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Comment by mosburger | Hacker News Reader

As a 48 year old who's feeling quite burnt out, I'm curious to learn more about this sideways move... I'm feeling a bit trapped right now. :(

EDIT: Ah, checked your profile and history and it seems like you've become a writer? Hmm... maybe I could do that...

(BTW, the SSL cert for your website has expired!)

EDIT2: Thanks for the advice on writing, all! Honestly, I was thinking of taking the technical writer route. I've always been pretty good at authoring things like technical specs, so it seemed like a potential "lateral move," albeit one that probably pays a hell of a lot less than software development. I'm suspect that technical writing has some of the same soul-crushing aspects of software development, so perhaps it wouldn't even be worth it.

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If you want to become a writer, you should definitely have a financial cushion. Replicating Stross’s success will almost certainly take years of minimally paid hard work, plus a fair bit of luck. Writing is a hard, hard business.

Unless you can write proficiently in the romance genre. There’s gold in them hills.

I wrote my first novel-shaped object when I was 15.

Sold my first short story for actual money aged 21.

First novel sold when I was 36.

... Stopped doing other stuff (mainly freelance computer journalism) to sub the fiction when I was 42.

The sole consolation is that I'm doing okay now and my career didn't really get started until most successful pop stars are at the touring-with-the-greatest-hits-playlist stage (or have given up and gotten a job as an accountant).

On romance; yes, it outsells all other commercial fiction genres combined. But don't assume it's easy money: there's a lot of competition, and every genre turns out to be much harder than it looks once you dig your teeth into it.

Fair point, it’s all hard. I intended to call out romance as a (long shot) potential source of overnight success. Reading the various self-publishing forums, any post that starts with “I earned six figures on my first book” ends with “and it’s a romance.”

I didn’t mean to imply that those authors don’t work hard or that those stories aren’t crazy outliers. Just that there’s more money sloshing around from a lot of avid readers.

As an aside, please keep doing what you do. Accelerando hooked me deep when it came out, and I’ve had a ton of fun reading through The Laundry Files. Thanks for optimizing your career for something other than money.

Re: writing, there are also people making decent money with web serials and Patreon (then publishing to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited). I suspect the most successful ones are exceeding Stephen King levels of output.

You'll find some of them on Royal Road. Lots of fantasy, litrpg, xianxia - fluffy serializable things.

I ran a novel on Royal Road as a serial. Definitely a hard market to get traction in if you’re not doing litrpg or xanxia. I published a techno thriller at 2+ chapters a week for six months and ended up with ~20 readers for the conclusion.

My three reviews were solid (all five star), but if you’re not writing to the site genres you’ll struggle to find an audience. One of my reviewers even mentioned they’d never read a techno thriller before.

Also tried Wattpad and Inkitt - basically zero views on the former, hard to say on Inkitt. Their stat reporting is super bad. Got one review there, so presumably less readers than RoyalRoad.

I've read a few web serials this last year and change (Unsong, HPMOR, and Worm).

They're interesting from many angles, although I think they distinctly lack in mass appeal. Unsong and HPMOR in particular seem to me like the kind of thing you would either love deeply, if they're in your wheelhouse, or otherwise find positively insufferable. (I loved both).

Worm, on the other hand, while in need of some editing, seems like it would be absolutely killer as an animated series in the vein of Amazon's adaptation of Invincible.

One issue that seems to come up in this space is the authors having issues getting into publishing deals. For instance, the author Worm don't currently distribute ebooks because of nebulous concerns about the effect on future contracts. Unfortunately this seems to leave such works in a state of legal limbo.

Idk what my point is, just rambling at this point. I have very much enjoyed all the stuff I've read in this area so far though.

If you are 48 years old, you were about 6 years old in 1980.

I was certainly not referring to you, but people who were in their 20s during that time.

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