Why I Am a Bad Correspondent (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why I Am a Bad Correspondent (2015)

nealstephenson.com

60 pointsgmays23 comments

“my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees”

This actually surprises me. With someone as thoroughly read and prolific as Stephenson I would have expected a much larger financial reward. Are the economics of publishing really that bad or is he just being modest?

It's that bad. Very few writers can make a living just off writing novels. I have a friend who wrote, six? seven? novels and just couldn't make it as a novel writer. There's just too much competition [1] these days.

[1] Not only with other people who are writers, but with the attention of potential customers (games, movies, surfing the web, etc).

There are some people who can produce a big tome that commands attention, NS being one, but they are few.

Completely this. I'm currently working on a novel with a view to publishing, but under no illusions that it's going to make any worthwhile money. For that, I have my day job and technical books (Which as far as I can make out are far more profitable then novels on average).

The Society of Authors (https://societyofauthors.org/) do some excellent work on this front. Basically, to make money writing you have to either be a _machine_ and put out a lot of content, or get lucky and build a fan base that is willing to wait for infrequent releases but buy all the copies.

I think the financial reward comes from, essentially, the number of books sold; while Stephenson writes good books and wins awards, he doesn't actually write many books and averages one giant tome every couple of years or so.

For an author of "genre fiction" the economics are that bad, but if an author's work is used for a successful film or some other Hollywood collaboration, that author's fortunes can definitely change.

Any idea how much an adaptation of a book for a movie from a big studio generates in revenue for the book author?

Excluding outliers like Harry Potter

I've seen figures of about $500k for a major film. Always ask for a fixed sum in cash. A percentage of profits is worthless because of "Hollywood accounting".

However, I think the custom is to buy a time-limited option first for 10% of that sum, say, and only pay the full sum if the film really gets made.

> A percentage of profits is worthless because of "Hollywood accounting".

One can always ask for a percentage of the gross, although it's rare that something like that is agreed to by everyone concerned. The producers of the original "Lord of the Rings" films felt for some reason kind of desperate at one point and tried to get Sean Connery to play Gandalf. They offered him a percentage of the gross to appear in the film. I did the math on it one time and if I remember correctly it would have paid over half a billion dollars...

This page says he sold over three million books as of 2013: https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-new-and-improve...

If he gets a dollar or two per copy (which I think is roughly correct, based on my very limited understanding of the industry) then that’s $3-6 million. He had been writing for around 30 years at that point, so that’s in the neighborhood of $100,000-200,000/year.

Would that be about right for a 'middle-class lifestyle'? By European standards at least I'd say it's on the high end of 'middle-class'.

Brandon Sanderson comes to mind as a comparison point—he's also a genre-fiction author, and I'd imagine he's about as well known as Neil Stevenson.

I know Sanderson employs at least one assistant.

I don't know if he's a FAIR comparison point... Sanderson is practically a robot; I don't know when the man finds time to sleep given his prodigious output AND personal engagements.

Stephenson has written apparently 16 novels in 35 years. [1]

Sanderson, on the other hand, has written around 30 novels in 14 years, depending on how you want to count novellas and kids' books. [2]

Sanderson is also much more active in keeping up PR about himself and what he's doing -- I think that fan interaction, both online and offline, is as much a part of his popularity as his actual writing. He's fantastic in the respect and I'm sure it reflects in his sales numbers... and probably helps with all of his discussions in getting his stuff into TV/films/games, and a lot of that stuff is (as far as I know from what he's allowed to discuss) in progress.

So I'd actually expect to see Sanderson making much more than Stephenson and it definitely makes sense to me that Sanderson would have an assistant or two given all of his engagements and franchises.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Bibliography

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson_bibliography

That's a very good point about number of published works, that likely makes a huge difference!

While Sanderson has several film projects in the works, none of them seem far enough along to have paid off yet financially. Although I guess it depends on how the contracts were written.

MikeAsh commented with an article he found saying Stephenson had sold 3 million books to date by 2013 [1], but I found another one saying Sanderson had sold 7 million to date by 2015 [2].

The really interesting part is that the article MikeAsh linked also lists Sanderson (as of 2013) with 2.5 million sales of his solo books, meaning that he sold at least another 4.5 million books in various languages in two years, basically eclipsing Stephenson's lifetime number.

Given the difference in their output and the times that the various books were available for sale, this really cements the difference between them sales-wise for me. My gut feeling here is that a lot of this is due to not only his writing and stories, but also to his constant enthusiastic fan engagement.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259853

[2] http://awfulagent.com/brandon-sanderson-sells-over-7-million...

In addition to being very humbly and respectfully written, I suspect that this is not unique to successful authors. That we'd all benefit similarly from this focused effort, but it's so foreign that we don't know what we're missing.

The same line of thinking applies to programming, of course.

In practice, however, the life of a programmer is usually split up into too many tiny async slices by email, chat, meetings, etc. to even attempt to enumerate here. It's so far the opposite extreme of what he describes here that it's like ironic comedy.

Makes me feel like I'm doing life all wrong.

I've been doing pretty much what he describes for three years now, except writing code and sharing it with the world for free [0].

After spending 13 years writing software professionally in everything from major established corporations to consulting and startups.

I don't have that many options for health-reasons, and I'm privileged to live with a partner who pulls most of the economic weight.

But I can't imagine doing it any other way anymore.

[0]

https://github.com/codr7/g-fu/tree/master/v1

https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl

https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

Arthur C. Clarke had an essay on fan mail. At the time he wrote it, he was limited to responding via preprinted postcard "Mr. Clarke regrets", which I believe was the title of the essay. His nest step was to be silence.

That was an early lesson to me on the bounds of human attention.

This is really hard to read - dark grey on a black background.

https://outline.com/https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-...

Also- 'reader view' on Firefox.

> rgba(153, 153, 153, 0.6);

Neal... What are you doing? Sitting in a pitch black room all day?

Edit: Looks like a typo:

> color: #9999;

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