fondly remembered' and my older sensibilities do not match | what I had years ago. | | But yeah watching the same thing every other day and you | will grow bored with it. | leephillips wrote: | I also recently went through the TOS. It really holds up. | The best episodes are timeless. TOS has an energy and | drama that I don't see in any of the shows or movies that | leach off of that world. I'm probably biased, as TOS is | part of my childhood, but it's the only one I like. | jrochkind1 wrote: | > As you get older, you should read fewer new books, | | What? Why? Who says? | | I plan to read just as many if not more new books as I get | older. | | I do not understand your answer about "the leverage | algorithms can provide". | | I enjoy reading new fiction books. Why "should" I do it less | as I get older? If I someday retire, I would plan to use some | of my additional free time to read even more books. | rland wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | CapmCrackaWaka wrote: | 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. | dale_glass wrote: | It depends a lot on what books. Many technical books age | extremely quickly. You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ | book except for some sort of historical research purpose. | | But even in literature there is timing, themes, references and | fashion. You'd have a hard time writing Don Quixote today, | because hardly anyone reads chivalric romances anymore, so the | vast majority of people wouldn't know what you're even | parodying. And I suspect most modern readers of Don Quixote | don't really get it, excluding those with an education in | european medieval literature. | | Even without going that far, there are fads and fashions. If | you want to write about wizards or vampires there probably are | better and worse times to do it. | | Even playing your cards right, how likely are you to get a hit? | Because there's really no lack of good books on most any | subject at this point, and it takes a very dedicated reader to | exhaust the existing catalog, and the easiest way for a reader | is to find out what's popular and try that, rather than giving | a new author a chance. | dionidium wrote: | _> You definitely don 't want a 30 years old C++ book except | for some sort of historical research purpose._ | | I think even here it depends on what you're trying to get out | of it. I wouldn't read K&R to get the latest information | about how to write modern C, but I read that book once every | 5 years or so because there are timeless aspects at its core. | This is even more true of a book like SICP. | ellegriffin wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | deckard1 wrote: | Time is an excellent filter of quality. | | Back when I was a kid my mom had a box of 7" vinyl records | she gave me. For every Elton John or Hendrix she had, there | were dozens of absolute garbage records. People often make | the claim that music was better back then. No, it has just | been filtered for you. | | For books I tend to do the same as you. I have a finite | amount of time on this planet and so little time to read in | the first place. I usually reach for something older than 20 | years. | ellegriffin wrote: | 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! | trutannus wrote: | > Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely | enjoyable today | | I'd argue that there's a large amount of books that don't age | out of their value. There's a lot of good material out there | written over a hundred years ago that's more enjoyable that the | average modern book. Even books which are tightly coupled to | their time period are all still relevant and valuable today. | | A funny example, I was reading an author yesterday who | discussed a social issue at a local university, and quoted a | professor who shares the exact name of a well known professor | today who comments on similar issues. | | Most of what I read is well over 30 years old, if not older. | And very much of it still reflects the world today. | KineticLensman wrote: | > Even books which are tightly coupled to their time period | are all still relevant and valuable today | | As an example of this I would cite "Mr Britling Sees It | Through" [0] which was written by HG Wells during World War | 1. It was published in 1916 and describes in a novel the | public reaction to the early stages of the war - and Wells | had no idea how the war was actually going to pan out when he | wrote it. I read it in April last year, one month into the | first COVID lockdown. Some of the reactions Wells describes | (from fear to to panic buying to concerns about the economy) | were exactly what was happening in the pandemic. I found it | amazingly relevant even given the massive changes in society | over the last century because in many ways basic human nature | is just the same now as then. | | [0] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Britling_Sees_It_Through | trutannus wrote: | Similar to The Plague by Camus. The progression basically | goes: | | 1. Everyone ignores it since it's "not serious" 2. People | play it down for political reasons 3. People start dying 4. | People lock down 5. Alcohol sells out | | At least where I am, this is exactly what happened. | bluGill wrote: | Sometimes those old books are fun in a quaint way. Talk about | "negros" where you are expected to understand why the person | isn't bad per se, but automatically unable to be anything other | than a basic servant. We can laugh at it now, yet it was so | common and wasn't even mentioned. | | And then of course look at ourselves and wonder what the next | generation will laugh at. | CobrastanJorji wrote: | I suspect that kind of fun is less fun when they're talking | about you, especially when it's still a problem today. | crazygringo wrote: | But... many movies and TV shows from 30 years are also still | immensely enjoyable today. Or heck, from 70 years ago. | | Why do you think movies and TV somehow age more than books? | Forricide wrote: | 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 [1] | https://www.patreon.com/imogenedisease [2] | https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul | sltkr wrote: | > 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. | chokma wrote: | Some more: | https://www.patreon.com/user?u=48733767 Casualfarmer 2.8K | https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth 10K / month | https://www.patreon.com/C_Mantis c.mantis / 4.2 K | https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth 5.3K | https://www.patreon.com/InadvisablyCompelled 2.8K | https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon 14 K | https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels 1395 patreons | | Some of those are also on Kindle Unlimited & Kindle. | nicolas_t wrote: | Yes, I was wondering where the author got those numbers, | There's also https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul who probably | gets more than 5k a month since the minimum tier is $2.5/month | Aerroon wrote: | The author of The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound $5262/month: | https://www.patreon.com/puddles4263 | | The author of Azarinth Healer has 3317 patrons at $2 minimum: | 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 wrote: | These are amazing! Thank you so much for sharing. I will look | into these as case studies. | CobrastanJorji wrote: | 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. | Aerroon wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | These are great, thank you! They didn't show up in the fiction | category, but makes sense since they are using other | terminology. I'll definitely look into these as case studies! | PeterisP wrote: | Wildbow is amazing. Her "Worm" series is literally 20 full | novels sized, and works like this are (or was? read it many | years ago) free competition to any would-be writer who would | want to require - as the article suggests - $5 per chapter of | an unfinished novel. I mean, all these Patreon examples | illustrate that it definitely can work, but IMHO it's more | accurate to treat it as "patron" sponsorship/charity/support | out of goodwill, instead of as actual economic sales of scarce | product. | clarkevans wrote: | Ursula Vernon, Author of Harriet the Hamster Princess - | https://www.patreon.com/ursulav (1,165 patrons, $2,709/mo) | stakkur wrote: | "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. | ChrisRR wrote: | Is it though? I highly doubt many self published authors are | selling over 100k copies. That's a ton of logistics to deal | with | ghaff wrote: | I'd be skeptical that more than a handful of self-published | books sold more than 100K copies (if that). | stakkur wrote: | 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... | | 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 wrote: | 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. | munificent wrote: | _> 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. | dalai wrote: | 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. | ska wrote: | True - in order to do this analysis properly you need some idea | of the distribution of royalties, and publication intervals, | etc. | ellegriffin wrote: | Yes, I am basing that off the research I did for this article: | | 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! | munificent wrote: | _> Did it have a big bump at front, and then decrease over | time? Or have you seen other bumps later on?_ | | It had a spike at launch when I announced it on my mailing | list and then it tapered. It's held pretty steadily since | then. If you're curious, I wrote a thing about the launch | here: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/20/how-my- | book-lau... | | But it's a technical book on programming, so the whole | economic and time model are just totally different compared | to fiction. My model was to serially publish it online for | free. There's a link to the mailing list at the top of each | chapter. When I finished a chapter, I'd put it online and | tell people about it. That did a good job of building up the | mailing list. Then when the print edition was done, I could | use that to tell people about it. | | I had absolutely no expectation of this, but somehow having | it online for free has been really good for actually selling | copies too. I don't know if it's because it raises the book's | profile, or because people can try before they buy, or maybe | that just feel grateful that they don't _have_ to buy? Either | way, it worked out way better than I expected. | | _> 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! _ | | I really hope you're successful. Even if the money is falling | out of it, fiction is the best way I know to share insight | about the human condition with others. We'd be poorer as a | species without it, regardless of what capitalism thinks. | vidarh wrote: | I think that is largely because most writers don't know how | to or don't care about marketing. | | I published a novel in late november, and it's sales are low | but steady to slowly increasing. A key aspect is that to | "survive" past the initial bump you need to invest effort | into building word of mouth and getting reviews, and that is | a _slow_ process. The people I got to help with marketing | even actively advised against doing much marketing before we | had a base of reviews, because they apparently find it almost | impossible to get positive ROI on Amazon ads until there 's a | reasonable number of reviews. | | I intentionally started writing a series, and everything I've | seen and heard suggests series rarely even start selling | decently until at least the 3rd volume, because people hold | off to see if it's worth investing time in. | | I'd advise against considering what happens to "most" books, | because most books gets _no_ marketing, no proper cover | design, no effort in writing blurbs, no effort to push the | books over time. | ellegriffin wrote: | Oh I've heard that. The classic "third book" being the one | that goes viral. (Gillian Flynn, Dan Brown, etc.) | | I agree with you on considering most books (most books | don't market), but even trying to learn from the successful | books isn't entirely encouraging. Even the best ones don't | see a lot of reads. | | But the industry is rapidly changing. We don't all watch | the same three television channels anymore. Niche content | is more the norm than mass marketed content. | | I think the whole "creator economy" is still in its | infancy, and we have yet to see whether it will actually | allow creators to monetize in a meaningful way. But it's | worth engaging with it as an experiment to see what | happens! | bluGill wrote: | I have on my bookshelf a book written by a personal friend of | mine. A fun non-fiction book, but I'm sure he didn't market | it. | jrochkind1 wrote: | As someone who reads novels continuously, I find it really | depressing that there might not be new novels to read much | longer. | macksd wrote: | 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. | ameister14 wrote: | 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. | eslaught wrote: | 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 wrote: | I would anecdotally counter argue that brand/audience/community | building drives _far_ more sales than the book quality | eslaught wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | Agree. | ellegriffin wrote: | It's interesting because reading is so subjective. I think I've | only ever liked a "best selling" book once or twice, because I | like things that are severely strange and that is not to | commercial tastes. So it's hard to judge "quality" | collectively. It's hard enough to judge "quality" individually! | m1117 wrote: | Yeah, writing a book is something that you not only do for the | money, but because you love it. | mikerg87 wrote: | 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 | ? | o_nate wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | These stats are total book titles. Not just fiction. So non- | fiction is somewhere in there! | Aditya_Garg wrote: | 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 | ben_w wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | I think the 2.6 mil refers to the # of titles available for | sale, not the number of copies sold. | nullandvoid wrote: | Oops I skimmed the article and missed that - thanks. | contravariant wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | I was surprised by how low the reported total number of books | is. Then I realised they're only reporting online book sales. | However, the number still seems quite low. | ellegriffin wrote: | Yes, it's only online book sales. NPD book wouldn't give me | numbers on print sales. Though I learned in a previous | article that print sales tend to be less than online sales. | phillc73 wrote: | I see now from up thread, this is 2.6 million individual | titles, not actual book sales. To me, this still seems low. | Unfortunately, the bookstat website linked in the article | won't load for me, but I wonder if that is only the total | number of English language titles (sold online). | goopthink wrote: | 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. | kingsuper20 wrote: | 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. | GekkePrutser wrote: | > 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. | failwhaleshark wrote: | If you can't get a book legally or conveniently, there isn't | really any sales to be "lost" because you wouldn't buy it. | There is no real injury if you can't acquire something | otherwise. You're not stealing a book from a store to cause a | loss. | | So, it's either do without or find a way to get it. And then, | you might make an extra effort to acquire it if it's really | good and encourage others to find it too. Not as a | rationalization but as a human habit: pirating some content, | within reason, leads to increased sales overall rather than a | decrease. | Mediterraneo10 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | How many of these were politically oriented and had sales | bolstered by political organizations to get them on a best | seller's list? | kingsuper20 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | So the ex-mayor of Baltimore should have had the Maryland | Democratic Party buy her children's books instead? | kingsuper20 wrote: | There's probably a book in this history of books as payoff, | from Grant's memoirs on up. | | There is some value to these ridiculous autobiographies | (not so much for the I-hate-the-President-books). In 100 | years, some future historian can draw from 'The Art of the | Deal', 'Dreams From My Father', and probably some biography | of Millard Fillmore to reach a conclusion. In the long run, | they are all non-entities. | kbenson wrote: | > 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - $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 - 3,317 patrons, my guess is | they are making well above $5k/mo. | | - 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 wrote: | Thank you so much! These are excellent case studies. Will look | into all of these. | GekkePrutser wrote: | > 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. | TigeriusKirk wrote: | Amazon is launching a new serialized book program called Vella. | | It seems sort of overly complicated to me in that Amazon will | sell "tokens" to readers in batches with discounts for volume. | The tokens can then be spent on episodes on Vella at the rate | of 1 token per 100 words in the episode. | | Apparently this is a thing they're copying from elsewhere, and | it's supposedly huge in China. | | https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7 | edu wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | | [1] https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | > Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in | between. | | Getting inspired is a part of a job. Here's an example: | | "Someone once asked Mr. Faulkner if he wrote by inspiration or | habit and he said he wrote by inspiration, but luckily | inspiration arrived at 9 every morning." | mattkevan wrote: | Martha Wells does this with her Murderbot Diaries books [1]. | | The series is fantastic and the latest book was great, but PS8 | for something that I finished in less than an hour felt a bit | steep. Especially for an ebook with literally 0 marginal cost. | | [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Martha- | Wells/e/B000APZA1O?ref=sr_nt... | wccrawford wrote: | I'm sure it took me more than an hour to read that book, but | I really enjoy that series so it was well worth the price to | me. It's definitely a short book (novella?) but I get almost | as much out of it as I do longer books. | | And if the larger books are artificially padded, I actually | enjoy them less. | DataGata wrote: | Serialized fiction is basically how many many classics came to | us. Today, lots of online fiction, like Andy Weir's The Martian | or Scott Alexander's Unsong, starts out as serialized fiction | that comes out in sections. The episodic model for books isn't | novel. | Aaargh20318 wrote: | > 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. | | Not just from the author's side. From a reader's perspective | this would also not work. I don't want to start reading a book | a chapter at a time. I don't even like reading books that are | part of an unfinished series. | | For me, as someone who reads quite a lot of books, there is | nothing more satisfying than finding a new series that you are | interested in and discovering the entire series is already | finished. You can then just binge through the whole thing. | | The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through | them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you | can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about. | | I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish | the entire series before releasing it. | klelatti wrote: | The effort of picking a story up again is a fair argument | against. There are some genres (crime fiction) where I think | that the anticipation of waiting for a chapter could | genuinely add to the experience. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Yes exactly, I don't like this at all either.. I know I will | get less absorbed in the story if I have to wait a month in | between each chapter and in the end I'll just give up. | Aerroon wrote: | What if you start a story that already has 400 chapters out | and you get a new chapter every week? Because that's the | kind of numbers you can run into. | | At that many chapters it's like you're reading multiple | books. | bluGill wrote: | There are enough books where the first few were good, but the | final was terrible that I'm not sure I agree. I've learned to | be happy with never having finished some series because they | started great but by the middle weren't worth finding out how | it finished. | klelatti wrote: | I don't think it's completely impossible: | | - I've paid $50 for an e-book with content that I thought was | really valuable (and it was worth every penny). | | - In the 2020s the book could be accompanied by supporting | material (webcasts etc) which would increase the perceived | value. | | - Some people would be prepared to pay more for early access | and to support an author they really like. | | I think that part of it is a change in focus of the book's | content: rather than being accessible to as wide a range of | readers as possible make it really valuable to a subset. | | Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to | book length. A series of chapters with more dense content would | be, in my view, be much more valuable (counting the cost of my | time). | | And of course as others have noted that many great books have | been published as serials (albeit in magazines and newspapers). | ghaff wrote: | >Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to | book length. | | I think by the time you took your scalpel to a typical | business book, you might be left with 50-100 pages. The core | idea is probably a magazine article but there are usually | useful examples, context, etc. | | The problem is that publishing industry economics demand | something more like 250 to 300 pages (and truth be told a lot | of readers would feel a bit ripped off if they paid a typical | book price for a 75 page book). | bluGill wrote: | I've been told that business books are 7 pages of content, | and 242 pages of story so to get people to read the content | pages. | ghaff wrote: | Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't | some made up BS as supported by real customer | experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably | summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the | Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it | would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably | lack the story to make it stick. | klelatti wrote: | There is actually an 18 page summary of Crossing the | Chasm in my local Amazon store - it gets 2 star ratings. | | I think that there are some potentially conflicting | forces: | | - a short exposition is probably better for the reader | | - less than 200 pages is seen as poor value for money | | - people generally expect to read from start to finish | | For me I'd much prefer books which fail the read from | start to finish test but have clearly signposted sections | that I can choose to read and sample from. | pochamago wrote: | Web novels seem to do just fine releasing chapter by chapter in | Korea and Japan. | wfleming wrote: | Serialized novels used to be common, though. Many of Dickens's | novels were famously serialized weekly. Alexandre Dumas' famous | novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were | also published as serials. There are plenty of other examples. | More recently, apparently In Cold Blood and Bonfire Of The | Vanities were both initially published as serials. | | Even today, comic books are effectively serialized narrative | stories that are pretty reliably published on schedule and have | writers who have to keep up for months at a time. | | > Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in | between. | | Different writers have different approaches to work. Some | writers work in highly productive sprints with long fallow | periods, and you're right this model probably wouldn't work | well for them. But some novelists do work steadily (Stephen | King I believe still tries to write for a couple hours every | single day and only takes relatively short breaks between | novels), and the fact that this model used to work for a number | of books that are now considered classics seems to indicate it | can still work in at least some cases. | | I'd actually be more worried about the consumer side - the | death of magazines makes this model tougher. A given author can | reliably produce a novel over the course of a year or two, | perhaps, but probably not indefinitely (comic books solve this | problem by having writing teams do arcs and then swap out the | writer). Magazines used to bundle multiple authors, so | subscribers weren't affected by the break period of a single | author. In a world where people subscribe to individual authors | on Substack and there's no bundling of many authors writing, | yeah, it's a tougher sell. | slothtrop wrote: | Some authors seem to chop up their novels into 3 or more | novellas. Vandermeer's Southern Reach was all released around | the same time and could have been one book from the outset. He | would probably deny it, but w/e. Can't say I blame authors. | | Word is that people on average don't read more or less than in | the past. If that's true I wonder what's responsible for | disparity. Are there more authors than before? | abdullahkhalids wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature) | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens | | > His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly | instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative | fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel | publication.[4][5] Cliffhanger endings in his serial | publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format | allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he | often modified his plot and character development based on such | feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed | distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to | reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with | positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and | he often wove elements from topical events into his | narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually | pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, | opening up and inspiring a new class of readers. | FalconSensei wrote: | Weekly instalments worked at that time and, while it would | still work today to some degree, I see a lot of change in | direction to binge-ing shows and books. | | With that being said, in Japan web-novels are quite common | among teenagers - which later on might get a publishing deal | to get a print version. BUT, the authors are not | professionals and write as a hobby, and making money with | their stories happens when they get the print deal, and not | publishing online. | Aerroon wrote: | It works in China, but there the authors get paid by word | count. And yes, it does lead to exactly the types of | problems you can imagine. But there are so many of these | stories that some end up being very engaging. | | Also, sites like Royalroad and Scribblehub have a fair few | authors who make a significant amount of money through | Patreon and the like. | ghaff wrote: | It was the dollar figures that didn't make sense to me. Sure, | if you can sell your fiction book for $100 on an installment | plan, that brings in a lot more money per fan than a $10 book | sold in one shot does. But those two scenarios seem rather | different not so much because one is episodic but because one | is getting 10x the dollars for the same final product. | Saturdays wrote: | I think most readers would scoff at those price points, | especially when comparing to the plethora of content available | from streaming services such as Netflix, which is at $8-9/month | for individual use. | | That being said, is there a model for a group of | authors/publishers that is $8-9/month for a growing large | selection novels (a la Netflix catalog)? If there is, it | probably won't 'solve' any of the issues the article and others | are bringing up here. | ellegriffin wrote: | Yes, I think there's a strong possibility this might wind up | being the case. My idea is only a working hypothesis as I try | to figure out a model that will work for the fiction author and | right now I'm banking on the idea that it USED to work (and | that Substack CURRENTLY works). But I am definitely open to | ideas if there is another one that might work better! | scottrogowski wrote: | 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. | obviouslynotme wrote: | 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. | rchaud wrote: | > The consumer is absolutely winning right now. There is a | lifetime of free diverse content just a click away. | | Theoretically the consumer should be winning. But the glut of | content (TV shows, new bands) and the supplementary marketing | for that content (blog posts, tweets, IG, newspaper articles) | makes it very difficult to actually locate the content itself. | | "One click away" suggests that I should be able to acquire it | at any store. But that is not true either. Some things are | exclusive to a streaming network or store (Apple Music/Amazon). | | There's a discoverability problem here, as well as friction | when it comes to acquiring the product itself. | marcus_holmes wrote: | I can see this going round in another circle. | | The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. | Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at | marketing to create the audience will be the key divider | between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring | amateur. | | So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great | creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the | creative to focus on creating. | | This is basically what publishing houses & record labels do, | but they're still so caught up in the actual physical | production of stuff. Now everything is digital there's no | actual need to make books or records. | | There'll be a new set of "promoters" who handle the hottest new | talent. Getting signed with one of them is the guarantee that | you've "made it" and you might actually be able to make a | living from this. | | Then the promoters will be publishing their own collections of | stuff, or creating their own subscription services, or finding | some other way of cross-promoting their creatives to the | audience of the other creatives they manage. Then it becomes a | matter of choosing which promoter(s) you want to follow. | | And then we're back to where we were, with gatekeepers for | content. | meowkit wrote: | If instagram is a model, then its already started. My feed is | basically just guitars/bass/drums and motorcycles. There are | these instagram pages who "promote" other pages who pay them. | Once the creator is large enough they can decouple and let | the feed algorithm work. | | Same goes for meme pages, actual models/actors. My guess is | this is nascent stage before it really becomes a dominant | force for filtering/promoting content. | ellegriffin wrote: | I fully agree. In fact, I think (hope) that most of the | writers who are selling only hundreds of copies of their | books are actually just bad marketers. I think this is why | the myth of the Big Four publishing house exists, because | those publishing houses used to come in and scoop the writer | out of obscurity by marketing their book. Now they look for a | writer who already has a big platform so they don't have to | spend the marketing budget and can wind up with a "sure | thing." | ghaff wrote: | >So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a | great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows | the creative to focus on creating. | | Well, that's basically what you hire a public relations | person for. The problem is that now you're having to _invest_ | , perhaps significantly, in making a bigger impact. | KittenInABox wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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). | localhost wrote: | 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-h... | analog31 wrote: | I'm a musician. Good luck with the creator economy. As they say | in music, don't quit your day job. | ellegriffin wrote: | Ha! I definitely won't... | vidarh wrote: | 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. | ellegriffin wrote: | Agreed. | secondcoming wrote: | This seems to contradict this guy [0] | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27108326 | Sebb767 wrote: | > 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. | aj7 wrote: | This neglects the effect that writing things down has on the | other media. | offtop5 wrote: | 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 wrote: | What boon do you see in it? | troelsSteegin wrote: | "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/ | peterarmstrong wrote: | 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/ | u678u wrote: | This model assumes the publisher does nothing. At least if you | buy a OReilly or Wiley book you know it will be a decent | standard. Many ebooks are junk and its not always obvious which | ones. | sdgasg wrote: | Yup, having been burnt by a few bad e-book purchases (both, | fiction and non-fiction), now I stick with big name | publishers. Unless books are recommended by trusted Twitter | or hn accounts. | swyx wrote: | totally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with | an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive | use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week | continuing to market it and to serve the book community) | | would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already | reported to leanpub support :) | kbenson wrote: | > For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably | publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems | that Substack is the best for that. | | Depending on audience and how you advertise to them, I've seen | people be really successful on Patreon. I outlined some of that | in a different comment here earlier, but $15k+ a month (from | Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also | do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat | esoteric genre fiction at Patreon. | markwisde wrote: | Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a | well-known editor and I'm making 10% per copy (ebook or print). | The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I'll only make this | amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax). | | Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can | make as much money by advertising some link that leads to | purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting | 20% on these. It's still not that much. | | Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the | mindset you need to care about security in your company | (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for | 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more | than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the | money. I actually made more money selling this self published | book than with my big editing company. | la_fayette wrote: | Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have | checked prices for printing books, because I am in the | process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. | Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems | quite cheap to me. | mritchie712 wrote: | This is self promotion done well. Provide insight into the | problem you solve and explain where you fit into this story. | Nice job. | [deleted] | peterarmstrong wrote: | 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), 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... | mritchie712 wrote: | My wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. | Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking | is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on | the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a | publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way | to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub! | cultofmetatron wrote: | you can publish directly. no need for leanpub. | | https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/ | peterarmstrong wrote: | Agreed! We don't do anything to help with that part of | the process: you need to use that page either way :) | watwut wrote: | Self publishing is easy. Finding audience is hard. | peterarmstrong wrote: | Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if | she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP | herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here. | | There are other companies like BookBaby which do the | "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub | currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to | make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You | can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any | storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have | many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our | homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a | place for computer programming books, not romance novels. | | Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not | Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind | of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our | Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder | (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your | Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of | Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you | click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we | generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word | files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's | actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds | really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence | another reason we don't have many romance writers on | Leanpub! | | Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be | worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and | professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of | readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much | help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this | regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our | computer programming books and similar types of books, of | course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale | newsletters.) | | Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time | novelist with a small social media following would be to | publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get | traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP | for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've | gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to | produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of | the options they can use as a toolchain. | | (On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social | media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly | to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their | followers at the appropriate landing page for their | book...) | Mehdi2277 wrote: | There are smaller similar sites to wattpad that are | easier to get viewers for new novels. I like tapas, but | probably several more worth exploring (unsure if woopread | is only translations or supports self publishing). I'd | likely submit chapters to several sites at once as a new | author just to increase chance of building an initial | following. | plorkyeran wrote: | > 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 wrote: | Perhaps they didn't fit a search criteria? Got examples we can | see? | dtech wrote: | Graphtreon records all pledges [1] | | [1] https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing | plorkyeran wrote: | A few I'm aware of: | | https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow $6000/month | | https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth $6500/month | | https://www.patreon.com/Magic_Smithing $10,000/month | | https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon $17,000/month | | https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba 4300 patrons with no $ | listed but I've heard it's well over $10,000/month | ellegriffin wrote: | 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! | gdubs wrote: | 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. | annexrichmond wrote: | > 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 wrote: | > 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. | tobias3 wrote: | 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? | ellegriffin wrote: | Very excited to check this one out. Thank you! | spookybones wrote: | Do you happen to know how this author grew her audience? I'm | curious. | NoOneNew wrote: | 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. | eric_b wrote: | I think you're spot on. I'm an avid reader but I enjoy all the | "low-brow" stuff. Tropey high fantasy, cheesy sci-fi, formulaic | legal thrillers, I love it all. If it has "spy" anywhere in the | description I'm in. | | But you're right - the only books I ever hear about from a | marketing standpoint are the ones my wife is reading for her | book club. So either Oprah talked about it, or it's part of the | "book club marketing machine" or whatever. | | I wish the publishing industry could turn things around. I | think the low percentage of people who actively read fiction is | ultimately a bad thing. Binge watching Netflix is not the same | as binge reading a good book series imo. | bluGill wrote: | The low percentage off readers isn't a bad thing: they buy | book after book and keep the industry going. Sure there | aren't as many as would buy a movie (however you get your | movies - cable, dvd, theater...), but that is still a large | enough niche to be worth serving. | | However expanding the niche would be a good thing. | vidarh wrote: | I might have to add "spy" in the description of my next | novel. | | > the only books I ever hear about from a marketing | standpoint | | I'm actually pushing my novel via Taboola at the moment. It's | definitively not profitable in terms of _sales_ of a single | book, but interestingly in terms of _signups to my e-mail | list_ it 's one of the best I've found, and I'm spending a | tiny amount on it each month on the theory that I'm reaching | users who are less jaded and more likely to be outside of the | typical bubble I reach on e.g. twitter, and who might well | turn out to be worthwhile to be able to repeatedly market to | over time in the hope of seeding some word of mouth outside | of my normal audience. | | Half the fun for me (this is a hobby) is trying to figure out | the marketing channels that will work... | Siira wrote: | I don't really see the evidence backing this claim. Most | popular fiction books on Goodreads are not exactly "deep." | Publishers aren't some stupid ideologues either. It's far more | probable that books simply can't compete with the addictive, | visual, social entertainment that is growing by the day. | | This isn't such a big problem either. The minority that does | read books are still huge in absolute terms, and we have more | options than ever to read. | dimitrios1 wrote: | > It's far more probable that books simply can't compete with | the addictive, visual, social entertainment that is growing | by the day. | | The thing is, they aren't competing. Those attracted to | addictive visual social entertainment weren't likely to read | a book anyways. The type that enjoys both does both, and does | not consider one to be a replacement of the other. | thaumasiotes wrote: | > 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. | | Tor? DAW? You talk like no one ever thought of publishing | science fiction or fantasy books. It's been going on all along! | NoOneNew wrote: | Like I said to another commenter, avid readers know these | publishers. Outsiders who would potentially read from them | dont know they exist. Non readers think books like The Da | Vinci Code and Harry Potter are once in a lifetime books. | They're actually fairly normal genre pieces. Difference was, | these were marketed better. | KittenInABox wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | spoonjim wrote: | When there is a book that "everyone is talking about" (i.e | Oprah or the New Yorker or whatever) it's usually a memoir of | someone's difficult life, usually a member of a declared | "oppressed" group. For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between | the World and Me." | | I read that book. It's not even supposed to be enjoyable, and | it's not really great writing or something that I feel like I | need to tell my friends about. Essentially it's stuff you | feel like you "should" read rather than you "want" to read. | Like vegetables instead of ice cream. The ice cream is the | page turning thrillers where some guy is beating up criminals | in parking garages and chasing art thieves around the world. | | The book industry puts its highest profile promotion on | vegetables instead of ice cream. | toomuchredbull wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Yes, but there's also probably a mass of people who did what | Dan Brown did and sold < 10k copies. | spoonjim wrote: | "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. | failwhaleshark wrote: | 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] | synergy20 wrote: | 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. | ghaff wrote: | 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. | rossdavidh wrote: | 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. | mxcrossb wrote: | 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? | hodder wrote: | It will likely lead to less continuity in the story and far | more cliffhangers as it jumps through the chapters like Dan | Brown. | michaelt wrote: | 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. | matsemann wrote: | The Martian was released one chapter at the time. Same with | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. As for the last | one, it's felt that it was written as it was going along, with | certain changes the author normally would have gone back to | fix. Like stuff ending up not mattering, or certain | inconsistencies in the world building. | | But even for larger book series this happens. Like Wheel of | Time, one can in an earlier book read about Lan sitting and | sharpening his sword. Some books later it's mentioned that his | sword never loses its edge. So in later versions of the first | book it has been changed to him sharpening his knife instead. | | But my guess is those things would happen on a larger scale | when not having the opportunity to go back and edit previous | chapters. | narrator wrote: | The Martian is probably the best example of an author really | embracing the 21st century. You give the text of the book | away for free on a website and make money off the people who | want the audiobook, the movie rights, the kindle, etc. In the | 21st century, entertainment is free, attention is expensive, | so you have to give away your free entertainment to get | attention and then sell the entertainment in more rarified | mediums like movies, audiobooks, even kindle, that require | higher production costs than writing a blog. | selimthegrim wrote: | Peter Watts does this too. | ellegriffin wrote: | Yes! I actually interviewed Andy Weir for another piece for | this exact reason. | https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry- | truth | GCA10 wrote: | 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 | ellegriffin wrote: | Absolutely, but it was completely profitable for the author. | Alexandre Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) | per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The | Constitutionnel in 1845. And it's estimated he was making | about that much per installment writing The Count of Monte | Cristo. People followed it like it was Game of Thrones! | | (More on that here if you're interested: | https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth | Mauricebranagh wrote: | Which is why there are page long descriptions of horses and | carriages in the count of mote cristo. | kesselvon wrote: | The second half of Count of Monte Cristo felt like some | serious word count padding | kingsuper20 wrote: | 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. | hluska wrote: | I helped a writer friend move a writing workshop online last | summer. This was one of the topics. The crowd seemed evenly | split between: | | - write it at once and release in chunks. | | - release it as you write. | | - And the most interesting (in my opinion), release it as you | write and then if it's popular, do a full round of edits based | on crowd feedback and self publish the 'definitive, crowd | edited edition'. | paulpauper wrote: | crowdsourcing the edits sounds like a good way to never | finish | andrewzah wrote: | Release it chapter by chapter and put it up on substack/patreon | or just for free in blog-style format. That's what ithare.com | and some other programming books did to build an audience | before (self) publishing. | bluescrn wrote: | As with so many TV shows, there'll never be a satisfying | ending, they'll likely be cancelled on a cliffhanger | aj7 wrote: | 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. | tyrex2017 wrote: | 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 | glaberficken wrote: | 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. 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. | jihadjihad wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law | failwhaleshark wrote: | 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. | drivers99 wrote: | 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/ | | 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. | steelframe wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | rahimnathwani wrote: | 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). | asgraham wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Oh, yes you are correct there. In online sales only (I | don't have the brick & mortar numbers). So to your point, | people are buying books, it's just that they are all buying | the same top selling books. And thank you!!!!! I'm still | trying to figure out the industry enough to succeed in it, | but it's a hard industry to succeed in as it turns out! | bombcar wrote: | I feel if you're including digital copies you need something to | correct - I've received a number of kindle e-books for free | that I've never even downloaded. There's no harm in adding to a | collection when it's digital, whereas I am much more picky over | free physical books. | asgraham wrote: | Fair point-- I don't know how the data defined a "sale." | However, the numbers are almost identical for print books, | just a little lower. But same order of magnitude. | NikolaeVarius wrote: | Why would anyone consider this shocking, there is a massive | amount of content out there, and the human race is finite. | bombcar wrote: | 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 wrote: | Yes! Exactly! It seems doable.... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-10 23:00 UTC)