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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the article glosses over a key point:

Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies.

If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies

Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top-selling author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of this post is just assuming that they are not that great a writer, that they cannot reach the top 1% of their profession.

Writing books is like making video games. Many people dream of creating one, and the vast majority of them are pretty bad. Nevertheless, some incredible books and video games are created, and the stars make a lot of money. Writing books may not be a good idea if your plan is to write some average books and make an average amount of money, but if you think you can write an amazing book, then what else can really compare?

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Reaching the top 1% of their profession still means 1k-10k copies sold, nothing you can make a living on.

As the article states, just 0.01 percent of books sell more than 100k copies, it's not enough to be a great author (not average, but better than 99% of them) you'd need to be somewhat exceptional (better than 99.99%) in order to earn a salary from books.

IMHO there's just too much competition, there so many more "top 1%+" authors in any genre than anyone can read, and given the economics described in this article, many of them don't even bother with publishing and offer their amazing writing for free.

> Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top-selling author, selling over a million copies?

Pretty much not. The vast majority of best selling books are produced by the same few authors year after year. It's far more marketing than meritocracy. Some of those authors farm out ghostwriting duties to numerous authors who will get paid some fixed rate (not royalties) to do most of the writing.

Or, to put it a different way, the odds of becoming an author that sells more than 500,000 copies are probably similar to or less than the odds of becoming a successful Hollywood actor. And probably similar to creating a video game like Minecraft or being one of the founders of a unicorn.

Even in the video game development industry, the stars have to start somewhere. Notch himself started as a developer at King before moving on to Jalbum, then Wurm Online, before even starting Minecraft.

How else do you get the skills to create a masterpiece without starting on average titles for average pay?

Selling a million copies would put them in the top 0.00003% of their profession - merely being in the top 1% only puts you in the ramen-eating 1k-10k sales bracket.

You've reminded me of a Stephen King quote:

"While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one."

a great book can have much more social impact than any movie, tv show, or other medium. Books allow for detail and development that is unrivaled by other mediums

I think this is very open to debate. How many people in the world have seen Star Wars? I would argue that no book short of the Bible has had a higher impact.

but what is the social impact of star wars besides spawning sequels?

A ton of cheap plastic light sabers at birthday parties. And millions of Yoda one-liners all over.

"Buck Rogers is a science fiction (and later, particularly space opera) character created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., subsequently appearing in multiple media".

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.

You are assuming that the top 1% got there based on merit and not money laundering -- a major feature of the business these days.

For anyone else who was surprised by that stat, don't forget that this is for books sold online.

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