writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say
you need top .5% talent and work ethic to maybe earn a lower-middle class salary
A labor of love, as it's said
you need top .5% talent and work ethic to maybe earn a lower-middle class salary
A labor of love, as it's said
It’s being a musician, actually. Most writers have the skills to maintain good side gigs of some kind or another. Musicians have to dedicate more of their time to musicianship, and often end up on the lower side of the pay scale. Sure, there will be a few with a profitable clientele paying for private lessons and tutoring, but that’s far more rare.
Recording and producing music, making music videos, etc is a massive cost center that may or may not break even. Usually not.
Playing live gigs is usually a money loser for most - venues often have extremely unfavourable terms (especially when starting out - a lot of places are pay to play, where you have to market and sell the tickets and at best get to keep what's left over after venue hire is covered).
The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
Agreed, but even then it’s bordering on low income. I saw an article a while back that claimed some musicians were making big money giving lessons online, but I never followed up on it. Apparently the really good ones could reach a larger pool of more potential students and double or triple their income.
In reality, for most writing is a fading interest. It's a skill that anyone can really pick up if they wanted to but doing so is easy to learn and hard to master. You can go long periods of time writing and never improve.
Due to how the system as whole is designed most writers never improve. It's just how it works in the end because of the lack of a coherent structure or guidance system. Only if you belong to pre-established writing groups will you even really have a chance at learning it.
Sure there are several references openly available online, but all it can teach you is syntax. What you need to be a good writer is experience, training and mentoring which most people will never gain the opportunity of having. And even to those that do, it's a lifelong endeavor and one that requires complex knowledge in a variety of fields. It's one that most that pick it up will never be able to comprehend themselves or when they do, it's too late and trying to do so is fundamentally impossible for them due to their situation.
Wasn’t this Charlie Kaufman’s take, or was it Quentin Tarantino? I remember reading an interview with one of them who riffed on this complaint. For some reason, I think it was Kaufman, because I was obsessed with his process at the time.
For various genres of the fantasy genre there's a fairly well trodden road nowadays of going from royalroad.com (with patreon) to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited.
royalroad.com lets people build massive followings and then translate them into patreon and other monetisation.
The audiences in the litrpg space right now are voracious and are fairly forgiving of typo's/grammar so long as they enjoy the story.
I'm not sure the same could've been said 10 or even 5 years ago. But again it's fairly genre specific.
> I… finally did it! And I also leveled as a [Demon Larva] thanks to the experience gained from leveling [Identification]! It was a total success!
> I could distribute my Stat Points and Skill Point later. For now, I focused on what was important. I glanced at the pebble closest to me and activated my [Identification]—
System Apocalypse - God like Magical Computer "System" that tracks peoples stats/skills, recognises their feats and rewards them arrives on earth and integrates the world into "The System" usually in the form of a magical cli gui that appears in peoples vision as they go about their day.
Isekai - Average person going about their business dies in an accident and is reincarnated on another (magical) world with memories of their past life intact.
For what may be more relatable to many here, publishing a technical (or tech-adjacent, i.e. more popular industry takes of various kinds) book may be career-enhancing, even significantly so, in various ways. But you still will likely just make a few $K in direct moneys.I did a book about open source history/business models/etc. and it's been good--even was asked to do a second edition/done book signings at event/etc.--but still only made single-digit thousands of dollars directly.
I've done book signings at Linux Foundation events and it's led to me doing a number of internal projects that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
This, unfortunately, has been the case practically for as long as literature has existed - very, very few authors make anything more than a pittance from their work in their lifetimes, and historically a majority of authors were the scions of wealthy or at least comfortably middle class families.
Now, thankfully, the publishing landscape is substantially more democratic, however the financial hurdles to being an author remain very real - it’s a side job, out of necessity, until you get published - and then it’s still probably a side job.
So, yes, it’s a labour of love. I don’t think anyone goes into writing to make bank, but rather because they have an insatiable urge to write, or to convey an idea, or whatever it may be - but financial success doesn’t weigh into it - in fact, for most, it’s an expensive hobby, insofar as it’s rather time consuming. Me, I just write whilst babysitting my telescope through the nights. Keeps the fingers warm.
TC: I think the reaction varies, because science fiction is a more commercial genre. There are a lot more people in science fiction whose goal is to make a living from writing fiction by publishing one or more novels a year. And people who enter science fiction generally receive more messaging about fiction writing as a sole source of income than, say, people entering mainstream fiction. The messaging there is different: get an MFA, teach; it’s understood that your teaching position supports your career as a writer. For writers entering science fiction, that’s not really a thing yet. We’re maybe getting there, but the messaging they receive is mostly: Be very prolific.
https://culture.org/an-interview-with-ted-chiang/
So basically most people don't write S/F "just for fun", and I'm pretty sure that was never the case and all the greats and less-well-known greats of the genre were all professional writers.
I write SF&F for shits and giggles, as I don’t like the idea of writing things to be commercially successful, having spent much of my existence focussed on commercial success elsewhere. Rather, I write for the catharsis and the vicarious experience of crafting a world and a narrative. I don’t know that I’m alone in that, but then again, I don’t know that I’m not - but I can’t believe myself to be particularly unusual.
Depends. I left my high paying job and had mostly burned through my savings until selling programming ebooks saved me. Not saying that writing was the best option, but it was the first that started paying my bills consistently. Of course, the fact that my monthly expenses was around $150 helped a lot. I've now written 12 books and the past two years has brought my savings back to a comfortable level.
If you want to write listicles, sure you don't need as much talent and you can make above minimum wage.
Nowadays, the content farm has become websites like Webcomics and Webnovels which offer a variety of tools for authors to be able to make a living. In reality like the pre-existing mangaka business, you will never be able to have a stable amount of money each year as you struggle to keep afloat you cannot improve or get better. The game has been rigged by the publishers since the 80s. And only the very elite are given the opportunity to succeed in the correct social circles. For which most people will never be given the opportunity to even partake in. You can apply for workshops and the naught but if you aren't from the right family or friends with the right people your chances are close to none. It's the same in the music industry and pervades everywhere even in technology.
There were many more pubs to publish to and more people bought short story anthologies.
These days, so many fascistic surveillance technologies have been deployed to squeeze the downtime out of existence for most jobs. You could have a 1950s day job (well, if you were middle class) and be a writer, but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.
This is disproven by the large majority of authors having a day job. Most people can’t have a day job and be a writer but the sentence is just as true as “Most people can’t be a writer.”
https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/
and
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/diff...
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...
So, depends on what you mean by steady. ~3%-ish growth (at the worst) in my book is not steady.
But yea, totally less expensive and wider availability of high quality food is great to be reminded of, thanks!
The stories were not finished while the beginnings were being published.
That method of Dumas was how Dostoevsky worked, at least some of the time--not knowing exactly what he was doing in a novel until after its first chapters had already appeared in a magazine. Presumably his gambling debts had something to do with this habit of working, although he supposedly had a case of what they call "hypergraphia," and could produce an incredibly amount of writing in a short amount of time.
This hasn't been a realistic goal since... IDK, the 50s? 60s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle#Literary_ca...
This very good story sold for about 3X the OP's story, at a time when print was the dominant medium.
I'd be happy selling my one book fairly well. Though I keep hearing that it's series and series of series that do the best.
My wife is in marketing for her day job and has been using that knowledge to help target and generate interest in her books, and it seems to be paying off, as her preorders are eclipsing quite a few established authors in the groups she's in, and this is her first book.
When she had half the preorders she does now, a friend was saying she could probably expect around $2k in sales in her first month, judging by the preorder numbers, so by the time it releases she might be seeing 2-3x or even more than that.
It helps that romance novels tend to be way on the short side. Self-published can be even shorter than the traditionally published stuff—a lot of those authors seem to get away with charging $4+ for maybe 70 pages, for each entry in their tens-of-books-long series. Much clearer path to some reasonable return than writing 350+ page thrillers or big ol' fantasy doorstops.
But you're still not wrong, in general (although 70 pages might be a bit on the low side, on average). At least her next project is going to be a novella for an anthology at around 30k words. But her next novel will probably be similar to her first. She's going to try to release 3-4 her first year, and a couple novellas, while working a full time job. Of course because of that she's not doing too much besides work, write, market, stress, and sleep right now.
I’m not familiar with that study, and I try to keep up with the literature. You might be very interested to read about the historical rise of the grunge genre as an example of the kind of luck you are talking about. There was definitely a magical kind of serendipity at work between all the different musicians and bands who were up and coming at the time.
Some of the one on one interviews with the key players are amazing. If they didn’t pick up a certain phone call or move to a specific city or play music with this one person, entire careers would never have been made.
But it goes with all content creators - sports - academia, getting PHD or Professor title.
Funny thing is that a lot of people try to become boxers or writers, football players as it seems easy to "make it" but I don't know if there is "car sports" rags to riches stories, to do car sports one has to be quite on the rich side anyway.
But still to go path of Mike Tyson you still have to be .5% talent and work ethic and for quite some time getting scraps as payments.