Writing books remains a tough way to make a living | Hacker News Reader

Writing books remains a tough way to make a living

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I've been self-publishing fiction for a couple of years. Many years ago I looked down on self-published works, expecting them to be of low quality. I thought if someone self-published it was just because they weren't good enough to get a "real" publisher.

It is true that self-publishing has a lower barrier to entry so there's a lot of crap that gets put out. But even for _really good authors_ who take the work seriously, trad publishing makes little financial sense most of the time. To succeed in self-pub in the most competitive and lucrative genres your book has to be on-par with any traditionally published book. Expectations have risen.

And when you're sitting there looking at a trad deal that will make you a few cents at best from every sale and compare that to the 70-100% royalties you can get self-publishing, the trad deal begins to make much less sense. New writers sometimes think a trad deal will pay off in other ways: they won't have to worry about marketing or other business aspects of putting out a book. But that's not even the case anymore - many traditional publishers expect you to market your own work and build your own following. They won't spend marketing resources on most writers they sign.

Making a living as an author is hard, and making a living as a traditionally-published author is near-impossible.

> But that's not even the case anymore - many traditional publishers expect you to market your own work and build your own following. They won't spend marketing resources on most writers they sign.

so is the only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?

For most authors the advances are pretty laughable, too. There is a very small percentage that publishers throw all their weight behind, offer generous advances to, marketing resources, etc. The rest of those they sign are more like "filler".

I can't speak for all writers, but here are a few reasons I have seen some authors going with a trad publisher:

* Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.

* Translations. There are some great untapped translation markets out there (like Germany). Some authors self-publish the English version of their books and sell translation rights to a publisher. The publisher then does the work of translating and republishing in the target countries, taking that effort off the author. The royalties are lower, but funding high-quality translations can cost a fortune and for many authors offloading that cost and effort can be worth it.

* Audiobooks. Similar to translations. Author may publish the ebook themselves and sell audio rights. Good narrators can cost a fortune, and many authors can't justify that outlay themselves. A trad audiobook publisher can get access to the best narrators and fund the entire production if the author doesn't have the means or desire to do it themselves.

I’d add (for fiction the only market I have exposure to):

- the editor: if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books. Many people seem to think editors are just marking up your punctuation. In reality they are more akin to product managers in software. They help set the tone of the books and ensure that the vision is adhered to.

- which leads me to copy editors. The traditional publishers employ all the best ones. You can hire independent copy editors but their quality is a crapshoot. And you don’t find out until it’s too late.

- the sales rep network. If reps like your book they will get it in front of people. Independent of marketing the boots on the ground factor can make a huge difference.

Now, you won’t necessarily get any of these benefits going with a publisher but you can’t get any of them self publishing.

> if a good traditional editor gets involved in your project they can make a huge difference in the quality of your books

I've also heard about mediocre editors that waste a lot of author time, and bad editors that ruin the project.

My developmental editor for my semi-technical book was “fine” but he didn’t do any of the structural re-factoring I did for my second edition. The company was using a new set of copy editors for the second edition and they were much better than the first.

Overall I can’t really complain about the editing but I think the benefits were relatively modest.

The major publishers seem to have gutted their editing staff over the last decade or so, and submitted manuscripts changed little before publishing. The primary editor you get barely has time to read it, and an outsourced copy editor (who are probably the better ones, yes).

Do you think I could offer English->German translation services to indie authors as a reasonable side income?

Do you know a good place to get to know them or start out building some connections?

I have been doing it in the past (mostly for ads and other marketing content) but it paid very little (was working freelance for an agency) but I enjoyed it a lot.

To be honest I'm not sure. It seems like _a ton_ of work to put out a high quality translation. I do not know how much time and money translators spend on each project but can imagine it being a lot. For example, some authors may expect a legit highly-paid translator to work with their own German proofreader etc to ensure quality of the output.

(Tangentially, I think Germany has some special laws that you as the translator would need to be familiar with. For example I think the translator needs to grant rights to the original author to republish the work. Not 100% sure on this, but worth checking!)

Unfortunately there is not much information for this online (atleast from a quick search I didn’t find much) Most seems to be related to working together with publishing houses (I loathe the German publishing houses so that’s definitely no option).

I would prefer working directly with an independent author - when I have a bit more time I’ll check out how to best get in contact with them.

Not sure about the legal side of it, but I have a friend who works in German copyright and who could probably help figure that part out.

One place to get started might be the Alliance of Independent Authors: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

They are author as opposed to translator-focused, but maybe reaching out to them can be a first step in getting the lay of the land? They might have some information about how their authors tend to use translation services. Although I'm sure there must be some translator communities out there that could provide even more focused info.

Great advice, thanks! I’ll try out some stuff let’s see how it goes.

> Audiobooks ... Good narrators can cost a fortune

To be specific, between $200 and $300 per finished hour, and a finished hour is about 9,000 words. It can cost more if you want two or more narrators to handle male/female parts (there's a lot more editing involved).

I know at least one self-published author who does create audiobooks for some of their works, but does so at a loss. Even at $15 per audiobook sale (through bookfunnel, so there's little overhead), making back the $3k they pay for the narration is a pretty high bar for a relatively niche market.

> * Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.

I think it's a validation thing, largely. If you get trad-published but the book does poorly—well, at least you got trad-published, so you must not be too awful (although... if you're in certain "hot" niches, there's some real crap put out, that looks like it was barely even edited), but your book just didn't land well. It happens. But you're an author, for sure.

If you self-publish and your book doesn't do well—did you market poorly? Would it have done better with a trad publisher? Are you... in fact so terrible at writing you shouldn't call yourself an author, and it didn't sell because it's total crap? You may never know!

Since there's not real, real money in it unless your book's such a hit you get movie deals and such (with rare outliers who make it big-enough purely on book sales but don't get adaptation interest) it's largely about being an author, so having that validation up-front has real appeal.

It's probably the prestige. Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.

Most new authors are subsidized by their day job. It’s a huge moment in an authors life when they start making money exclusively from writing. A moment most never get to.

Same deal with most board game designers. The vast majority are subsidized by their day job, and aren't ever going to make serious money from designing games.

I know a guy, for example, that worked two years in his spare time on one game, got picked up by a publisher, ended up in Barnes and Noble and was considered a success by the publisher (they even requested and released an expansion), and the guy got only $9,000 in royalties (with no advance) for all his efforts.

Pretty much the only people making enough money for it to be their sole form of income are either hired directly a publisher or are out there hustling constantly and signing like 8+ game designs a year, or have insanely cheap cost of living (one game designer mentioned how he made net income of $12k one year and was able to survive off that because they live super cheaply), or have somehow landed on a massive evergreen hit, like Azul or Carcassonne.

[1] https://twitter.com/JPacCantin/status/1647455444884156417

> Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.

You think most new authors have wealthy families?

That is a very odd assumption, given how hard it is to write a book... and given how low the returns are... and given how many other ways there are to achieve prestige... and given how little people regard authorship these days as a measurement of it... and given how unlikely it would be for wealth to have an outsized representation in a career generally associated with poverty... and how all old authors were once new authors which would imply that most of them are wealthy too, which, not so.

I'm talking about contemporary literature. It has been this way historically and nothing about it has changed.

What historical data do you have?

Wikipedia. Most authors in the western cannon are descendants of aristocracy.

"Most authors in the Western cannon" as a group is not representative of most authors, Western or otherwise.

They are the representation of the _successful_ authors, though. Because they are the cannon now. So the OP is right.

He is not right. His original claim was that new authors are mostly wealthy. All he did was weaken his claim until it was (more, but not actually) supportable.

Further, to address your own point, they are not even the representation of successful authors. There's thousands and thousands of successful authors that aren't even near to being close to the gates of the Western canon.

Of course he is right. It's similar story to the early scientists whom all were independently wealthy. And your claim about 'thousands and thousands of successful authors' is just ridiculous when an average person doesn't even read a thousand books in his lifetime let alone considers most of the authors of these books 'successful'.

That's such a silly standard of success to think that one must be entered into the Western cannon to be considered successful. The number of authors that have made good money writing books far, far exceeds, by many orders of magnitude, the number of authors in the Western cannon.

In the 20th century, there have been hundred of thousands to a million different titles published. If even 10% of those authors made enough money to be considered a living wage, it absolutely dwarfs the number of authors in the cannon, which is on the scale of 100s, not thousands.

If the cannon is your standard, your standard excludes almost the entire industry.

If your standard of success is 'making good money' instead of leaving lasting impression and still being read hundreds of years after the author's death then you are still wrong. Only a tiny amount of all authors were able to make _any_ money from their books, let alone enough to live comfortable lives. Book publishing is like professional sport or entertainment, only the very top make any money. Hence if you are already wealthy you can keep trying and maybe finally you make it big. If you are poor you don't have that luxury.

I know plenty of authors and none of them are subsidized by wealthy families. All of them do it part time in the evenings out of a labor of love.

It is worth pointing out that there's nothing particular odd if it were the case that writing was subsidized by wealthy families. For the vast majority of the history of writing, writing was subsidized an left to monks, philosophers or aristocrats. It's only been in the relatively recent time period that writing was a potential occupation for anyone interested with enough skills/talent.

In my experience, in NY, the majority of people working in contemporary literature publishing are ivy leage graduates, mostly women, and they live off of their parents. I'm not judging, just stating my observation.

Literary fiction, yes. That market's so fucked that the vast majority of literary magazines don't pay at all and you'll often get sneered at for asking about pay.

Anyone trying to make any amount of money at writing writes genre fic of one sort or another. Fantasy or maybe sci fi, and probably "juvenile fiction" (tends to sell better to adults, too). Romance (which may or may not actually be straight-up porn, basically). Airport thrillers. Not lit-fic. Never, if your goal is to make any money at all.

And yeah, the publishing-side heavily favors people with money, lit-fic or not, for the reason that making a living at it requires excellent connections to get you directly into a high-paying part of it, or else years and years making less than it takes to live on in places like New York, to work your way up the ladder. Either way, that probably means family money. This phenomenon been mentioned, directly or obliquely, in IIRC all of: Bullshit Jobs (Graeber, 2018), Fussell's Class (1983), and The Official Preppy Handbook (Birnbach et al, 1980).

a traditional publisher will distribute your book through all of their sales channels. if you self-publish, it's very hard or near impossible to sell your book at a proper bookstore. the sales reps will also push the books onto independent booksellers, who might love the book and want to handsell it.

> only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?

A few really important things come to mind:

- Editing. I'm not talking about mere copy editing which you can get done reasonably cheaply, but rather having an editor that is reading through everything and giving feedback is hugely important.

- Layout and printing of the book There's a lot that happens between writing and having a polished book in your hands. You can contract all this out but it adds a lot of work.

- Distribution. While the burden of marketing a book has increasingly fallen upon the author these days, if you want your book to be on the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble, then your much better off going with a traditional publisher.

- Prestige. Like it or not, the vast majority of people on Earth still look down upon self publishing. For some types of books this is less important: technical books and fantasy fiction books can go without in many cases (but if you want to use your book for credibility in something like consulting you'll still want a traditional publisher). But if you want to write on a serious topic it helps a lot to have an academic press publish your work, or if you want to really pursue writing literature you at least want some publisher that is recognized in your relevant community.

Currently I think the only really good use cases for self publishing are the fantasy fiction and niche technical book markets assuming you already have an audience. And even in those cases there are plenty of reasons to go with traditional publishers over self publishing.

Not sure why you’re getting so many downvotes. The first two are definitely real issues with a lot of self-published work.

I did not downvote, but just wanted to mention that the first two do not require a traditional publisher. In fact none of them do, but especially not the first two.

It is true that there are real quality issues with a lot of self-published work because you don't _need_ an editor to publish your book. Heck, you don't even need to do a self-edit pass. Write it and hit publish! But it is increasingly an expectation that you have one, because quality expectations are extremely high, especially for competitive money-making genres.

I started out self-editing and now pay for three professional edits for each release: developmental, copy, and proofread. Professional editors are not exclusive to traditional publishing houses.

I never claimed that they "require a traditional publisher", in fact I explicitly point out that you can pay for these yourself (though I can't imagine putting together a good team of editors without having prior publishing experience).

My point was that, in response to the parent claiming there's nothing traditional publishers offer, these are things that traditional publishers do in fact offer an author. If you write for a traditional publisher you mostly have to just worry about writing, and, unfortunately, marketing these days.

Correct on Distribution & Prestige. If you claim trad publishing isn't necessary at all, then explain to me how you get:

1) placed in bookstores

2) on the "upcoming books" circulars that the trads send out to likely "author talk" venues

3) reviewed in mainstream media

Ingram Spark provides global book store and library distribution.

In practice, that just means if someone walks into a bookstore and asks for your book, they can buy it without going through Amazon.

Yup, and if they think it'll sell then book stores can stock up more. Many book stores don't stock unless the book is distributed as returnable (in case it doesn't sell). Whether self pub or trad pub, unsold books returned by stores come back out of the author's cut. In many cases it doesn't even make sense for the author to physically reclaim returned books as the shipping and storage are more expensive, so they get destroyed.

the funny bit is, you have to set a "retail price" in every country they operate in, and if you set it too low, the bookstore has a loss on each book. So you have to keep increasing the price until the margin is positive.

just in case someone in Australia goes to a bookstore and asks for it :)

No. I think the actual answer is "real-life SEO."

Say you have a Mexican restaurant in NYC. There must be hundreds of them, right? But imagine that someone in NYC googles "Mexican restaurant," and your restaurant is the first search result that comes up. That's worth a lot of money.

Self-publishing is like opening your own restaurant, while being published by a major publisher is like being on the first page of Google. When, say, CNN wants someone to be a panel expert, they might call you. You can get invited to conferences on the strength of that credential, and then build up to greater opportunities from there. In essence you've been socially validated.

That's worth quite a lot of money, though it's up to you if it's worth the cost. If you didn't have any fame going in, then I think it will be.

I read some reddit's post regarding to this topic.

The main takeaway was that living, or higher profits came only if you were being aggressive with ads.

Something like reinvesting 50% of the profits in digital ads (google, amazon).

If your book reaches near top #1, you've done it. Now I realized that most of the books I read published on XXI century had been very popular, top of the chart books in some genre, during some years and I found them trough reddit/forums recommendations. Books that you would still find regarded as best in Amazon.

Internet it's pushing Pareto principle to an extreme. The same goes for music, digital art, cinema, teaching, etc. Small artists are sheltering themselves in services like Patreon because they beat the giants in terms of selling.

Also I think people are reading less. My friends don't read. They pay +15/30 USD a month to Netflix and other services. That's money and time "taken away" from reading, books.

I know quite a few authors making a living without paying for any ads, but it's definitely a different type of effort. You have to really hone in on social media, getting large review teams, etc to get visibility for your books without ads.

IMO someone starting out is probably best off not spending money on ads. They have too many other things to perfect as they learn, which can only be done by publishing over and over. At least with fiction, you're looking at building a backlist - it's not a "write one breakout book and live off of it forever" kind of thing. After a few books published it can make sense to start setting an ad budget, and using ads successfully is a whole other learning curve to dive into.

It makes sense.

Do you have any advice to someone who would start writing fiction books?

I write a lot but only for myself. I don't care about money but I would like to persevere to some day be able to produce quality works in my own language.

I suggest starting by deciding what you do care about, since it's not the money. What does "producing quality works" mean to you? How do you measure it? If you write only for yourself you can be your own judge of quality. Or do you intend to measure your success in readership, or reviews?

If you decide you care about getting people to actually read your work, the next step would likely be narrowing down your genre and checking out what is doing well in that genre and niche. Look at Amazon top 100 lists for your categories, for example. What's selling? What's getting good or bad reviews? Open the Look Inside previews of the books. What POV are the stories written in, are there any patterns you notice in successful covers or blurbs, etc?

If you don't already read in your chosen genre, you probably want to start. At the same time, you can start writing. I'd personally suggest starting with short stories or novellas. Something you can finish and put out there asap to get the feedback loop going. Self-publishing is low barrier to entry, but there are a lot of balls to juggle. Each thing you put out will provide more information for your next book.

Before publishing your first book, decide if you want to go into Kindle Unlimited (Amazon exclusivity) or "wide" (publishing to all retailers). There are huge pros and cons of each, and some genres are better suited for one or the other. KU can be easier to get traction and start seeing page reads with, but it has its cons as well.

Also, decide if you want to use a pen name.

Try not to get too attached to the first stories you publish. They will probably suck. Personally I would not bother spending money on an editor or cover designer when you start out, but it depends on the genre and your own budget/priorities.

From there it's basically about iterating on what you have with every new book. There's way too much to cover in one comment and more specific genre-based strategies depending on what you're writing, so this is more like a dump of my general thoughts for someone starting out.

Thank you a lot.

This is great advice! As someone who also is starting out writing fiction and does care about making money in the long run (let's say I have about a year of runway) would you add anything else to the above advice?

Well for monetization, take all of the below with a grain of salt because my books only pay for themselves right now. My primary work is programming, so I'm by no means making a living off my writing!

The common advice I hear that resonates with me is to write "the most to-market book of your heart". If your _primary_ goal is money, it may be worth writing in a genre you know makes lots of it.

That's romance. Romance sells. Personally, I wanted to write sci-fi, but I also wanted to sell, so I write sci-fi romance. You don't _have_ to write romance to make money. I hear Thrillers is another popular category. I'm confident you can make it in pretty much any genre you choose, some might just take longer.

Genre fiction often has quite well-defined reader expectations. The trick is to figure out what readers expect in your chosen genre and then write that. A good bet is reading in the genre. Find other books that are doing well (Amazon and other retailer top-100 categories are good for this) and use them as examples. Watch out for outliers in the top-100 lists, though. Some authors are just so popular that their books will sell even if they're off market. I bet if Ruby Dixon released an off-market book, she'd be a best seller regardless. So it might be good to focus on high-to-mid-list authors who are not _huge_ staples but nevertheless consistently sell well.

I recently read a book called "7 Figure Fiction" by T. Taylor who talks about the concept of "Universal Fantasies": things that make a reader _feel_ something acutely when they read it. In Narnia, the fantasy of stepping through a closet and into a completely new world just invokes something in you. Just the thought of it kind of gives me goosebumps! Portal fantasy readers want that scene that makes them feel that. In sports romance, _something_ about having the main character wearing their love interest's jersey invokes an acute positive feeling in a reader of that genre. I bet if you read a bunch of sports romances, most of them will have that kind of scene. For the craft side, learning to recognize and put in those kinds of "Universal Fantasy" scenes can be helpful.

Then there's the marketing, which I suck at but which is unfortunately very important. One of the first things you'd want to do is start a newsletter. You can write a short "reader magnet" (can just be a short story or novella), sign up for BookFunnel, and use it to collect email addresses of potential readers. If you don't go with a reader magnet, you should _at least_ write something like a bonus scene that you offer readers at the back of your first book in exchange for a signup to your NL.

Once you do decide your genre and work out the technicalities of KU vs wide etc, before publishing you probably want to give away advance review copies of your book. Readers are more likely to click on your book if it has a star rating, so having early reviews of your new release can be very helpful. There are places that can help with this (Booksirens, Booksprout, etc), and you can also build a private ARC team (using something like your newsletter, or joining relevant FB groups where you can invite people to sign up for free early review copies).

If you listen to podcasts, there are _lots_ of author podcasts out there. One that I really liked is Six Figure Authors. They are on an indefinite hiatus now, but have a huge back catalogue of great episodes. The highlight of the podcast for me was Lindsay Buroker, a very prolific author who writes high fantasy and sci-fi. I think she dabbles in romance as well, but that wasn't her primary genre.

Thanks for that. I'm not dabbling in writing, but I love to hear the thoughts of people behind that.

Once again, thanks for such a thoughtful response. You’ve been a great resource and inspiration!

Also, its very difficult to make money on just one book. Most indie authors start seeing better sales after 5-10 books, having built up a loyal reader base.

I will say that I think succeeding as an author requires business skills that most of them appear to lack.

Amazon has started getting better at notifying me that there are new books available by an author from whom I've previously purchased books, but for a long time, and even now, I'd say most authors that I read aren't even getting me on an email list to eg tell me there's more stuff of theirs that I can buy. That's really business 101 and they're just not doing it. It's weird.

Not just higher profits, but if you are self-published or have no reviews yet then your book is usually on the 400th page on anyone's search.

I have still told nobody I know about my book, it's kind of an experiment, because it would be easy for me to email blast everyone I know to like it, but I really want people to read it without pre-conception and so far no sales, even though it is free! (or 0.99 cents on Amazon as that's Amazon)

Not telling anyone you know is probably smart. _If_ you write outside of the genre your friends group usually reads and a bunch of them visit and buy your book out of curiosity on Amazon, it can negatively impact the categorization of your books.

"oh these people who usually read historical fiction are buying this new medical thriller. We will show this medical thriller to other people with the same buying habits!"

Only readers of historical fiction who aren't your friends probably won't bother picking up a medical thriller.

Regarding reviews, this is why many authors build ARC teams. Reviews are really important, so they send out advance review copies.

OT Do you have examples of self published authors that you feel really stood out.

Check out the romance top 100 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Romance/zgbs/digital-tex...

I point out romance because that's what I write, but it's just one example. At a quick glance through the first few product pages there, most of those books appear self-published.

To get to #1 in these general categories on Amazon (Romance, Contemporary romance, Paranormal romance, etc), you need _a crapton_ of sales or page reads (if you are in Kindle Unlimited). These authors all stand out because they are making bank right now, as indicated by their presence on this list.

(Of course this does not reflect expenses like ad spend, but that's a whole other story that is near impossible to measure without info from the author themselves.)

Really appreciate you sharing your perspective. I recently wrote a book as a passion project and have been sitting anxiously on a contract. I'm not concerned about the money (I don't think my book will be a huge thing). My main motivation for going trad is the credibility as you somewhat alluded to. Do you think this is misguided on my part? Basically just so I can point at it in the future and say "a professional in the industry thought my book was worth printing with their name on it"

First, congratulations on finishing your book and getting a contract! That is a huge achievement.

I do not think your reasoning is misguided at all. If you think a traditional publisher affords you more credibility and a sense of satisfaction, that is reason enough to go with trad - _especially_ since as you say you're not concerned about the money, so there is no reason to worry about a traditional publisher's royalty rates compared to other options.

I believe your reason for wanting to go with a publisher is perfectly valid.

I have a question for you both (drakonka and turkeygizzard): Would you ever sell all or a portion of the rights to future earnings for your already published books to a third party? We've seen in the music industry PE firms basically acquiring known catalogues for the residuals and I'm wondering why that doesn't seem to happen in the publishing industry.

It happens quite a bit! I mentioned it in another comment here, but one thing that publishers can be very useful for is audiobook rights and translations. These are very costly to produce and it sometimes makes more sense to offload that part to a publisher. That is definitely something I'd consider doing if the opportunity came along.

I wonder how much longer this will remain true. Audiobooks and translations seem like near-term target for AI.

That's a good point. I'm already in the process of using voice synthesis to narrate one of my books. It is still a huge time outlay to get to the quality bar I want, but much cheaper than paying for a narrator.

One thing working in favor of human narrators is the fans. Audiobook listeners can get very attached to certain voices, to the point where they'll read _anything_ that narrator works on regardless of the book's author or genre. If I had the budget for it, I'd definitely favor a well-known human narrator over AI for the visibility aspect of working with that person. But most authors don't have the budget to hire popular narrators, which is where less popular or entry-level narrators may find themselves losing work to AI alternatives. The narration quality is still higher with competent humans at this time as well, but that'll change.

For translations, I don't think I'll ever trust AI entirely (just like I don't trust myself as a human writer entirely!) I'd still be hiring a native-speaking human editor and proofreader if generating AI translations. Or more likely, I'd be hiring a human translator who is able to charge competitively by using AI in their workflows (and is also able to handle the quality checks etc for me).

True. On this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU

100% of the commenters are Matthew's fans. Did that lead to any sales for me? Not clear.

Interesting! Do you have an email or way to get in touch by chance? I'd love to connect and ask more as I'm both writing a book and considering trying to build some stuff in this space. Alternatively, I'm at jb2956 at georgetown.edu!

Sure! Feel free to reach out at me at liza dot io.

get on Reedsy. You can put work out for bid, and the quality is quite high, IMHO.

Yes! I just used an editor from there who gave some phenomenal feedback for a very reasonable price

Audiobook natation isn't that expensive - the same narrators being used by publishing houses can do it for $200 an hour with it being 10-12k words per hour. Audiobook production is a few thousand for most books under the current system.

Accurate. Go on ACX and audition narrators. Also Voices.com.

The "per hour" rate usually means "per finished hour" not "per hour that they spent doing it."

For most self-published authors, a few thousand dollars is a lot to drop into a project that may never pay out. And in many cases if they do have the money, it makes more business sense to spend that budget on editors and cover designers across multiple books.

But there are definitely people who fund their own audiobook production. And narrator royalty share options exist too, which some use (I would personally not). It's just not the default option or choice for many.

Congrats. Is it fiction or non-fiction?

can you link some of your work? I'd like to give it a try :)

Afraid not! I write under a pen name. It's not a huge secret, but not something I advertise either for various reasons (the main one being that I'm still not as good as I'd like to be... but I'll get there).

Yeah, I wish not only self-publishing one’s own work, it also creating a small journal for publishing other writers was the first instinct of young writers, especially young writers of fiction, rather than seeking publication through more traditional outlets. I think small collectives of dedicated writer and self-publishers and self-producers is literature’s best hope for a new epoch of great writing.

So how do I find you guys? Because that's the biggest problem between the two of us. It should be based on my reading history, but goodreads is pretty useless, storygraph is better but still not that great.

I've been recently finding most good books by lengthy talks with GPT4 since I can explain in detail what I want, what I enjoyed and what I didn't, but that only works for books which are already popular (and even with old books, there are some great ones which are niche enough to never become really popular).

Unfortunately discovery still usually comes down to some manual sleuthing. It really depends on the genre, but I think you'll find that many ebooks on distributors like Amazon, Kobo, etc are self-published, so we're pretty easy to find! Check out the top 100 category in your favorite niche and you'll _likely_ find a good number of self-published titles there. If you come across an author you really end up liking, most have newsletters and/or a social media presence.

You can also sign up for ebook deal sites like BookBub, which send out deals for books in your preferred genre. They often feature self-published works. BB tends to be quite selective with what books they work with, so hopefully you'd find some nice quality work there (but of course it can always be a bit hit and miss).

On Substack, someone gave me "Legends & Lattes" which is a recent book I'd never have known about.

fyi: it's a "high stakes / low conflict" book. Yes, there are orcs, elves, and so forth, but they're kinda incidental to the plot. Not really sci-fi IMHO.

I've found myself enjoying more and more self published books. I wish a LITTLE more care was put into cover art and small details though. The cover art and book quality seem to be the two things that stick out like a sore thumb on self published works.

Even knowing that a lot of my favorite reads every year are self published, I am sometimes skeptical of a new book because the cover art looks like it was done poorly by someone in 15 minutes in photoshop. I guess I'm quite literally judging a book by its cover here but... In a world where you get a cover and a 2 paragraph blurb about a book... That is a significant factor.

I don’t think your impressions are entirely off-base here. If the author is so bad at judging the quality of the cover art (or, for me, the typesetting) I think it’s possible that it suggests a similar lack of judgement of quality for the writing (or, perhaps, editing) itself.

I would disagree - those skills (cover art, typesetting) are orthogonal skills to writing. These are some of the things (I assume) publishers would do for you.

Also, there are many things that I can judge to be good or bad, but that doesn't mean I can produce high quality examples myself. And getting high quality work from others isn't cheap, so it might be out of reach for self-published authors. Even if they know that the cover art isn't good, they might still use it, if they can't do better themselves and can't afford to hire someone who would do better.

That’s a very good point.

It's not about skills. It's about taste. Nothing wrong with getting someone else to do a cover or two. The question is whether the author had even the judgement to ask someone else for better work (in their taste). Same for typesetting. Same for proofreading.

And then there's the french publishers who prefer a text-only cover (and minimal at that) as a matter of their taste (and I guess, expectations of their customers - since not all french publishers go text-only).

Anything is possible, but I don't think judgement of visual aesthetics maps at all to quality of writing.

I'm a damn good technical writer and can break down complex ideas into clear and understandable prose, but I don't know the first thing about fonts or typesetting.

Sure. But only to a point. If it looks laughably bad, then sure it probably doesnt bode well for the quality of the writing. But if the cover is fine/good enough but clearly not something that would come from a trad publishing house... That is when the cover might not be reflective of the work but still hold people, myself often included, back.

This is actually a huge factor - both the covers and the blurbs are hugely important. Self-published covers in competitive genres now have to be on-par with trad covers for a reader to bother clicking on them.

Niches where there may not be much trad coverage can be more forgiving. If you're writing in a small niche that not many other authors cover, you have more wiggle room with the cover art. But very popular genres with a high ceiling really benefit from a professional cover designer (or a professionally-designed premade).

Luckily, there are budget designers out there who are decent. I started out publishing short stories and doing my own covers and editing. My first works _sucked_ and I'm glad I used them more for practice and did not put money into them. Gradually as I started making more, I began investing those royalties in peripheral services: editing and covers. I now pay for covers, developmental edits, copy edits, and proofreads for each new book. I've improved a lot and am steadily building a readership, but my books still barely pay for themselves with the outlay required.

Not sure what your standards are, but a notably bad cover also shows the author has invested essentially $0 in their book. You can get passable quality work from sites like GetCovers for ~$10-$30 (I think I paid $25). Though it’s possible these are the kinds of covers you’re reacting negatively to.

“Real” covers from US-based artists start at more like $300, which is a more substantial outlay for a project that’s unlikely to pay it back.

Yeah I guess the issue is that there is a huge gap between notable bad, good, and what seems to come from trad publishing.

I dont think most of the covers are that BAD. They just stick out and its clear this book is self published.

I've advertised on Reedsy and gotten an excellent illustrator. It costs. You can query "Albert Cory" on Amazon and judge for yourself.

All the designs I got on 99Designs were crap.

They look good to me.

Inventing the Future is you?

Yeah these are right on the cusp. Maybe I'm too discerning here. The font seems to blend into the background a bit more than one would expect and, "a novel" is way more faded than you would ever see in trad publishing.

But tbh most people might not even notice that. I don't really know. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what stand out sometimes.

that's me.

Trad publishers use offset printing, I believe. I'm not enough of an expert to know what effect that has. In self-publishing, you just provide a PDF.

100% this. I would so love someone artistic to have created my book cover, but the book was a passion project for me to make a Sci-fi book my daughter would have liked, and is being sold for $0 so paying anyone was outside my budget. I have since talked to an artist and we may do an illustrated version together.

Use Midjourney for a cover and ChatGPT for a synopsis

A few years ago I had beers with a NYT best selling author using trad publishing. Millions of copies sold on multiple continents, translated into many different languages, etc etc. You've heard of him, or at least his one big hit.

He said, at best, over his entire lifetime he may make $200k from that book. He basically has to write a book every single year just to make his mortgage payments, and its a grind.

When I told him I make $8/book self published he nearly fell out of his chair.

A typical royalty is 10% of the retail price. If the book is $30 (cheap these days), then a million copies sold (an extremely rare feat, even for a best seller, but...) is $3 million dollars. How does this story add up? (Foreign rights are often a lump sum rather than royalties, but still...?)

> A typical royalty is 10% of the retail price.

For WHO? What publisher is offering 10%??

The best I've ever heard is a fraction of a cent per book, and you don't get a single cent until AFTER all the expenses have been earned back (advance, editing, promotion of the book, flying you all over the place, hotels, staff).

The standard rate from reputable publishers is 10 to 15%. It's what I've gotten from three different publishers (Hachette, No Starch, Packt). The rates for paperback, discounted books, ebooks, audio books, are all a bit different, but that's the ballpark. All these publishers also paid me advances. That’s an advance on royalties. You start getting paid more when your earned royalties exceed the advance. There is no deduction for any other expense whatsoever.

This thread is full of utter nonsense about the worlds of publishing and writing.

[Edit: minus the 15% for your agent, if you're represented by one. But as your agent also made sure you got a good contract, you probably come out ahead.]

OK I’ll bite. What is the utter nonsense in this thread?

Do you have any tips for self-publishing, or reliable resources that talk about it? Or do you manage PR, did you get access to any form of media coverage? I thought this was the main point of getting a publisher.

One thing that I've found interesting about Iceland is that it is the country with the most authors per capita:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24399599

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/444296-mo...

But of course most of these authors aren't full-time authors whose income comes chiefly from their books. In fact, the Icelandic Prime Minister recently released a novel: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/28/iceland-pm-rel...

Having a small and sparse population, Icelanders seem to have a tradition of wearing multiple hats rather than sticking with one specialization. When the men's football team made their first World Cup, the head coach wasn't just a football coach, he also happened to be a dentist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimir_Hallgrímsson

It seems like a lot of people lament that more folks can't make it as full-time authors, but I don't really have a problem with that if the demand for their writing isn't there. But if the US were more like Iceland and typical "real" jobs paid a livable wage with reasonable hours, maybe those passionate about writing could still manage to take a shot at it without it being a big deal if their book turned out to be a commercial flop?

> But if the US were more like Iceland and typical "real" jobs paid a livable wage with reasonable hours

That's the key issue in general, not just for US. When the system is designed to extract maximum efficiency, there is little room for other stuff

Maximum efficiency in regards to what metric? (Before you say 'money/the economy', inequality seems to be bad in that respect [1], and that's about the only thing in regards to which US system seems to be highly efficiency ;)

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf

I believe that is what they are referring to, 'the system' being highly efficient at allocating process improvements/efficiency improvements to the owners of capital leading to the income inequality you note

The US is fairly good at creating high GDP per capita. They are 8th behind: Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Norway, Qatar, UAE and Switzerland.

Of those nations: Norway, Qatar and UAE are highly dependent on oil profits and Luxembourg is an outlier as an unusually small affluent nation. Ireland is also known to have an inflated GDP due to it's tax hub status resulting in corporations reporting high revenue numbers there even though that revenue is often disconnected from the country.

I think most nations would be thrilled to have a GDP per capita of $76,399 USD. When the proceeds are that much higher it takes an awful lot of inequality to make the outcomes worse. One of the biggest issues in the US is that health care is not covered by the government so it costs nearly double compared to most comparable countries and access is subject to all the inequality constraints that universal government programs mostly erase.

For example in Canada which has a GDP per capita of $51,987, the split between wages and capital is approximately 90-10 meaning that the average wage (including non-working population) was $46,788. For the US to have the same type of average wage of only $46,788 the share going to capital would have to be 38.8%.

It’s more than that. In Iceland you’re allowed to just stop working and the government will give you a basic income (along with a recreation stipend!) indefinitely. This gives people so much time for pursuits they’re passionate about.

As usual, I will allow Han Solo to critique your argument.

> There’s not enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser.

That’s why it works I get it and most people wouldn’t want to live in an icy hellscape but if you like spending all your time indoors it’s not so bad.

Contrary to the name, Iceland isn’t an icy hellscape at all. Haven’t you heard the quip about Iceland being green and Greenland being ice? Icelanders like spending time outside, and Reykjavik and most cities and towns are on the coast so they’re not all that cold. https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/iceland/reykjavik/climat...

I think by most people's standards that's pretty cold. Summer high in the mid 50s. 8 Months of the year with near freezing nightly temps.

What inhabited place would you be comparing it to to get "not all that cold"?

an average low of 0 celsius in the winter is a LOT warmer than Canada, except maybe on the west coast. It's probably warmer than the Nordics too, and maybe Russia.

You’re just naming other icy hellscapes.

You mean actual icy hellscapes? Correct! ;)

Ones that are all colder than Iceland

Ah, well, I think I have to stick with my original assessment, maybe less cold than Russia still sounds very cold.

I would love a way to easily run the numbers but ball park I think 98-99% of World population lives in a warmer climate.

Even Ottawa and Moscow get summertime average highs around 80 vs 57 in Reykjavík... Burr...

I think what you're saying is that you find those temperatures very cold. You asked what "inhabited places" are colder than that; I gave you a list of countries totalling around 200 million people who would not find Icelandic winters cold. I'm not sure they'd be too happy with a high of 11 in the summer though.

Hehe did the context somehow get completely lost somewhere? We were talking about whether Iceland is an “icy hellscape”. The summer temps and the number of people in warmer places is irrelevant. Nobody argued Iceland isn’t cool or cold relatively speaking. The only question is whether it’s below freezing, otherwise it can’t be icy, right? Reykjavik is not icy most of the time, even in winter. Reykjavik is also warmer in the winter than much of the inland US, and many many other inhabited places that freeze regularly. I was just trying to correct a common misunderstanding about Iceland. Sometimes people make incorrect assumptions based on the name.

I live in the states and forecasted low temps this week are lower than Reykjavik’s average low by more than 10 degrees, and lower than Reykjavik’s actual forecasted temps by 25 degrees (F)...

It would indeed be interesting to run the numbers. I’m guessing the number of people who live in below freezing temps in the middle of winter, places colder than Reykjavik for the coldest month or two of each respective locale, would probably exceed a billion.

It’s not very icy, with an average high above freezing year round. That’s warmer winter conditions than a lot of the US. Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Finland, Mongolia, Svalbard, Norway… there’s a pretty long list of inhabited places that are colder than Iceland.

Do you have a source for Iceland having a universal basic income like that? How much is it? I’m not finding anything about it with Google searches, and it seems kind of hard to believe.

It’s not universal. It’s basically indefinite unemployment payments.

Australia has that too. $1500/mo for a single person.

This still seemed implausible to me, so I looked it up. The Icelandic government has all the details on the web in English!

It looks like it’s for up to 30 months, and you need to be employed for 24. months to ‘reset’ it: https://vinnumalastofnun.is/en/jobseeker/entitlement-to-unem...

You’re required to confirm every month that you’re seeking employment: https://vinnumalastofnun.is/en/jobseeker/rights-and-obligati...

The amount seems to be ISK 349,852 per month: https://vinnumalastofnun.is/en/jobseeker/amounts-and-payment...

So that’s about USD 2500 - though there are lower amounts depending on your ‘entitlement’ band - I’m not sure how that’s calculated. Even at the 100% band, that’s $30,000/year - which is (for example) half of California minimum wage.

As someone who has a full time job and has self-published a novel I wrote in my spare time, I do not think that supply of books is the issue. In fact, as I went through the process of learning how to self publish, I met many people who write in their free time, including people I know and friends of friends I don’t know. I was actually surprised by how many people there are who have either already self published or who have an unpublished book they work on in their spare time.

From my experience, the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read, and when they do read, it’s usually a super popular book all their friends have read or that Tim Ferris talked about. When I published my book, I was surprised by how many close friends and family bought the book to support me, but have never opened it. And it wasn’t until after I published my book and became more aware of the reading habits of those around me that I realized how little most people read these days. There are a handful of people who read 30-50 books, but if you were to take the median so those people don’t skew the average, I’d estimate that it’d come in around 1-2 books. Probably half of the people in my life don’t read a single book in an average year.

While I never wanted to make a living off my book, I’ll admit it was discouraging to see how few people read it cover to cover. I took Mark Dawson’s course and got all of the social ads, lead magnet, etc. setup. The ads did work, but I quickly found out that of the subset of people who do read a lot in the US, most are 60+ and want self-published books to be either $0.99 or free. I had multiple angry old ladies reach out to me through my Facebook ad complaining that they weren’t going to pay $2.99 for a self-published book and that it was upsetting I’d even try.

It wasn’t all bad and I did find readers who genuinely enjoyed my book and supporting self-published authors, but these type of people are a very small percent of the population. If the average person read 15 books per year and was ok paying $10 per book to support authors, I think you’d see a lot more self-published books. From my anecdotal experience, there are plenty of people who aspire to write, but we lack a supportive reading culture to fully cultivate authors (even part-time authors).

EDIT: I’ll also add that among the people in the median reading 1-2 books per year, most are listening to those books as audiobooks. I’m not one of those people who say listening to books isn’t reading, but for the average full length novel it costs about $10k to get an audiobook made, which is way outside the budget for anyone trying to publish books as a hobby. I paid for an audiobook to be made because I have the income and thought it’d be a fun experience (which it was!), but I will never make enough from the book to cover that expense

The demand side is also that for people who do read their spending may be down. I used to buy roughly $400 in books a year. I now buy maybe 1 book a year and subscribe to kindle unlimited for everything else. I don't think I'm reading much less but authors are certainly making less per read, especially since 30% of my spend on KU goes to Amazon and any book that has a publisher still needs to give the publisher their cut out of the remaining 70%.

I think your $400 a year might be a bit of an outlier. Personally I would say the $140 I'm spending per year via KU is probably more than I was spending before. If you multiply this out by the number of people with KU subscriptions it wouldn't surprise me if that's actually more money flowing directly to authors than before.

I guess it depends how much you like paperbacks but they were fairly good at getting me to buy hardcovers because I wanted something right when it came out and didn't want to wait for a paperback. At $40/hardcover $400 is less than a book a month. A KU subscription is less money flowing into the system than someone buying 1 hardcover per quarter.

After graduating college at the age of 22, I've read between 20-50 books every year.

I'm often surprised at how far ahead of the bell curve I am. I am very rarely able to have a conversation about literature with people in real life. If I'm lucky enough to find someone that's read a recently published book I've also read then they often haven't read anything else by the same author. Or they haven't read the influences the author had for the book. Or they aren't aware of the genre trends the book took part in.

Reading in America is a lonely hobby sometimes.

I maybe used to read 30+ books a year. (And subscribed to a lot of magazines.) I’m not sure I read many fewer words these days but I read far fewer books—maybe 5-10.

When I was younger I would read ten to twenty books a year, of all genres. As I've gotten older it's dropped to one to two, entirely history books. Part of the problem is discoverability. There's too much stuff, and places like Goodreads aren't good at sorting through them. Since most things get limited physical releases these days you don't find them at book stores or libraries like you used to. I also refuse to support Amazon in any way because I'd rather give the money to the authors directly. Problem with that is the only way to do that most of the time is with pre-orders or drops, and by the time I found out about these authors or that particular work those are long since over.

Goodreads discoverability seems pretty good to me. I'm constantly finding new books through their recommended algo, front page, curated lists and search. What else could they do to improve that?

For example, if I wanted find more beatnik related books (after reading On The Road) I search lists and find this fantastic community scored collection with more books than I'll ever want to read on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/89976.Beatniks

A big problem for me is I can't just open to a random page and start reading to see if it's worthwhile. I have to jump over to Google Books, and that can be iffy as to whether or not they have samples I can read. Google Books also isn't good about searching by title, and I often have to use the author's name in combination or search by ISBN, and I don't always have those. Google Books does have the useful facet of searching by release, so if a book's been re-released under a new publisher or with a new foreword or something it'll tell me that.

> the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read,

I got back into reading, but its been an effort. Books are big and expensive, my library actually doesn't have stuff available often so I'm always on a wait list. Its hard tough to find time let alone quiet time to focus on a book. So many distractions around, roommates, city noise, neighbors making noise.

The thing is when I read more books, I’d pull out a book if I had a dead 15-30 minutes more or less anywhere. Nowadays it’s easier to default to Facebook, random links, etc. in those sorts of slots.

Most men, at any rate, wore a jacket almost everywhere (as in: suit jacket, sport coat, blazer) in the heyday of pulp fiction, when quite a few could make working-class wages pounding out words on a typewriter.

What do those jackets have? Big hip pockets. What fits perfectly in those, hardly even affecting the drape, with enough room to spare that they can slip in and out effortlessly? Slim little pulp fiction books. Hell, many are even big enough for a volume of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to fit OK. Can't cram a glossy in there, but pulps? Yep.

Plus, yes, there were no cell phones, but if you want to carry a book today, where do you put it, if you don't have a bag (and even if you do, that's not convenient, is it?)? Well, on your phone, as an ebook, since that fits in a jeans or trouser pocket, and practically no dead-tree books or e-readers do... oh but look, you have some notifications! And there goes the 15 minutes.

Women often carry purses. And who still reads? It's largely women. I'm sure there are other reasons, but—hmmmm.

I read a lot of books when I wasn’t wearing a jacket so I don’t know.

Yeah, same, it’s about ergonomics and tendencies over a population, though. Hard to make a book as small as a cell phone that is really readable (it’d probably have to be spiral-bound, for one thing, or have ultra-tiny print crammed on the outer 2/3 of the pages), and lots of cell phones already barely fit in a trouser pocket.

Less reading imho, is a symptom of increasing hours worked (which is also linked to lagging livable pay). The US has been increasing the hours worked. Less leisure time and less disposable income drives a host of negative effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

I'm pretty sure it's just more options, mainly social media. Everyone I know has plenty of leisure time to browser stuff on their phone, but book reading is a distant thought for most.

Yeah, I really doubt people would read much more if they worked less. You need a combination of literacy and a longer attention span, and these qualities are strengthened by reading more often. If you go forever without reading a book, it's harder to read through long books with advanced language that you used to be able to read effortlessly—and this is not because you don't understand the language, but because you lack the willpower to continue, since it's a bit mentally tiring to if you've fallen out of practice. At least, that's my experience, having gone through long stretches of time without reading.

So, based on my own experience, I think most people who don't read actually wouldn't be able to read more given more time. They would need to practice reading books that are easy on their level (both literacy level and attention-span level), and gradually advance to longer and more difficult books to read.

Self publishing causes a huge increase in noise since there are no barriers to getting published. So there's a big risk you'll pick up some garbage, but also vast supply which drives down prices. It also means new books on popular subjects can be quickly written, so unless you have some credentials the odds are stacked against you. So i think it comes down to marketing one way or another.

I plan to write a book one day, but mainly as an aid to establishing my credibility for courses I'll run, so marketing from the other direction.

I feel this. I write non-fiction in the tech industry. I start every project estimating the potential number of readers. My second book is the only one written for a particular profession. I calculated there were at least 20,000 people in the profession. Over 13 years it has sold about 2,000 copies. I have also written the only history of the IT security industry. I update it every year. It too only sells 2,000 copies per edition. Definitely not a way to make a living.

Post a link to your book here as well. I'm intrigued to see what it was about.

As much as I dislike publishers gatekeeping what gets read, It's a big ask to commit several hours to a self-published book. This is one thing I like about Japanese light novels, I can look up the release calendar and pick out a few that look interesting. They are a relatively quick read and only around $7 (about half that if you live in Japan).

While there may be less demand for books, I am less sure of the corollary that there is less reading. I remember when Harry Potter was having its hey day, and the Amazon Kindle was first announced, there were stats showing that worldwide reading blipped up.

I suspect folks these days read faster, and read more words, than people past. Except it might be content like Hackernews, YouTube comments, X/Twitter and other doom scrollers, that make that up.

> in the US ... people here hardly read

This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.

This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.

What does the data say?

* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."

* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]

* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]

* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]

* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]

[1] https://wordsrated.com/global-book-sales-statistics/

[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/12358/which-countries-produce...

[3] https://internationalpublishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/... , page 17.

[4] https://masterenedicion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BookM...

Your data does not answer: how many of these books are actually read (in the US)?

I've been reading about 5-10 books a year for the last 10 years or so, after having not read anything of substance (outside of school) for some years prior to that.

Since my reading time is limited, I want to read books that are really good. I have to say, quite frankly, that many books just aren't that amazing (and I'm including both traditional and self-published in this). That makes me reluctant to pick up a book unless it's from an author I already know, comes with a really strong recommendation, or just has a superb opening. If a book doesn't have at least one of those three (or ideally two), I'm just not going to pick it up.

This is all anecdata, but my point is the demand side is more complicated. Even given the competition, the vast availability of both traditionally and self-published books doesn't guarantee that quality goes up, at least in aggregate.

At 5-10 books a year, there's also the "problem" that you've got more than a lifetime supply, just sticking to time-tested, very-likely-to-be-excellent classics. That's even true for relatively-modern genre fic and such, these days—it's not the 1960s anymore, you can fill shelves and shelves with good-reputation sci fi and fantasy. This is all true even if zero new books are published... ever.

>People here hardly read,

I feel it's not so much that people don't read, it's that people don't read books anymore in lieu of other mediums (most prominently social media) or methods (eg: watching television, playing games with a story component).

We all do plenty of reading in our lives, after all.

It would be so great if more professions in the US had part time options. I could make a zillion dollars as a dev for a big tech company, but there's nowhere that pays 80% of that for 80% of the hours. Hell, I don't think I have the option to make 50% of that for 80% of the hours. Salaried careers seem to only have full time positions, and it sucks.

Specialization is at the core of economic profit. Damn you, economics!

if you have the soft skills (I sure dont lol) I -think- contracting/consulting can be a solution to this? It's not exactly part time, but you work your contract and then take a break before you pick up the next one, which does give you more flexibility with your time. You could eg work six months on, six months off, that way.

Maybe. I knew a PE who did this years ago, but I wonder if there's any software engineers on this board who have successfully done this

I usually negotiate my contracts to be 20-30 hours per week of work. This gives me ample time to work on side projects (aka playing ck3) and run my Etsy shop.

The soft skills aren't much, you have to remember your boss is also just as social awkward as you, because, they are usually cut from the same software developer cloth. But remaining on good terms with past managers helps a lot. I still have annual dinners with almost everyone I've ever worked with, even if we are all scattered across the US.

"It would be so great if more professions in the US had part time options. "

I agree with this, and I've personally led a life that has had many different kinds of occupations (I've been a musician, a teacher, and a programmer- usually all three at once).

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the reason for "full-time" employment has to do with making workers unavailable for other projects.

Or, if you prefer, full time jobs aren't there because 40-hours-a-week is how much can be gotten out of a worker, but because that's how much time is necessary to keep someone from getting another job that might interfere with the "real" job.

Many folks, especially folks who do weird stuff that requires, if not great intellect or training, familiarity with a specific system (as is the case with software, for instance) aren't actually working a full time load. That's a really common observation, I think. But the way to understand why that continues to happen is that their employment ensures their availability.

That may see strange, and on some levels it's simply not correct and certainly not how most folks are thinking about full time employment.

But if you push an employer to give you fewer hours, that understanding might make a lot of sense out of why they generally won't allow part-time work- if you've got a side gig, they can't have that take priority over their tasks.

Your value to your company is also not a linear function of your time there. There are high fixed costs to training, liability, insurance, etc. They are paying you to always be available, etc.

With that said, I think it's very possible to find a much more easier development job with a lower salary. You should be able to meet performance expectations in very little time.

The company Galois notably supports this sort of arrangement (you pick your hours and your pay is scaled accordingly). I think their corporate structure could be applied more widely.

Iceland is an affluent western nation with its own language, but a population of less than 375,000 people - fewer people than many cities in other countries. And yet these people want books just as much as any other people - perhaps given the nation's culture even more so.

For supply (and selection) to keep up with demand, it requires a far higher percentage of the population to write.

It's the same with most creative fields really. The vast majority of people earn very little from their work, and a few really skilled/lucky folks at the top of the field earn a fortune.

See also music, art, game design/development, content creation on sites like YouTube and Twitch, blogging, etc.

Part of this is simply due to competition; there was stacks of it before the internet got big, and there's probably a thousand times more now the internet has become normalised. The barrier to entry to writing a book or becoming a writer is extremely low in the grand scheme of things (well, if you have the determination/patience to finish), so enough people do that you're spoilt for choice there.

Add this to how challenging the marketing/sales side of running a business is by default, and how trying to make a sustainable income as an author or creator is basically being a sole trader/entrepreneur, and well, it's not too surprising that most people don't do particularly well from it.

On the competition aspect, I think it's also important to look at the consumer side. For me it was wild knowing Mission Impossible struggled at the box office because of Barbie/Oppenheimer, especially because it was such a big budget film and it was actually my favorite of the three. The reality is that most people would maybe go once a month to the cinema, so they have to prioritize what to watch.

To make matters worse, you are also competing with all of history. If you want to read 12 books this year, when are you going to get to the small creators with years-worth of classics to go through?

Agree with your overall point, but the Mission Impossible thing isn't that surprising to me. I think a lot of people are tired of endless reboots/sequels of action-adventure movies. Also I think Tom Cruise can have the opposite of star power these days, a lot of people feel kind of ick about him.

I don’t watch movies with certain actors in them. He’s one of them.

That's a good point really. Not many people realise that the majority of the population doesn't buy many creative works at all.

They'll only go to the cinema maybe once a month, buy perhaps a few video games and tabletop games a year if any, watch perhaps a few TV shows or films or streaming services every month, buy perhaps 10-12 books a year, and for many of them, not buy any paintings or display art at all.

And then unless it goes viral/gets picked up by the media/becomes a meme, it probably won't even get noticed by the general public. So you have to hope the right people find your work so that happens too...

For most non-fiction authors, far and away the biggest monetary benefit of writing books is indirect, e.g. reputational benefits associated with being a published author on a topic. (Going with a recognized publisher can make more sense in this case.)

I did make a few thousand the one time I went with a publisher. I’ve also self-published and didn’t really try to make direct income at all as I had a free downloadable ebook. The only real cut I got was when third parties bought books for me to do book signings.

On the other hand I’m pretty sure I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars at least in indirect professional benefits.

I'm convinced this is what most tech oriented books are about, not so much about earning money from a book, but putting "Author of xyz" on their CV and website; "you literally wrote the book on xyz, you are an authority on xyz"

Assuming they’re going in with eyes open, totally. It’s also a good forcing function to dive deeper into a topic than you might otherwise do.

And traditional technical publishers are probably a more effective route for this reason even if you’re leaving some direct money on the table.

The famous mathematician Vladimir Arnold said (approximately) “the best way to learn a topic is to write a book on it.” He did that a few times in his career — most notably his excellent book on classical mechanics.

I suspect a younger generation of authors coming up now will almost exclusively self publish.

In the niches of fantasy I read there are no traditionally published authors any more, they all monetise via patreon, kindle unlimited and audible. From what I've gleaned no traditional publisher can compete with this.

I think probably we reach a point where hardbacks become "collectors editions" for successful works only, while paperbacks are print on demand. The vast majority of consumption will be ebook or audible.

This would follow the same path as the music industry and the revival of vinyl record albums. Most are collected and not played since streaming is so much easier and portable. I would go further and say that paperbacks will fall almost completely out of favor as they are less durable and could be seen as more of a "waste" environmentally. A bookshelf in a home is still a wall of virtue and interest signals and I don't think that will go away completely.

There’s still a large “I like the feel of a real book even if it’s a paperback” contingent. But I assume that is much less true of relatively younger people. (I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my books that are in the public domain and would largely clear out most of my paperbacks if I could magically get them in digital format.

My daughters (gen Z) prefer physical books, though we'll see if that persists past the first time they have to move apartments themselves.

Record stores that still exist aroud me seem to have travelled back in time, I now feel like the first days of the CD sales, where they were at a corner in a shop full of vynil records.

Also someone is buying those vynil players with bluetooth and USB connectors.

i have some rare paperbacks that have insurable value. this is a counterpoint to the assumption that paperbacks are worthless.

Of course rare books are valuable. The point is that if you want to buy a physical book you probably will pay $10-15 more for the nice version. The market for the cheap entry is smaller.

Paper books have legal value - you have rights to resell it, for instance, that you don't have for ebooks. Until we unfuck those, ebooks will never completely replace them.

Paper books aren't particularly environmentally wasteful - if you buy one extra electronic device (say, an ereader), that basically outstrips the damage of any number of books you'd buy. That might not be relevant to the perception, though.

Books as expensive wallpaper will definitely keep being a thing while dead-tree books are common, but they're fundamentally about conveying an impression, and impressions can change - if ebooks become the overwhelming majority to the point that office decoration is the main point of books, then anyone who sees the bookshelf will assume you're a poser doing it for the image, and thus people will stop doing it. So wallpaper-bookshelves can't exist as a sole purpose of books (probably).

You take away the importance of getting bookstore shelf space, material marketing and book tours (good luck getting that), etc. and publishers add less and less for a huge cut. As I commented ed elsewhere I almost certainly benefited non-monetarily from going with a well-known technical publisher but I wouldn’t do it going forward at this point for various reasons.

> In the niches of fantasy I read there are no traditionally published authors any more, they all monetise via patreon, kindle unlimited and audible. From what I've gleaned no traditional publisher can compete with this.

I see this too, but I've also seen the next step: Publishers chase them down for book deals. Azarinth Healer is the one that comes to mind (since I'm working through Book 3 again), where the author monetized via Patreon for years, then got a publishing deal through Portal.

Honestly, it's been a good thing overall. The audiobooks are high quality, and the editing has done the story a tremendous amount of good.

Moving from self published Patron into traditional publishing is a bumpy ride. To use your example, Azarinth Healer’s author significantly reduced output while working on editing the book without disclosing why they were doing so. They then didn’t hand out copies of the edited work on Patron thus massively discouraging people from continuing to support them.

I went through that process a few times with minor variations and it’s annoyed me enough that I decided to permanently boycott both Amazon (including AWS) and Patron.

The reverse where traditional authors give fans more access on Patron is less problematic, but also distracts from actually writing.

A bit of a tangent about Azarinth Healer's journey to follow, with a more generic wrapup...

> To use your example, Azarinth Healer’s author significantly reduced output while working on editing the book without disclosing why they were doing so.

Interesting. This drama must have been largely contained to Discord, since I never really saw it come up in Patreon itself. Plus, their output has been a bit unpredictable due to real life mental health complications for years. Notably, though, supporters on Patreon were not charged when they were not producing new chapters.

Ultimately reduced output, especially for the sake of fixing prior works for publishing, is acceptable to me.

> They then didn’t hand out copies of the edited work on Patron thus massively discouraging people from continuing to support them.

The author probably couldn't. They can't even keep the un-edited version up on Royal Road, so the contract probably stipulated what could and could not be done with the edited manuscript. And, honestly, I'm OK with that. Since Patreon charges have been turned off for awhile, paying $5 for the edited books is acceptable IMO.

> distracts from actually writing

Authors gotta market their work; even traditional publishers aren't doing that nearly as much anymore.

While output might be the key metric that some readers judge authors by, at the end of the day it's not the metric authors need to worry about the most. An author who can't support themselves by writing will produce even less output than one who is bound by the need to make money.

At the end of the day, I have a hard time being sour about authors - Rhegar included - finding a way to earn a living off writing.

You can print hardcover on demand too these days.

Worries me a bit that an established “natural selection” process pivoted towards quick turnaround. Thirty years ago publishing house would decline 99% of the manuscripts, the rest they will heavily edit, print in somewhat large numbers, and extensively promote. Today they accept more stuff, print in small 3,000–5,000 batches, then throw away forever. To me, feels like a young but promising author went from a 1% chance of getting recognized to 10% chance of getting printed and 100% chance of getting forgotten right after.

Been writing tech books now for over a decade, got about 8-10 under the belt depending on if you count 2nd and 3rd editions as new books.

Definitely not writing them for the money — that’s about $300 a month usually. Enough to buy a few knick knacks and some meals.

It’s more the notoriety of being a “subject matter expert” that counts.

I work full time and then put what I learn from the job into the books to share it with the world. No point hanging onto the knowledge and hoarding it all dragon-like.

For people in this thread, I strongly recommend Rob Fitzpatrick's book on how to write a book as a business, "Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction":

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...

Even though I'm not an author I found the advice very useful, it can trivially be applied to building and marketing any product.

Most of what they talk about is fiction, romance novels. No wonder it's still popular to be sold, I'm the wrong demographic, to me they're the generic rags with the generic tall strong man and falling woman on the cover. They give them away at the library and nobody wants them still.

It IS near-impossible. I have two books on Amazon (search "Albert Cory") which are actually about our industry, and I've mentioned them here many times. Fortunately I'm retired and don't need the income.

One data point for you: I've been taking various angles on my new book, looking for books with that feature, and then finding the agent who represented them. Sounds smart, right? Hasn't worked so far.

One fallout of that is, I've been checking these books out of the library (less $$$ commitment there!) and at least starting them. What dreck people read!

If the main character isn't solving a murder, connecting with their long-lost lover, fighting terrorists, or engaged in other TV-worthy plots, the book will never make it onto bookshelves. Since I don't have to care about people's lousy taste, I don't.

Lastly, the figure of $10K for an audiobook that someone mentioned is way too high, in my experience.

I have a 6 book contract with Podium, my debut was in the top 100 books of 2023 by Kirkus, and I am nowhere near quitting my day job.

I've paid attention to the publishing industry for years. Like all of the arts, it's oversaturated and there's a lot of churn.

IMO, writers who earn a full-time living as authors fall into three basic categories. They either a) established themselves as blockbuster bestsellers with the Big Five before Amazon democratized the marketplace, circa 2010 and earlier, b) they established themselves as blockbuster bestsellers as early adopters of the Amazon Kindle marketplace, circa 2011 to 2016, or c) they own an advertising agency, are married to someone who owns an advertising agency, they are slick marketing gurus, or they are major social media influencers.

There are exceptions. I see interesting innovations in the web serial space, where I play around. I sell advance chapters on Patreon. Some authors do earn a full-time living that way.

But in general, yes, it is very tough to be a professional author or an artist or a musician or an indie game developer these days. Everyone wants to be one.

I also see cynical authors and artists using AI to 100x their content production so they can nickel and dime their way into top seller spots. The algorithms boost anyone whose works consistently sell and bury everyone else.

Authors apparently earn cents of royalties for every physical book purchased. That seems crazy.

I wouldn't mind paying $5 more for a book if >90% of it went to the author.

> Authors apparently earn cents of royalties for every physical book purchased. That seems crazy.

Agreed, but it is (somewhat) justified by the sheer length of the chain (printing house, distributors, bookstores etc.)

FWIW, I wrote and self-published a book on a 99% automated platform (e-book only), and I get 80% royalties.

Another (anec)datapoint: I published a book (this time not written by me) in a more "traditional" way (i.e., on paper). The book is pretty niche, had 0 marketing expenses (we basically only relied on word-of-mouth). We kept the costs low, but not too low (we paid a bit for nice typesetting, illustrations, good paper etc.). We did not even try to put it in bookstores and only sold it via Internet (using an ebay-style platform, not even a custom e-commerce solution; we didn't even had a landing page with a our own domain!). This allowed us to break even after a few months, which I think is insane comparing to the "big book" (aka publishing industry).

> FWIW, I wrote and self-published a book on a 99% automated platform (e-book only), and I get 80% royalties.

Would you mind sharing which platform this is?

Sure. While at that, let me also plug my book: https://leanpub.com/hacking-your-way-emacs

Thanks for that link! That's very interesting. I am editing two books for two authors at the present, both of whom already published, in paper, and with Amazon I believe. But this looks like a very interesting publishing model. Especially for more technical books. There are a few in progress that I know about. (Is emacs something different than the apple computer?)

Any book that is $5 more expensive than current market price will instantly lose to thousands of competative cheaper books where authors write about similar topics while agreeing to earn peanuts.

You can try solving this by industry-wide regulations, but that would make average price of books much higher, and will likely steer readers to other medias, shift revenues to already established writers, or both.

Are books purchase really so price sensitive? It's not exactly like you're buying potatoes

I’m not sure it’s a continuous supply-demand curve but you get out of the “normal” discounted range—say above $15–and people will really think twice.

IMO, in the age of Kindle Unlimited, yes. I, myself, have a very hard time justifying purchases over $6. The reason is pretty simple, the higher priced books are not guaranteed to be better, just written by a more widely recognized author.

OP should just donate $5 to his favorite writers.

>Any book that is $5 more expensive than current market price will instantly lose to thousands of competative cheaper books where authors write about similar topics while agreeing to earn peanuts.

I could see this being true for non-fiction, but for fiction? I'm generally not looking at price, I'm looking at whether the story seems interesting.

Two books can both be about space battles (or whatever your topic of choice is), but one can seem extremely interesting while the other doesn't. Similar topics doesn't really mean much compared to everything else (writing style, characters, etc.)

"You can try solving this by industry-wide regulations"

Also known as "price fixing".

A few years ago I met an author who was switching from self-pub to traditional pub for one of his books (usually this is tough to do, traditional publishers typically won't touch a book that started off as self-published).

His take went from 70% on Amazon to just 7% w/ the traditional publisher.

Of course the traditional publisher handles all marketing and distribution, so hopefully the slimmer percentage of a much bigger pie works out.

But I was amazed at how low the final percentage was.

Absolutely! When I wrote for Manning, a print book that sold for $45 netted me a huge $4.50 — 90/10 split. Ebooks were 50/50. Guess the print guys all gotta take their cut.

This was Science Fiction/Fantasy with major publishers early to mid 2000s. The 50% ebook royalty dropped to I think 10% not long after.

It's a lot like picking a career as an artist, a musician, or an athlete. A very small percentage makes a lucrative living, and the rest wander in the desert.

> unconscionable contracts

Self-publishing has never been an easier option than today.

> book bans

As far as I can tell, these are only for R rated books in schools and libraries. Isn't it the same as R movies? Nobody thinks of R movies as being banned.

> action to build a system that properly values the essential contributions of writers

They're valued by the free market, i.e. people freely paying what they believe the book is worth to them. I'm curious how the Guild expects to change this. Have government regulations that mandate payment per word? Government subsidy?

Many types of books have ancillary results for the author than can be lucrative. For example, writing a solid academic book can get you a job or more pay in an academic setting, or a top job in a technical position.

Creating is a tough way to make a living. Writing books, writing short stories, music, apps, videos, and the list goes on and on.

And while it's never been easier to create - the tools are plentiful and their prices falling - there's never been more noise to claw through and standout from. Add in shorter and shorter attention spans and more creators produce more quantity because they feel they have no choice.

On the other hand, look at an artist like Banksy. Enigmatic and drops are randon. When Banksy drops people take notice. Aside from a eye / mind for quality and creativity, I think there might be a lesson in the somewhere.

The lessons are:

1. Low barriers to entry drive down prices

2. Be first (Banksy)

3. And if you can't be first, at least try to stand out in some way. As in - FFS - if the internet got any more beige* it would be invisible.

* I use beige as a metaphor (?) for the ultimate bland color. Some (late) nights, I'd even argue it's so bland it doesn't deserve to be recognized as a color.

Anecdotally I have found the amount of books I read has skyrocketed since I got a library card. I used to hesitate at book stores trying to decide if a book was worth $30 and the space on my (already full) book shelf. Now, if I hear about a book that's even remotely interesting, I check it out from the library almost impulsively. If I don't like it, I don't finish it. If I really like it, I buy a copy. The checkout deadlines also provide a nice motivation for me to finish a book.

I went from reading less than 5-10 books a year best to reading 40 books in 2023. And the more I read, the more I want to read.

I am spoiled, living in NYC, as the NYPL and Brooklyn PL between them have a pretty extensive catalog, and it's rare that they don't have a book I want, even recently published books. There's often a wait list though. It's also easy to get a lot of reading done during my commute on public transit. We still don't get cell service on the MTA between stations, so books are the best form of entertainment.

Of course, I suppose if everyone used the library exclusively, writers would make very little money. But I like to think it works out. I bought more books last year than I did before using the library, and attended a few book talks & signings at my local book store.

Piracy did the same thing for me. If would read more than 50 pages in a book i would buy a copy, if not i would delete and move on. I think i fully read 21 in 2023, and ditched probably about as many before 50 pages. I absolutely bought and read more books than in 2022, not even close.

Couldn't you do the same with Kindle samples? Seems lower effort.

I may be wrong, but Kindle samples are often much shorter than 50 pages in my experience. Usually too short for me to make a choice as to whether I want to read the book or not.

I'm in the process of releasing my first book, with O'Reilly, this year (https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/unifying-business-...). I didn't do it for the money (but for the recognition), but I'm very interested to know how it will economically fare.

>Lawmakers, publishers, and the public must recognize authors as professionals deserving fair pay and dignity. We urge collective action to build a system that properly values the essential contributions of writers to society. The Authors Guild will continue this fight until the stark income disparities revealed in our survey are remedied by overdue reforms

Do these people really think they can come up with an actual solution to these problems?

When I read that I was thinking of changing authors to any other "perceived useless job". Their demand is fit more money because they produce value somehow? What value?

Well, I have learnt alot from some books.

The entertainment value is also value.

The books they mostly mention are romance novels and all fiction. I have and mostly continue to avoid them because honestly most of them are rags and it's not worth checking out from the volumes of garbage unless they're recommended by a person I know of esteem.

Incidentally I have, sitting next to me, a freelance publishing contracts manager who works contract rights for Hachette and other big players.

Anyway, the problem in the industry, from my point of view (very opinionated):

- The market has-not-priced-in-demographics! Still! Blinkered to the aging readership.

- False expectation of revival or sustaining market size.

- Often the wrong channel/medium. Much non-fiction & fiction simply doesn't need or benefit from traditional publishing houses.

- Industry is still in the process of acknowledging (or is hiding the fact) that brands are so dependant on celebrity names. Celebrity authors are bolstering statistics and making it look more lucrative to the average Joe than it really is.

- Clinging on to old worldviews on IP, to the detriment of innovation.

- Very much haven't got their head around LLM / prior art changes that are forcing us to be less litigious in the coming years.

My associate is more conservative than me, and is also far more knowledgeable than me of course.

I also note the consolidation of publishers was at full throttle this past decade.

Hi! I'm 60,000 words into a non-fiction travelogue/guide to China for Westerners. It's a narrative story of a 60 day journey, and we also walk through Imperial history, modern culture (music/tv), apps apart from WeChat, and more.

I'm debating going trad/self-publishing route - can I hire the freelance publishing contracts manager for a consultation? My email is mikhael at hey.com

Apologies for not seeing this until now. I have just passed on your details.

That's interesting and reminds me of Bill Bryson, e.g. The Lost Continent did a lovely job of intertwining the history, trivia and his childhood memories into his personal travel.

> By far the largest percentage of respondents, 79%, were white, followed by 8% Black, 4% Hispanic, 2% AAPI, and 2% Native American. Twelve percent identified as LGBTQIA+ and 11% identified as disabled, meeting the ADA’s definition. The survey did find that diversity efforts were beginning to bear fruit—Black, AAPI, and Hispanic authorship has increased the most since 2019, and LGBTQIA+ and nonbinary authors were also above average among new authors. Sixty-one percent of respondents were women, 34% men, and 5% nonbinary.

What diversity efforts did they do?

>The median book-related income for survey respondents in 2022 was up 9% from 2018, adjusted for inflation, with all the increase coming from full-time authors, whose income was up 20%, compared to a 4% decline for part-time authors.

Whatever was to increase income worked. The books they talk about are mostly what I'd consider trash I wouldn't read: generic romance novels and fan fiction with changed names. Low ceiling.

I wonder if this will get better as the book market seems to get increasingly fragmented (Booktok, Bookshop.org, the resurgence of bookstores in the U.S. and UK, etc.) and as there is more competition in other mediums like with Spotify now competing with Audible. But it does seem like writing is an extremely hits based business -- some books/authors that publishers sign are absolute home runs and make 99% of the money out of any given cohort of books and the rest likely don't return the cost of the advance and investment from the publisher's side of things. Maybe technology will also increase the potential for author earnings here, if today you have to hire someone to record an audiobook or do a translation, maybe that gets automated away in a few years and you can more easily publish in every format and language potentially reaching a larger audience.

The largest demographic of readers, who have the ability to make or break a book is middle class white women. If you can convince them to read your book, you have made it.

I would say it depends on the book. I don't have such data for my Elisp textbook (which fared pretty well), but I'm not sure it would confirm your claim.

> middle class white women

Sachachua enters this category. I am sure she would be glad to read your book.

pd: sacha if you read this, no offense, just joking, hahahaha

I get that this is the authors guild and activism and lobbying is literally their job, but statements like "survey finds that median book and writing-related income for authors in 2022 was below the poverty level" are meaningless.

What makes one an "author" exactly? Publishing a book? I can do that in 5 minutes online with 3 clicks. Does that mean I qualify for the survey? Well, I made $0 from my writing last year, so I guess that means I'm being exploited and the government isn't properly valuing the essential contribution I make to society. I'll expect my weekly check in the mail.

It's like saying the average software developer makes below-poverty wages from their work...if you consider everyone in the world with an idea for an app in their head to be a software developer.

No, it would be like counting everyone who made an app as a software developer

Go through any of the app stores and look up all the trash that is published on a daily basis that gets single digit downloads. Look at all the new websites registered. Millions of people follow "create a React to-do list" tutorials and write their own. These are all software developers who make zero income from their craft. Yet no one is arguing that software developers as a whole are underprivileged. You can apply this same logic to actors, musicians, real estate agents and a hundred other professions. There's just the understanding that if there are zero barriers to entry you have to have some test that sets the professionals/serious practitioners apart. Otherwise your surveys are always going to tend towards 0.

Self publishing certainly muddied the waters for statistics on author income, which is why the survey and article break things down info self published and traditionally published. Fundamentally though, it isn't if you qualify for the survey, but if you both know about it and identify as an author, passionately enough to bother filling it out.

How do you think an author should be defined? And what list do you use to validate them? If you start raising the bar, you start limiting the scope. Maybe that is the problem; comparing apples with oranges or romance authors with self help gurus. But if you set your bar to something like 'authors making >$20,000 in royalties per year', you will unsurprisingly get a result where authors make >$20,000 in royalties per year.

Not in response to the article but the general vibes in the comments.

Writing a published book and having it out there is a thought that really resonates me. I wonder what I'd write if I had more time to myself, a clear mind, and /if I was a radically different person who wanted to do it/.

The thought of having written something, put it out there, and to have someone enjoy it is lovely – I'd be happy writing schlock if it came straight from my heart. But in terms of being the sort of person to sit down every day, concentrate, and slave away at it... That isn't me. Props to people who manage to put anything on a single page, let alone finish a whole book.

Pulp will be almost completely replaced by AI, no doubt, within the next couple years. I don't see how anyone could possibly consider that a viable career path anymore. The people who consume it couldn't care less or notice, and they'll have it tailored precisely to their own tastes based on advertising data collection. It was never about quality, just sheer quantity of the same thing over and over again (but slightly different), which LLMs are phenomenal at. Same goes for pop music and mainstream cinema on a slightly further timescale.

The only easy way to make a living is to sell.

Intelectual work like writing, researching, teaching, etc. despite being important, don't have intrinsic appeal such that people naturally and voluntarily put money on it. We are not built like that.

This is where institutions like universities, governments, etc. come in.

Of course you need to be good at selling in situations where you can get a good cut. I’m sure there are a lot of car salesmen that are just squeaking by.

But, yes, good salesmen for things like enterprise software can do quite well though you more exposed of the vagaries of the market than someone more removed from the front lines.

Even scientists doing basic research need to “sell” their research proposals and papers to get them funded and published.

Every piece of professional work has an intended audience, and that means selling to that audience.

A work with no intended audience is a hobby.

> This is where institutions like universities, governments, etc. come in.

Science was doing pretty well before it became institutionalized in the early 20th century. It's not without tradeoffs, but these aren't essential components.

I've published traditionally and it was a great experience. The publisher (O'Reilly) was great to work with, and the editors made a tremendous, positive difference in the finished work. That was many years ago.

Since, I've moved to fiction and self publishing, and that's been hard, but rewarding. It's hard and expensive to build a following on your own with just books and ads.

Now I have moved to web serials and subscriptions. I'm convinced this is the best time to be a writer. The hardest part, finding an audience, is as easy as sticking to a publishing schedule and engaging with readers.

Substack is better, imho, if you can serialize it . Monthly subs is recurring revenue, compared to one-time book purchases.

A few weeks back one of the VCs now attached to newline co attempted to sell me on becoming dev author through their program.

I of course pointed out that as I market upfront I am getting paid via my substack so essentially I solved the problems his startup is still trying to solve.

And of course he ghosted me.

I’ve written a book, edited the hell out of it, gotten feedback from friends, etc (I think it’s pretty good!) and have tried reaching out to literary agents (this is what the trad route recommends). So far about 0/20. Any tips here? I’m located in NYC fwiw.

~99% of the published writers i know have a full-time job to support their book writing.

https://www.amazon.com/Across-Silicon-Bravely-Stan-Stevens/d...

As someone who was considering creating a graphic novel this year, I'm glad to see I'm in one of the most lucrative categories. Especially since I have no desire to write pulp romance novels.

Tangential, but do any authors apply the same techniques promoted by software developers for honing their craft? e.g. instead of trying to write the next great American novel you focus on writing a lot of short stories and then analyze them for market fit and expand on the ones that have legs?

I think writers as a whole are far less inclined to concern themselves with market fit than many developers are.

Short stories haven’t historically been very lucrative relative to longer works. Although there were some genres, eg SF, where they were a natural entry point.

Maybe they should be? I suggested short stories as a way to practice and test the waters since they would work well with social media and aggregator sites, people are willing to read a short story they find on reddit or hn but much less likely to read a whole book. Keeping your “demos” short also requires less commitment and takes less time so you can do more of them. The idea isn’t to earn money from short stories but to do analytics on them in order to decide which to turn into a novel.

Actually, one software-developer-turned-writer did something close. Check out Chris Fox's book "Write to Market" on Amazon. He sat down and analyzed sales figures for different book genres on Amazon then chose a genre where he thought he could squeeze onto the top ten bestseller list. He's been cranking out books for years and selling pretty well. If you check his author page, you'll see he has quite a few titles out.

You can't take every good short story and turn it into a novel, and not every novel could be meaningfully reduced to a short story. Concepts that work in one format won't work in another.

Agreed

Probably true but if you have several popular short stories done in a certain style or genre then it’s a good bet that a novel in the same will be more popular. They’re good practice too, the article mentions that a lot of the respondents have only published a single book.

Another reason for this is the sheer amount of rubbish literature that is being printed, specially in the category of "Young Adult". There are endless streams of psychopath male leads and damsel in distress characters, with predictable story lines and pretentious dialogues.

It's pulp. If you made it disappear the people reading it wouldn't magically start reading "the good stuff", they'd move onto something else suitably mindless in another medium.

> There are endless streams of psychopath male leads and damsel in distress characters, with predictable story lines and pretentious dialogues.

I mean - it sells. Is it readers fault if other authors write unpopular stuff? "Royal Road" is my guilty pleasure. Almost everything there conforms to that quoted scheme but even among mountains of crap there exist various degrees of quality. That said the popularity isn't strongly correlated to that - checking 2 authors I follow one has $300/month on Patreon while other $20k/month.

Personally, I think this is where Patreon (and similar) shine. Allows 'true fans' to support directly with a much smaller cut than traditional distribution/publishing mechanisms, whilst also not requiring long-term subscriptions.

If your content is in demand, you do well.

Honestly Royal Road is a treasure. It's the only site where I actively click on t he ads because the ads are all for new stories and there's a decent chance I'll like one.

For many people, reading is a fun escape into an alternative reality that they would never want to live out in real life. If they want to escape into a world of dark romance tropes featuring psychopathic male leads, more power to them and to the authors they're supporting.

Don't forget that these also have experienced publisher and marketing networks behind them; on their own the books are a dime a dozen, it's the publishers that make it popular.

just don't read it if you have a problem with it. and don't waste your emotional energy on hating it. there are a ton of books out there that you would love, why spend your time thinking about books you don't like?

let the readers read what they want, let the writers write what they want, and don't judge people based on their reading preferences. even if it's rupi kaur.

Being an author is tough, but it's not all bad news. I've made over $2mil over the past 5 years with a self-published book. Certainly not a typical result, but I want to give the authors here some hope.

That is indeed unusual and very impressive, congratulations! Are you willing to share any more details? E.g. fiction or non-fiction, genre, distribution channel, how you made your income? Thank you!

Non-fiction in a small business niche.

Distribution on Amazon KDP and ACX (Audible).

The $2m is from book royalties. It has also generated multiples of this in consulting, coaching and course sales.

Really hoping this isn't a book telling you how to make money by self-publishing, or similar.

Self-publishing as discussed elsewhere, is certainly the way to go, otherwise those profits would have gone to the publishers.

It's not a book on how to make money. It's in a small business niche.

Could you give some more information, like topic, kind of book, marketing strategy?

Non fiction book in a small business niche. Marketing strategy includes guest appearances on podcasts, catchy title and concept, Amazon ads but most of all an easy to read well written book. People frequently share it and gift it

That's an unusual and excellent outcome! But congratulations for your success!

I've published three non-fiction books. The first was self published and got noticed by Entrepreneur press. They published the second two.

Despite being a bestseller in the business category, I've made probably only about $30,000 from them. I've been told that mine is also an atypical result as most authors make next to nothing.

Despite having plenty of things to write about, I've since decided there are much better uses for my time.

If you want to give hope you'll have to give a lot more detail than that. I might even say evidence.

Not wanting to dox myself of attract competition. It's in a small business niche. A catchy title and concept was key.

i'm very skeptical of this claim!

ok!

i feel like if i made $2M from book sales, then i'd just ignore the skeptics like me. go look at your bank account instead of trying to jab back.

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