... because most non fiction books are wrote as a product to make money, not to communicate something useful to the reader?
Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
81–90 of 148 posts
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#82I enjoyed this, I thought it mostly made good points, and it linked to other articles I will look at. Yet.. I started reading a blogger who teaches how to make a successful blog, sells courses about it, etc. I soon realized her blog is just about her making money from promising to help you make money from your blog. A frighteningly vacuous operation. It seems a modern cousin to the old ad in magazines promising to re…
It's a fine line but ....
I've just bought an e-book online which is essentially about promoting your content online (so broadly aligned with what you're talking about). The book was relatively expensive but I'd say definitely worth it - contents are really well thought out and comes with a lot of supporting material. It also seems to have been pretty successful for the author.
But the irony is that if this wasn't something that had been promoted successfully online then I'm not sure that the author would have had the credibility to be able to sell a product of this type. Why should I believe you if you're not doing it yourself?
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#83Unfortunately most writers of fiction make next to nothing too. Writers often are not happy writing either (unlike painters and video artists who seem to have a whale of a time). Sadly I toiled for 8 years on a novel (while working a day job). It was a massive effort. It might be hard for people to understand but I felt I had to write it (i.e. writers curse). I wish I had spent all that time on studying programming e…
I relate with you - I also feel that my time would be better spent doing something else - but since 2014 I keep writing a (self-help?) book..
A constructive criticism: your cover doesn't stand out (and I'm being kind). If I had found your book randomly I would ignore it completely. I know this is totally subjective so take it with a grain of salt. Probably my cover will not be better.
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can relate a bit. I also wrote a book that quickly faded into obscurity. The biggest learning I had was I had no audience. I needed to build that first with blog posts or what not, THEN write the book. I’m surprised that’s not covered here in this article
Writing a book is like creating anything else. Whether you're writing a book, making music, producing goods or offering services, people need to actually try what you've made. This is why "advertising" is so important. Not necessarily traditional advertising, but some form of getting the word out about your amazing creation.
This is not the writer's job. It's what publishers are supposed to do.
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#85Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention. What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup. Contrast…
Authors have the same problem as musicians.
And app developers.
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#86On #1 “Signing with a publisher before you have leverage”, a bit from an episode[0] of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Founder’s Field Guide podcast stuck with me.
> If you ask questions of an industry and they won't tell you the answer, that's always a good sign that someone's getting very wealthy. In publishing, if you ask an author, ask any author, how much did it cost to print the book? What are your COGS? They will not know. Ask any literary agent that question and they'll think you're off your rocker. Ask any publisher to give you that information transparently and they will rip up your contract.
> So call the printers in China, pick your favorite book, find out some print brokers here in the US, and say, "What did the printing of those books cost? Send me a spreadsheet." And when they do and you find out that a $50 retail book cost about $2 to print, and you're going to get 10% of [off?] cover price, they're requiring that you order 5,000 for your own list and they're going to give you a quarter of a million dollar advance, you realize that there's no way they've taken no risk at all.
Interestingly, the person speaking was in the restaurant business… There’s quite a bit of insight in that episode.
[0] https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/20135760/kokonas-know-...
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#87Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention. What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup. Contrast…
The thing is that authors are too weak. They get maybe 10% of what is being made off of their work, probably much less. The publishing companies have strong leverage and can essentially extort money from the authors - they can say either you publish with us, or just put it back to your drawer and forget.
It is now a bit easier to self publish, but still you are going to get pittance.
In terms of music, as when artists realised to can just sidestep labels and publish themselves, the shops started using their advantage to take almost the whole pie - things like Spotify pay next to nothing for streams.
It's just that artists are somehow not able to get together and force fair terms on whatever it is in the upstream, because they don't have money and any power. All they can do is to pull out their art, but there is 10x artists believing they can make it despite being scammed and they sign up.
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing a book is like creating anything else. Whether you're writing a book, making music, producing goods or offering services, people need to actually try what you've made. This is why "advertising" is so important. Not necessarily traditional advertising, but some form of getting the word out about your amazing creation.
This is not the writer's job. It's what publishers are supposed to do.
They might disagree about that though.
From the outside it looks like they operate more like VCs, publish lots of books, see what sticks.
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#89I wrote a mediocre book on a popular programming language, and have gotten something like 10-20keuros. It took a year to write it, dunno how many hours, but probably not a very good hourly pay.
Re: Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you ^^ Well... If you enjoy reading maybe give my novel a go :) You do need a Kindle though /wouldn't recommend reading on a phone. But no hassles. Cheers
I was about to pick it up before I read this comment, any particular reason you don't recommend reading it a phone? that's generally the main way I read books so I was disappointed
Well, he said he can't recommend reading in general on a phone, which I can absolutely relate to. I can't even read anything longer than a normal article on my pc screen. It's just not enjoyable, for some reason, so I print out most papers I read.