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Comment by ellegriffin | Hacker News Reader

This is certainly valid, but it also assumes the current publishing model (as in, how could I, one writer, make $100,000 of the $28 billion pie). Which also assumes that I would need to reach mass appeal (re: sell lots of copies) as an author to be successful in that paradigm.

What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already has a niche audience for my writing, to have those followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough value to that small audience, that they want to pay to subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100/year? Or 2,000 people pay $50/year?

This is different from selling books. It's selling a platform.

It STILL might not work. And I STILL might never reach that income. But it's an entirely new way to think about books and publishing and I'm curious to see if there's still a path for fiction writers in there somewhere....

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> What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already has a niche audience for my writing, to have those followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough value to that small audience, that they want to pay to subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100/year? Or 2,000 people pay $50/year?

That's a completely different concept that a novelist so data from the classic publishing industry are likely useless. You'll have to find out for yourself ¯\_(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.

This is commonish in translation community. There are sites like wuxia world and woopread that have a lot of translations of east asian web novels that you can pay to see chapters earlier. Some do it as pay per chapter others as a subscription model for early access. I do also see a few self published fantasies/romances that do this on tapas but would guess few do well enough. Normal model here is short chapters of about 5ish pages sold for l0-20ish cents per chapter. This leads to many series having massive chapter counts. 1000 chapter stories are pretty common here and longest popularish one I know is like close to 4k chapters.

The value propositions creators bring to their markets are changing drastically. An artist whose content I follow across YouTube and Instagram is a vlogger and does a ton of design work outside of the scope of her more traditional "here is a painting, would you like to buy it or a print of it" offerings. She also engages socially with her fans. The whole thing works out to selling an experience/brand of a kind that didn't really exist in the past. I think it's fair to say that it's probably not possible to follow this path "as a writer" in the sense that "a writer" has meant in the past -- but that doesn't mean that this is a situation where "Short answer: no." is an accurate (or indeed respectful) answer to a question that she is asking by attempting the thing.

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