Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

> But could fiction do the same? That is a yet unanswered question. There are a few serial fiction writers on Substack—but none are paid. There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).

I think those statistics are extremely suspect. I subscribe to a few fiction authors on Patreon, and there's a few I did subscibe to but don't any more. I know of at least 4-5 fiction authors making a lot of money, like $10k+/mo ($15k+/mo in some cases) writing fairly niche content (litrpg and/or xianxia type work).

Then, when they get enough chapters for the current long-running fiction together, they bunfle it into a book and release on Kindle Unlimited, as an additional source of income.

Here's some examples:

- https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul - 2163 patrons as of now, minimum tier is $2.50/mo, but I suspect most people are paying $5 since that gives access to all advance chapters and not just some, and you can read delayed chapters on royalroad.com. So, probably somewhere between $4k and $8k a month, and this is their side hustle while in college I think.

- https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels - 1393 Patrons. There is a $1/mo option, but various tiers from $3/mo to $10/mo give you up to 50 advance chapters from where it's publishes for free on royalroad.com.

- https://www.patreon.com/jdfister - Page says they are making $4,116/mo from 517 patrons, similar situation as above with royalroad.com and advance chapters, as a point towards how much to expect the above people are making.

- https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth - $12,753/mo from 1,886 subsribers. Same situation as above with free publishing on royalroad.com and advance chapters.

- https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL - 3,317 patrons, my guess is they are making well above $5k/mo.

- https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon - $17,297 from 2,403 patrons. Similar as above. Books showing up on Kindle Unlimited.

These are just some people I actually read or read at some point in the past for a while, not a bunch I searched out that includes the top people. This is an answered question, IMO. If random web serials I'm reading are making this much money, I suspect there's a large amount of people making money this way.

Thank you so much! These are excellent case studies. Will look into all of these.

So, interestingly, from being on the readers side and seeing how authors promote their works, and from actually brainstorming this with one of the above authors for a bit when they were first starting out, there's a clear path that can work if there's a ready audience to hook with your work for free.

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.

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