Hacker News Reader

In fact, the median salary for UK full time writers is well below minimum wage.

That is mitigated by the median household income for full time writers in the UK being well above average.

In other words, most people who write full time can afford to because of a partners income.

And as you point out, most writers don't write full time.

I've sold more than average of my two first novels, but still tiny amounts and there's no way I would consider writing full time - it doesn't even cover my monthly takeaway spend.

Was it Dorothy Parker who, when asked for advice for writers, said, "Marry money."

This is less true in self published romance, btw. My wife saw almost 3x that many book reads/sales (Kindle Unlimited pays nearly as well as a sold book) in just two months of her first self-published book. It's kind of higher than expected but there's decent number of few romance self-published authors out there making good money, often in the six figures, in their first year. In order to do that they often write 4-8 books during that year though, writing fast and building giant series is pretty much required for romance.

My wife also has a day job in marketing, so she utilized that knowledge for market research, writing to market, learning what types of self-promotion works, and promoting aggressively, so that helped a lot as well. Also me being willing to do pretty much all the housework while she focuses on getting this off the ground (not doing an amazing job, things are slipping, but at least we have clean dishes :).

I like to write also, but just silly humorous fiction books (I've yet to actually publish one also, but hopefully in the next year or two), and I'm not expecting to be anywhere near as successful as she is. For me that will likely always stay a hobby (it's competing, and often losing, to my other dream of making games, anyway).

What marketing techniques does she find most valuable?

Some of the things she's doing for marketing right now:

- Making videos for TikTok. She has over 1000 followers already, up from 0 a few months ago. She's slowed down on it recently, mainly because she has to focus on writing her book.

- She sent out copies of ARCs in exchange for a promise to leave a review on Amazon, so she had about 30 reviews on the day of the book's release (thankfully very positive)

- Contests to win ARCs (advanced reader copies) that involve following her social media

- Contests to win physical books and swag after answering questions that prove you read the book. She's also purchased a mug press and a sublimation machine so she can make her own swag. She's already made custom buttons, bookmarks, tumblers, stickers (she bought the stickers though), etc.

- Scheduling and participating in social media 'takeovers' (mainly reader Facebook groups) where she schedules a timeslot to engage with a group's members with games, contests, polls, and comments back and forth, usually for a couple of hours at a time

- Exchanging slots with other writers to promote each other's books in each other's email newsletters (she puts them out weekly).

- She tried Instagram and wasn't getting anywhere near as much engagement there, so she's mostly stopped that.

- She also tried buying Facebook ads and didn't have much luck there.

I couldn't say for sure what worked the best, although based on conversations with her, giving out ARCs, posting videos on TikTok, and Facebook group takeovers seem to be the most effective for her so far.

She didn't just throw anything up there for TikTok videos, either. She consumed a good amount of TikTok herself for research (I think she kind of turned herself into an addict in the process, but that's not uncommon with that platform), sees what audio clips are trending, and makes her own variation on them that also promotes her book.

I'm sure she's doing other things as well. She likes to experiment and see what's working for her and not. She also attended several online classes given by established authors (which also let her network other people taking the course, and participate in almost weekly discussions with them), and I know she's signing up for another online course that her writer friends recommended to improve her TikTok game even more.

"There are so many sites out there right now hosting free fiction that it’s hard for many to find readers, even if the work is released for free. Many authors I know spend more time on self promotion than in writing due to this: otherwise, nobody will ever read their work in the first place" - first hand experience very true. I saw with kindle self publishing that, when the book is published, in the first week you do see some uptick, probably because it gets shown in some 'latest books' list. After that it dwindles. Mine went to zero after a week. Sold 24 copies. Its hard to make a book visible in millions of others.

+1

If money were no object, I'd love to be a novelist. I'd love nothing more than for books to be my main focus in life. But money is an object, and it seems tremendously hard to acquire as a writer. To make a decent living, you're basically banking on becoming one of a few dozen celebrity writers. Even then, you'd expect to make be making pennies compared to the elites in almost any other field (music, business, sports, etc). The only serious money to be made is franchising your IP into a more-monetizable medium, like movies.

I know art isn't supposed to be about making money, but being a full-time novelist seems too precarious for all but the most foolhardy among us.

Other ways people make a living as a "novelist" or just author I guess:

- ghost writing (very common, most books by celebrity or popular figures for instance)

- not writing literature (not to be crass about it, but a lot of authors that make a living doing it find a template that works and beat the living daylights out of it as quickly and as much as they can; art is secondary to speed, smash and grab plots, and simplicity; each book might not be a top seller, but the total sales can be livable; think airport departure lounge books)

- they spend almost all of their time outside of writing on marketing

- they work in the publishing industry (increasingly common to look at some debut young author to see that they actually work in the industry, or were in some way affiliated by way of employment with the publishing industry)

- video game writing and or speech writing

I think something did change in culture and literary culture somewhere in the 2012 - 2015 range: https://jakeseliger.com/2021/09/30/the-death-of-literary-cul...

> What killed literary culture? The Internet is the most obvious, salient answer, and in particular the dominance of social media, which is in effect its own genre—and, frequently, its own genre of fiction. Almost everyone will admit that their own social media profiles attempt to showcase a version of their best or ideal selves, and, thinking of just about everyone I know well, or even slightly well, the gap between who they really are and what they are really doing, and what appears on their social media, is so wide as to qualify as fiction. Determining the “real” self is probably impossible, but determining the fake selves is easier, and the fake is everywhere. Read much social media as fiction and performance and it will make more sense.

What an interesting thought

Edit: great article, thanks for sharing!

Don't forget Zlib!