Making a living by writing is as rare as being a billionaire | Hacker News Reader

Making a living by writing is as rare as being a billionaire

theintrinsicperspective.com

60 pointsLuc23 comments

The claim of the title turns out to be significantly narrower when you get into the text. Still, it offers some good points. The following is perhaps what’s most relevant to Hacker News.

> In this, as Elle has pointed out before, the economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.

Is this true for technical books? I can't imagine that a book like Practical Malware Analysis or The Rootkit Arsenal would ever be "wildly popular".

If publishers like O'Reilly were operating on this model then why would they ever publish any books on any niche subject? Surely they would only ever publish books targeted to a mass audience.

The assumption of one book per five years isn't reasonable for a full-time writer making their living off of writing.

Most full-time authors that I know of write more like a book per year. Averaging more than one per year isn't uncommon. They also have a large back catalog of books that each trickle in some royalties to supplement what they're making off of new books.

I don't know many people who make a living a writing, but the ones that I do know rarely make a living from writing books.

I agree with that - those who live of writing who wrote few books are likely the highest sellers.

But that said, in the UK the average full time writer earns less than minimum wage from their writing (but have higher than average household income)

Title does not follow through with article.

The author defines "making a living" as making 4x the median salary, and further ONLY considers authors of books. There are MANY ways to make an actual living wage off of writing that have nothing to do with book authorship. Blogs, newsletters, journalism, opinion columns, and screenwriting, for example.

It also assumes that big hits are the only ways for an author to make a living. I remember a blog where a fantasy author (https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...) advocated the opposite - of focusing on series and creating a range of small royalty streams that pay the bills. The mindset is entirely different as it is much closer to treating the author's oeuvre as a portfolio of assets rather than looking for the one big hit.

Yeah, it also fails to acknowledge that self-publishing is a thing and you can make a nice career writing straight-to-epub books and print on demand books. Amazon allows people to bypass traditional publishers.

It's exceedingly rare to do well from self publishing too.

It's not 500 out of 300M rare. I have a co-worker who could support himself entirely on sales from a children's book he self-published.

It really depends on what you consider "making a living" or "could support themselves". In the UK the mean income for all full time writers of books - pulled up massively by the big successes - was below minimum wage last time I saw a proper survey. The top 10% pulls in about half the total income for that group in the UK.

Most of the full time writers of books would not be able to afford being full time if not for partners (their average household income is above the UK average), and/or supplementing with other income, such as writing articles or doing additional work copy-editing/proofreading etc.

So while it may be a bit hyperbolic to say it's as rare as being a billionaire, the profession is also "subsidised" heavily by partners etc. making it possible for people to hold a low paying job that they wouldn't hold otherwise, and the number of people who earn a wage they'd be willing to live on without higher paying partners, is absolutely tiny.

I've self-published two novels and working on the third and they've sold considerably better than average yet couldn't cover what I spent on takeaway last year (to be fair, I spent an exorbitant amount on takeaway; the kind of money people on minimum wage would be aghast at, and I'm being better this year, but the point is I could without even noticing because it was a rounding error). Your co-worker is a runaway success. And that's amazing, and he should be proud. It's also an extreme outlier.

But to go back to start, it's also subjective and down to what you consider enough that it could "support you".

Put another way: Even if I had a NY Times bestseller, if it was "only" towards the lower end of the chart, I'd lose my house if that was my only income. I can't afford to be "just" a NY Times bestselling author unless it's far up the chart, even if I could write well enough (if I could have multiple books on the lower end at the same time, maybe, but most authors don't write that fast)

And the vast majority of authors are nowhere near selling at that level. I know or have a good idea of the income of several full time authors who regularly are on the bestseller lists that earn incomes that, sure, technically could support me, but that is way below what they could earn in other jobs given their skills. I work in tech, and I know the earnings of one very successful UK author with a past working in tech, with a multitude of awards, 20+ years of published backlog, who still earn less than me. That's not a "haha" - I'd love to be in his position and feel I could afford to write full time, and it's amazing to have stuck it out to get to that level.

Now consider that most authors don't write more than 1-3 books in their lifetime. Some because it's all they want. Most because they don't get sales. "Any" sales.

You may have noticed I've added the qualifier "of books". I did that for a reason: If you want to make a living writing, journalism (still badly paid), magazines, or copywriting etc. are much better paid. If we include that, then the claim is definitely hyperbole. They're still on average not well paid, but the average person who writes words for a living in the UK are pretty much earning an average salary. Most would still make, on the basis that a well-earning author is overall going to be quite smart and well educated, make more in most other jobs they'd be suitable for.

To go back to the start, it's about what the author of the article said. And the author of the article made the claim that you aren't making a living wage as an author unless you (a) are working for a known publishing house, and (b) are making over $250K a year. It's so absolutely absurd on face value that it's not even worth discussing further at length. You don't even have to do any real research to know that this is incorrect.

> focusing on series and creating a range of small royalty streams that pay the bills.

This is a variation on some valuable business guidance I got a long time ago: it's better to get one nickle each from 100 sources than to get 100 nickles from one source. It spreads risk (losing 1 out of 100 nickle sources won't break you) and it also prevents any source from having too much control over you.

I'll add to that and say that a very large portion of the best authors likely built an online audience long before they published any books. It was the existing fame that made their books sell rather than a book making them famous.

Somehow I find this proposition surprising and even shocking because it seems to assume that the best authors are young enough to have started their careers within the past 15-20 years when the internet has actually been relevant enough that one could build an audience there first.

I mean, maybe it's true, and I'm just stuck reading books by the old farts.

Also, getting a book to be a “bestseller” can be planned [0], further limiting the article’s statement that “in some cases, an author might get a small advance but make a lot of money via a surprise bestseller.”

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...

Oversupply jobmarkets are brutal and exploitive towards the naive and try to keep that naivete going to guarantee an Oversupply of exploitable workers sticking around in a steady stream. Up next an interview with Scarlett Weinstiensson.

Writing, music, game design, acting, fashion. All the nice things attracting all the bad people to profit from humanity needing all the nice things to make life bearable.

Another way to put it is that the most gentle among us are attracted to industries run by the most brutal among us.

This was the whole premise of Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' album.

I don't think that's accurate. At least, I personally know a few people who make their living by writing. I don't personally know any billionaires.

But the thing the successful authors I know have in common is that they don't use only one way to publish and sell their writing. None of them only write books, for instance.

What they do is take a piece of writing they've done and repackage and sell it in a number of different forms in a number of different places. Sections of a book can be published separately on web sites, for instance. When I've talked with these authors, it becomes clear that selling the same writing multiple times in multiple channels is a key part of making a living doing it.

Making a living from book sales alone, by writing books is as rare as a billionaire.

Still. Quite sad to think about.

Of course, many writers use writing as part of a greater hustle, and there are of course also movie deals and other adaptations.

And this excludes journalism, tabloids, copywriting, technical writing, writing for hire, short-form writing, screenwriting, playwriting, and many others.

In fact, I think writers focusing exclusively on books is quite rare. I expect there are many more people making a living through writing alone than there are billionaires.

Indeed. Most books are written by people who are journalists in their day job, from what I see.

On the floor below me is an army of technical writers. All making a living.

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