Writing books is not really a good idea
ellegriffin.substack.com
ellegriffin.substack.com
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.)
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/
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...
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...)
Naturally, I did it to win a bet. But the bet was designed to teach a friend of mine a lesson, that he was using the unknown difficulty of self-publishing as an excuse to not work on his book. He finally stopped procrastinating and finished his manuscript within a few months.
The hard part of selling books is the selling part. I similarly goaded my own wife into writing a series of sci-fi novels and we (pre-pandemic) had been going to book fairs to sell them. We maybe did two a year, mostly just for fun. We usually sell enough to cover our expenses (printing fees, booth fees, gas to travel, food while we're out). But along the way, she's earned a handful of loyal readers.
We've never put a lot of effort into it, but she sells a few hundred copies a year of her three books. It's not bad, especially for a vanity project. There is a clear line pointing from "effort in selling" to "books sold".
Most publishers these days won't even look at you unless you already have an active readership. We've met a lot of other authors at the book fairs, seeing the same people every year. The ones who have publishing deals are having to do all their own selling, just like us, but didn't get to choose their own cover and are giving up a huge chunk of cash to the publisher. For what? So they can say they're "published"? Meh.
I've seen a lot of people approach their projects as, "If you build it, they will come". I'm sorry, but that's just not a thing. The movie from which that quote comes from (Field of Dreams) is about a literal miracle. You have to sell the book. You have to get out and beat pavement, whether you get a publishing deal or not. So if you have to do the work, you might as well keep the money.
But there are so many publishers/companies that prey on people who want to write, or think they are good enough to publish.
They are called Vanity Publishers.
It's a huge scummy business. It all seems kosher because the customer agrees to the deal.
https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-bewa...
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 $15k+ a month (from Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat esoteric genre fiction at Patreon.
would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)
What were they? (Particularly if they're still issues)
Afair I read a post about self-published fantasy authors, and the only author who earned over 100k, also paid like 50k for ads
Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much.
Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ 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.
- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)
- simply send the book by email when you get a customer
This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!
Ingram allows publishers (I wear both hats) to set the wholesale cut and whether or not to take returns. Bricks and mortar book stores require you take take returns and give them at least a 50% cut. I never wanted to go there so do not take returns and give a 26% cut, 1% over the Amazon minimum.
My print cost is roughly $5.25 and I clear a little over $6 a copy. I also have a kindle e-book edition available directly through Amazon at a list of $9.99 that nets me $6.70 a copy. I sell print copies about 3:1 over the e-book.
Unless the title is a tome, it can be printed as b&w with a print cost in the $4-8 range. Everything after that depends on your competition (for retail price) and your wholesale discount.
At the end of the day I don't see anyone getting rich on any book sales, print or electronic, that are not best sellers from known authors/celebrities. However, as supplemental income you can definitely make some coin with little post authorship effort whether print or e-book.
As someone who likes to write fiction myself, the idea of publishing in-progress feels incredibly alien. Typically, if I finish writing something, it's a first draft that I would revisit a few months later and rework. How are authors handling this aspect of wanting to re-edit if they're publishing chapters on the go? I seem to recall Stephen King describing locking his manuscripts away for six months before revisiting them. The in-progress model seems to work against this type of workflow, or are there ways of dealing with that?
Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.
It wasn't exactly uncommon in the early XX either, during the "Golden Age" of SFF:
https://www.andrewliptak.com/blog/2015/01/22/the-history-of-...
If you are into Chinese webnovels you'll be familiar with the subscription predatory practices that big companies like Qidian have, where the real cost of a whole 1500-chapter novel (inflated because of the perverse incentives of subscription-based revenue) ends up being close to 500USD
It is sad watching the transition from fan translations' funding trough donation pooling into predatory big-novel subscriptons/per chapter "tokens"
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.
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...
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.
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.
And this at almost a million dollars: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.modelmaker...
I'm not sure if these are outliers, and my "random" sampling is just picking out highly visible apps. But I've made good money off an app built in a month, and I've made relatively little from a book written in 3 months.
Software has a lot more variety. You can make say, a communist themed productivity app vs a forest themed one and these will appeal to different people.
"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 Débats, 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 Soulé, 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
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?
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.
I'd imagine the number of books sold per year is strictly increasing.
https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...
Also you'd think last year might have led to more people reading books.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
(entry of Thursday, 14th October)
> 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...
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....
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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
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
The funny thing about writing is that writers mostly hate writing. Writers like being writers. They also like having written books. But the process, they despise.
This is very different from other arts. Musicians enjoy playing music a lot. Performers, in general, love to perform. Even painters, I think, like to paint.
Not writers.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Also probably many people probably submit the same pieces over and over.
Btw if you find an outlet that seems to have no standards but also pays, the right thing to do is to stop being a subscriber and start being an author.
I assume editors don't get paid nearly enough.
I think they might be publishing stuff their core audience really likes, btw. It's just that audience is probably a niche.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
> 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".
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.
This is something I've thought about a lot lately. It seems like if you show any hint of artistic talent or skill in some craft, everyone around you starts encouraging you to monetize it. You draw so well, you should have a patreon. You made some nice soap, you should sell that at the farmer's market. You picked up enough leatherworking to make a wallet, when are you opening the etsy store? I don't think that's right.
edit: nobody tells the person who changes their own oil "oh wow you should be a mechanic!", but god forbid you write a short story without submitting it to The New Yorker :)
TIL of the associated phrase, thank you!
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.
And much easier to make it as a television screen writer.
The mediums have shifted
That there are new jobs of a different kind is not much consolation when one likes the old jobs.
But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing. Can't have Post-mates without workers and restaurants. Can't have restaurants without more workers and food distribution. Can't have food distribution without more workers and food processors... etc.
Ivy league english majors get jobs writing TV and movie scripts. Mass electronic distribution means that many many people get to watch the creative output of a small number of people. All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yep, the transition is difficult, and they'll complain about it, but society as a whole benefits.
If only Ivy League English majors get to be writers, then I think society as a whole has lost a lot.
For many it remains still not that wise a decision.
>All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yeah, I hear burger-flipping is still in demand.
I appreciate the ELI5, but it's not that I don't know history, or I don't understand that some jobs die and others replace them.
It is that I consider some jobs dying a problem, whether they are replaced by something else or not, and doubly so in the way that that transition happens (and some people in each generation get the short end of the stick).
ok, but it's not that some jobs die and others replace them, it's that efficiency gains allow less effort to satiate demand and thereby create a labor/ingenuity supply for new endeavors.
the job of writing (or performing music, etc.) did not die, it's that the demand for satisfying arts consumption can be met by a smaller sector of the economy.
Are you sure there were more successful authors? There weren't that many notable books published in 1921.
There are many thousands of successful authors living today. I'm wondering, how many were there in 1921?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-m...
Edit: I'm a bit off with my dates, as 1922 was the year after which works effectively didn't ever enter the public domain.
I really don't see any good argument why copyright should last longer than, say, 20 years.
Would any potential authors decide it's not worth it to write books if copyright only lasted 20 years? What benefit to society does ~100 years of copyright provide?
My ideal is like the old system (initial registration plus fixed term renewals). That actually worked well to balance interests and we should go back to it. Just make the renewals an increasing cost so that your 'Mickey Mouse' hits can continue to have effectively infinite protection while most won't renew and drop into the public domain.
The boring truth is politicians in Congress were in favor of copyright extension (at least in 1998). Two reasons given were: 1) copyright industries give the US one of its most significant trade surpluses, and 2) the European Union had recently extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions.
I fully expect the copyright on the first Mickey Mouse cartoon will expire in 2024.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/678813/disney-lobbying-e...
Everything having a lifetime copyright has it's own problems, but cutting everything to 20 years creates it own.
The public domain isn't meant to be a dumping ground for forgotten properties. Rather, the public domain is a wellspring from which new writers can draw upon. Just as I may name a character "Sherlock" (1887), "Romeo" (1597), or "Odysseus" (~700 BC) in order to bring in specific character traits, I may also want to name a character "Superman" (1938), "Gandalf" (1954), or "Skywalker" (1977). These are all part of our shared cultural heritage from previous generations, and we have a right to build upon that heritage to create something even better for the next generation.
That is why I think roughly one generation, 30 years or so, is an appropriate maximum copyright duration. As adults, every generation has the right to retell and remix stories and characters from their childhood. The current duration of copyright is a gross abuse of that right.
To respond to this specific point, though "...we have a right to build upon that heritage to create something even better for the next generation". We already do this, we create tropes and then write new stories using those tropes. Creating new is better than just rehashing existing properties and longer copyright terms actually encourage new works because you can't rely on older properties for your material. I think they're too long for virtually all works because most works are commercial failures. They could find new audiences if their distribution rights weren't locked up. MST3K is a great example of doing something new with an existing property that is only possible with term limits.
Games are interesting because games copy each other incessantly but almost never sue over copyright.
The actual source code and art would clearly fall under copyright, but not the gameplay. So when PUBG discovered the popular battle royale genre, everyone rushed to copy it and now we have Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty Battle Royale, etc. When Dota was popular, it spawned tons of clones. Minecraft spawned tons of clones. In some cases where the clones are too similar, the original creator may have legal grounds for suing, but they seldom do so.
Short of blatantly stealing assets from another game, it's hard to get in trouble over another game's copyright.
Side note, this has been a really good thread to read and respond to.
Even Twilight fanficton like 50 Shades of Gray launched even more imitators!
I strongly disagree with this statement. The point of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". The commercial viability is the means through which that point is achieved. If at any time copyright isn't functioning to promote the arts, and instead hinders, then it isn't fulfilling the point.
While I do agree that the tropes are the stronger part, part of the reason why shared characters are so powerful is because they can immediately stand in to represent the trope. If I am writing a Robin Hood story, I don't need to spend time explaining who Robin Hood is, I can just start telling the story. If I am writing a story about "What if Superman were evil?" (e.g. [0][1]), then I need to first spend time explaining who the character is, describing powers, and then drawing just enough parallels so that the audience knows who I'm talking about without drawing so many that I get sued. It's a really boring way to start a story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irredeemable [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightburn
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
Progress of knowledge is covered differently and it's why the US has carved exceptions for facts (they're exempt from copyright) and we use a patent system for inventions. Think of current problems with companies like Elsiver that use copyright as a cudgel to keep academic papers from the masses.
I definitely agree that copyright can, and frequently does hinder progress. My statement is perhaps limited to the US, where patents and copyrights are given an explicit goal in Article 1 of the Constitution, stating "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The "to promote the progress" wording is important, as it tells a goal, and not just a legal capability.
A thought experiment I like is to consider the best way to promote progress in the arts and sciences. Suppose there were a magic box, which could instantly tell the full value of any invention or artwork or writing. You put something in, and it tells you how much it benefits society. Then there could be a program set up to reward authors and inventors for making things. They come up to the box, put the work in, and get paid the amount that the magic box tells you. In exchange for contributing to society, there is some compensation for doing so.
Of course, no such magic box exists, nor can it. We could have some sort of a poll to determine the overall worth of a new book or a better can opener, but that would have a lot of overhead. So instead, for a limited time, we reward authors and inventors by giving them a temporary monopoly over making copies of what they wrote, and that can become a monetary reward by selling those copies. Because we don't have an objective measure of a book's worth, we fall back to subjective measures. But this is still fundamentally a restriction on society as a whole, not to reproduce something that they have purchased, and that restriction requires some ongoing basis. It cannot be forever, and it must always be in service of promoting the arts and sciences, because that is the only reason why the offer of a legal monopoly in exchange for open publication exists.
(As a tangent, I don't understand any basis for legal protections of trade secrets, beyond civil penalties for breaking a contract. Companies using trade secrets have decided not to accept the bargain offered by patents, and therefore should also not have the benefits of legal protections.)
(And a second tangent, I don't think that computer programs released without source code should be eligible for copyright protection. The authors have not fulfilled their side of the bargain by releasing a work in a form that can be built upon and expanded by society once their limited-time monopoly has expired, and so they should not receive the legal monopoly offered in that bargain.)
Yes, and that point is that it's not for ever.
> It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work.
Exactly. For a limited time.
Most of us only live for a single lifetime, so anything longer than that is effectively forever: If something is locked away by copyright when you're born, and still is when you die, then you don't ever get it free of copyright.
Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, and as far as I know, it's been fine. That might be why there have been so many movies and shows based on the character recently.
Imagine it's 2024 and the original Mickey Mouse cartoon just entered the public domain. How does this impact Disney?
-Anyone could watch Steamboat Willie for free (assuming it's online somewhere). I don't see this harming Disney.
-Another big studio like Warner could make a cartoon with the original Mickey. I doubt any of the big studios are even interested in doing so, but if they do, I don't think it will affect Disney's revenue.
-Small studios and independent artists could use the original Mickey character. I think if anyone does this, it's more likely to help than hurt Disney, by boosting Mickey's profile.
-Other manufacturers could make Mickey Mouse merchandise. This is probably the biggest direct harm to Disney, but I don't think it'll make much impact on their revenue.
Some things people couldn't do:
-Use the Mickey Mouse logo. It's protected by trademark.
-Make a sequel or spin off of a modern Mickey Mouse product. Another studio couldn't just make Epic Mickey 2 since Epic Mickey (2010) is still protected.
I'm not sure Disney makes much money off of Mickey compared to other properties like Star Wars, Marvel, Frozen, etc. Mickey's popularity seems to be waning. Apart from a few video games, he hasn't been in much recently. He has a TV show that did fine but isn't particularly popular.
Okay, but what about other popular properties? The first Harry Potter book was published 24 years ago. What if it were in the public domain?
-J. K. Rowling's net worth is estimated to be over a billion USD. She'll be okay.
-People would still buy new books written by J. K. Rowling.
-Only her earliest books would be in the public domain.
In most jobs, you can't expect to work for a few years and be set for life. I'm not sure why it should be different for authors (and it usually isn't). If your book won't make enough money for you to retire after 20 years of sales, you'd either have to write another book, or get another job. That's already the case for the vast majority of authors.
The trick to dealing with a 20 year copyright term is to keep making new works. Which is exactly what copyright was supposed to encourage.
Couple of other issues.
"Small studios and independent artists could use the original Mickey character"
"Other manufacturers could make Mickey Mouse merchandise. This is probably the biggest direct harm to Disney, but I don't think it'll make much impact on their revenue."
The reason you've seen them make Steamboat Willie LEGO and the current "old-style" Mickey Mouse cartoons is because they're setting up a copyright argument if someone tried. They're also setting up the same arguments that Sherlock Holmes uses which is that the elements of Mickey in Steamboat Willie have been used recently and are thus still locked up by copyright. You can distribute Steamboat Willie, but can not otherwise use the property. The Sherlock Holmes case is here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163248743572192...
"Which is exactly what copyright was supposed to encourage."
No, copyright is an exclusive distribution right. It's a government granted monopoly to provide protection to creative works. The history of copyright is pretty interesting in an of itself and starts with the printing press in the 1500s. Long story short, though, it's always been about commercial exploitation of a creative work.
This was edited to correct some info.
The Doyle estate lost the case you're referring to and Klinger was allowed to publish his derivative stories.
Disney could try to sue, but I don't think their case is any stronger than the Sherlock Holmes case if the defendant is only deriving material from the original Mickey cartoon.
From the case listed "And the claim is correct, for he acknowledges that those copyrights are valid and that the only copying he wants to include in his book is copying of the Holmes and Watson characters as they appear in the earlier stories and in the novels."
Mickey Mouse will most certainly not be in the public domain anymore than he is now. Disney can also fall back on trademark law to take care of Disney's use as well.
It's a bit of a moot point in my opinion, because I don't think anyone outside of Disney would even want to make more of 1928 Mickey. It's old. It's not popular. Maybe they'd use him for a cameo or for parody, but shows already do that anyway, regardless of the copyright [1].
That the extension was done under the guise of harmonization only shows that the lobbying was done one country at a time. That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#S...
> That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
It doesn't show that. You're speculating that Congress supported copyright due to Disney's lobbying and dismissing the possibility that members of Congress who supported it actually supported it for the reasons they stated. The tricky thing with this kind of speculation is it's impossible to prove or disprove. Maybe it was Disney that convinced them. But you don't seem to have any evidence.
If it's so cheap to buy Congressional votes, why hasn't Disney been able to extend copyright again in the past 20 years? They've been lobbying every year since Sonny Bono. The copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.
If votes are so cheap, why can't we just buy votes to shorten copyright? Or at least prevent extensions?
We have a mechanism for solving the problem of Derivative works that purport to be creations of the "empire": trademarks.
BTW, everyone focuses on Steamboat Willie (entering the public domain in 2024), but there are already several Mickey Mouse cartoons in the public domain: The Mad Doctor, Minnie's Yoo-Hoo, and Mickey's Surprise Party.
So, it is possible to create derivative Mickey Mouse works, just make sure that they can't be confused for works or products created or licensed by Disney.
On the numbers side people have a lot more disposable income, capturing a larger share of revenue per person can completely flip the equation. Patreon, etc don’t have to individually provide enough to live off of as long as all revenue streams add up to a living wage. I suspect if the objective threshold is say 50k USD inflation adjusted, today is relatively speaking a much better time to be an author than most people here are assuming.
Of course that’s ignoring all the vanity books being published. Simply having an ISBN number doesn’t really mean anything in today’s world.
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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong, I fantasize too, but I manage in eating a balanced breakfast. I think the obsessive component is completely disregarded in the realization of most “self-actualizing” aspirants. I can think of a recent read of Angus Black of AC/DC and how he turned his first guitar’s fretboard rotten from all the sweat. Focusing more on finding that obsession rather than fantasizing about becoming something you likely are not tooled for - say an author - will lead to a more satisfactory course through life. Otherwise, one is simply blindly and madly stabbing in the dark to achieve what someone like Bukowski will starve to do. It must come from within, not from without.
This paints a picture of media forms along some continuum, which describes what you're looking for.
[1] Media Literacy, W. James Potter
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.
$1000 * 12 < $100,000
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/ is what he has been writing for the past year and I still look forward to the chapters on Tuesday and Saturday every week. There is also a whole community of readers who gathers in the comments section or the subreddit to theorize and speculate, it is a lot of fun.
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.
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.
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.
In what world is he a "great" writer?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And then of course look at ourselves and wonder what the next generation will laugh at.
Why do you think movies and TV somehow age more than books?
1. Quality of special effects 2. Specifically for TV, it was often treated as the medium where you dump scripts that weren’t good enough to be made into a movie.
And I'm sorry but that's not how scripts work. Episodic television and one-off movies have entirely different dramatic structures and aren't even remotely interchangeable. You can't just turn a movie into TV.
One of the greatest TV shows of all time, I Love Lucy, is from 70 years ago. And in terms of enjoyment, it hasn't aged at all. Nor did it require special effects. ;)
Above all, the 1950's was called the "Golden Age of Television" for a reason! [1]
That is definitely survivorship bias. Do you have any idea how many books are created in a year, even before eCommerce? The vast majority of them are crap.
I think a lot of TV shows have reached the point where they're aging a lot slower too. If you launch a new sci-fi show today for instance, you're competing for eyeballs against Star Trek: TNG which hold up well in the modern day. When TNG came out old shows hadn't aged as well and the were unavailable to most people. DVD's and now streaming have given TV the equivalent of used book stores and creators now have to compete against the back catalogues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
Of course, instantiating this in the real world is another question. For ebook libraries, it certainly seems plausible, but for regular libraries?
Disagree with this. There has been a very short period in human history (roughly from the invention of the printing press till the rise of ebooks/audiobooks) where books were primarily physical objects. Stories were told and preserved orally for thousands of years, and who knows where the future of the medium is.
The amount is probably not very large though, the German Wikipedia page says ~11 Mio Euro for 2010.
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.
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.
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.
For instance: https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
I do certainly think the market is massively geared towards a tiny number of best-sellers, but there are a number of people who still have success with modest sales of individual books simply by focusing more on building a back catalogue and marketing to a fan base more likely to want to buy "everything". You can afford to spend quite a lot more on ads if a single sale might lead to 20 more than if one book is all you have.
But that require you to think about it as a business, and a lot of writers don't want to deal with that bit.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
I think I have an unspoken budget of “words read daily” that is consumed by work and my mobile devices.
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.
Why?
why is that?
Also, do not underestimate the power of re-reading great books, new and deeper insights are attained during the second and third reads.
You re-read great works, not NYT best shiller! (sic).
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.
(Some people also derive comfort in familiar stories.)
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.
To your second point, to quote Prince, "There is joy in repetition".
What am I to read in the mean time?
Take any good from my post and leave the rest. I am not the most finesse commentator.. but at least I am not accusatory.
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.
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.
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).
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.
That's just one example. It obviously depends on the book. Getting "absolutely nothing" out of something seems more like a choice.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps it’s relevant that I have a terrible memory for plot.
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.
Your comparison to television is a pretty good one, honestly. I've never really rewatched an episode of a serial television series (other than trying to refresh my memory when picking up a new season), since there usually isn't any substance there beyond the plot and characters, but I'll happily rewatch movies if the directing, cinematography, and/or acting are compelling enough.
--Vladimir Nabokov
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.
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.
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.
Pre-COVID, I usually managed 120 to 150 books per year. Now, it is probably down to about 40.
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.
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...
People read machine translated stories! Sometimes you can't even tell what's going on based on those translations, but people still read them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's why I love indie films, indie games, garage rock, zines....
Most books are written about the wealthy?
But also, yes, often about the wealthy. Here's synposes of four of the five current NY Times Bestsellers:
> Over twenty years ago, the heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors — and the items stolen from her family were never recovered.
> Until now. On the Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials WHL3.
And:
> While Maisie believes the boy and wants to help, she must maintain extreme caution: she’s working secretly for the Special Operations Executive, assessing candidates for crucial work with the French resistance.
And:
> There, Stone finds that a dual-pronged threat is hiding in plain sight among the stately houses and exclusive coastal clubs, and the incursion isn't easily rebuffed. These enemies have friends in high places, funds to spare, and a score to settle with Stone . . . and only the cleverest plot will draw them out into the open. From luxuriously renovated homes to the choppy ocean waters, the pursuit can only lead to an explosive end.
And:
> Straight as an arrow special agent Kate O'Hare and international con man Nick Fox have brought down some of the biggest criminals out there. But now they face their most dangerous foe yet-a vast, shadowy international organization known only as the Brotherhood.
Directly descended from the Vatican Bank priests who served Hitler during World War II, the Brotherhood is on a frantic search for a lost train loaded with $30 billion in Nazi gold, untouched for over seventy-five years somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Europe.
These are stories about the elite. You may argue "Well, sure, but people like reading about the rich and powerful because they are more exciting to read about." But that is in itself partially a result of a culture we've built that says that your story is less meaningful if you aren't successful or powerful.
There is something to what you say, but perhaps less than you think. Stories about unjustly downtrodden members of the elite overcoming adversity and opposition to return to their rightful place in the social order (eg. every fairytale princess ever) didn't circulate as oral traditions for centuries due to the patronage of the upper crust. Nor can you really explain the popularity of the current incarnations of these stories (eg. as Disney princesses) that way.
Incidentally, I (vaguely) recall a story about a wizard from an alternate reality seeking out a baby switched at birth with one in our world. Said baby grew up to be a garbage man in our world, but always felt out of place. Said wizard offers to return said garbage man to his rightful place in the magical realm.
Bapr gurl'ir erghearq gb gur zntvpny ernyz ur'f unaqrq n oebbz naq gbyq gb fgneg fjrrcvat bhg gur fgnoyrf.
This was a short story (perhaps even a short-short), and not Zelazny's Wizard World novel (or any other novel).
Poor people telling stories about rich people still enables the poor to have agency in culture building. (And, in fact, it is probably most effective to have them tell stories about the rich so that the rich can be seen from an outsider's perspective.)
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.
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?
Star Wars is basically that, as a movie, tuned and optimized. It's a complicated question, but I think it's quite possible Star Wars would not and could not exist in the absence of the original, pre-Star-Wars, novella.
Which became all sorts of things such as comic strips… but started as a book.
"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."
How else do you get the skills to create a masterpiece without starting on average titles for average pay?
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.
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.
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.
Or in simple words, could you clarify here?
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.
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.
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.
However expanding the niche would be a good thing.
> 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...
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.
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.
Tor? DAW? You talk like no one ever thought of publishing science fiction or fantasy books. It's been going on all along!
Have you got a blog or anything like that?
"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."
I used to read 30-ish novels a year, and now it's more like 4. Would love to get back on the horse, I'm sure there are plenty of others. Finding fun books to read is tough.
As for post 2, 3, 4...? I dunno, but I'm on Twitter at atseajournal, and happy to hear about whatever.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recommend having some knowledge for free, for example, open source project. Charge more per copy and expect lower number of sales. Continuously improve project and book. Collect reviews in respectful way.
I am happy to answer any questions.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Also, sites like Royalroad and Scribblehub have a fair few authors who make a significant amount of money through Patreon and the like.
The series is fantastic and the latest book was great, but £8 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...
And if the larger books are artificially padded, I actually enjoy them less.
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.
At that many chapters it's like you're reading multiple books.
While I know that feeling somewhat…
> I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.
… how would that work when series of books (at least the ones I'm familiar with) are often written and published over the course of several years, or perhaps in some cases even decades, i.e. much slower than your typical Netflix series?
At those timescales, that means authors would be getting neither feedback nor payments for a very long time, and it also increases the risk that in the end, the whole thing might not be published at all.
While unfinished series of books (or unfinished books themselves for that matter) can indeed be frustrating from a certain point of view, I still think the world is mostly a better place for them having already been published even in that unfinished state.
- 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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where does one even start to find the next Pynchon for example?
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.
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.
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.
The PR person wants to be noticed by journalists. They get paid the same regardless of how much money the creative makes. But their next gig depends on being noticed by journalists.
The marketing partner wants to sell lots of whatever it is that the creative makes. They're on a % of sales (or more usually, it's the other way around and the creative earns royalties based on sales). They need to build an interested audience that they can then market to for other creatives.
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.
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?
That said, I tend to pick my books from the top lists. But I'm not a frequent reader.
Further, every modern author is competing with every author who ever lived. I could read the science fiction you wrote last year or I could read Asimov, Herbert, Card, etc. and they're often cheaper and more socially relevant.
[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9446/do-33-of-h...
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
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 :)
The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every book is a big disappointment these days.
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.
But of course, that doesn't preclude the fact that there may have been much better works that didn't make it to us.
Popularity seems almost arbitrary with elements of promotion (ads, influencers, celebrities, etc.), timeliness, and virality.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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).
> 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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
(not exhaustive:)
- Video-games (including mobile)
- Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc)
- Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc)
- Music (single purchase and streaming)
- TV (yup still going)
- News (TV, and online mostly)
- books (print and ebooks)
Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years.
Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing?
The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period).
My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though. We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it.
Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff.
The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content.
I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
What will happen when anyone can make a movie on their home computer that looks just as good as a Hollywood production is not that current book writers will make them. It is that the market will be flooded by visually fine, but structurally inept movies that no one will want to watch.
Ironically, what you’ve described has also happen to books to some degree. The self-published ‘Createspace’ or ‘KindleDirect’ books are usually cringeworthy.
It’s the old curator problem... if it becomes trivial to create something in a medium, it’s more important then ever to have a gatekeeper or curator to help identify the good stuff.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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
(More on that here if you're interested: https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
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.
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.
- 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’.
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.
It's strange to see people speculating about whether this is possible, since it's already here.
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?
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.
Ah, here we go: https://www.npr.org/2012/08/01/157696354/gore-vidal-american...
TBH, I find a downside of publishing through a traditional publisher is that I can't just freely distribute in digital form.
This is just incredibly wrong? There are quite a few web serial authors making more than $5000/month on Patreon.
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
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.
The numbers are quite frightening but honestly, it is a crowded market with millions of professional, semi-professional and hoobyist authors all trying to stand-out.
I have read a few books recently, that are quite well-known, and didn't really find the quality very high. These are books that have gone through the high barrier of publishing and distribution so they can't be "garbage" but yet, they were underwhelming.
On the other hand, I have read some books which are outstanding and unique. They have a USP over other books, which is why they should and could succeed.
In such a crowded market, one should not expect to make a good full-time salary, just like most footballers and musicians would be lucky to make enough to live on, let alone a good salary.
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.
Lots of non-literary fiction, like “Game of Thrones” translates well and having read the books and watched the show I’d probably agree with your assessment here - optimize for time. But real literature is only good as literature.
My point is that you can not stack up movies and books 1:1 for sales, as people have limited free time and one person watching exclusively movies, for example, would generate far higher watch numbers than a person only reading books would buy books (everything else being equal). While not ideal, I think comparing them by time spent gives a far better comparison of what is currently popular than simply comparing sales numbers.
The last 100 or so years has been an anomaly in that for the first time in history we had a highly literate population that could read fiction. And for much of this era movies and TV were not as accessible to create or consume. But today it is both affordable to create, distribute, and consume fiction via the motion picture therefore making written fiction niche as the audience for it isn’t interested in the literary aspect of it so much as the story telling element. So as we’ve had cumulatively more content disseminated at at accelerating pace it has made most written fiction as obsolete as the parlor singer or traveling news reader. Implanting the stories would do to TV what TV has done popular books.
May be it time or effort, modern story dissemination technology allows people to consume more fiction per hour. I only think most people weren’t reading because they liked to read. They wanted to consume stories and now fiction books are just not able to compete with TV streaming. But literature should be continue on as it has.
"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!'
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.
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?
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.
I hope that there are more, and if you can find them please let me know!!!
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’m not concerned if we don’t uncover the next Stephen King (he’s got a few great books though!) so long as the next Pynchon is published.
But then again, that 2.6 million books were sold is also more than I expected.
Although I think you meant to write 27 million (268 * 100k)
edit - ignore, I missed that it was 2.6m unique in the article
That right there would probably throw all the numbers off dramatically world population wise.
- 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?)
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.
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.
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.
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 AsimovBut 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.
No mention of Patreon either.
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?
Maybe authors can pivot to that. But I fear with the very low barrier to entry, most creatives won't be making money.
The rate of change is roughly proportional to the amount present. The biggest gets even bigger, faster.
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.
together with that, it is a great learning opportunity for the author.
all in all: not for me
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) Publish your work for free, either on a site dedicated to that genre like royalroad.com or some other way as long as you can get people invested and checking regularly for your work.
2) Be consistent and frequent in your output. More than once a week is good, but if you only publish something once a week, make sure you always have something to publish and don't skip ever. Buffered content is your friend.
3) A lot of the free readers (or even Patreon subscribers) don't expect book publisher quality editing. In fact, many will jump at the option to help you by being a proof-reader and let you know of typos, or weird sounding phrases, etc. I suspect many would prefer more often releases/more content as a trade for slightly worse editing. Some of those I posted above release 5-6 chapters a week, and typos are common. Nobody seems to mind.
4) I'm convinced as a reader the biggest thing that gets people to subscribe/be a patron is advance chapters. From my experience, you get to a really exciting part of the story, and want to know what happens, and from author blurbs letting people know there at 10-20 future chapters available from subscribers, it's hard to resist dropping $5-$10 to know there's a significant chunk of story you immediately get. It's also very hard to stop paying knowing you have a few weeks to wait before the free chapters catch up to where you were just reading.
5) Some authors take chunks past chapters off free sites a while after so they can publish on Amazon as a book (after editing passes, etc, so usually there's at least a few weeks past the current chapter). This probably synergizes well with people that find the author from their books and subscribe to read the latest one as it's written (e.g. Matt Dinniman for me). I'm not sure if you lose a lot of organic free reader growth though, and whether it's better or worse probably depends on how well your books do on Amazon (whether traditional or Kindle Unlimited).
Finally, I'm pretty sure there's a subreddit for authors that covers a lot of this and you can mine people there for information. I'm not sure what fiction genre's this extends to well, but I imagine most pulpy things which people like to consume in large quantities qualify. For example, I'm not sure of a romance webnovel site like royalroad.com, but I bet it exists, and I bet there are people on Patreon making good money from patrons because of it.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)