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Writing books is not really a good idea

ellegriffin.substack.com

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Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#221

Post by ameister14 »

She's WAY off with her data, because she's only going classic publishing and ignoring the fact that the 'new and untested' serialization model has many successful practitioners and has for a long time. To get to NK Jemisin's 5k per month on Patreon, she went down past 22 writers on the graphtreon rank.

This part: There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).

That's just wrong. Pirateaba, Zogarth, Kosnik4, Shirtaloon, Wildbow, SenescentSoul and more make more than $5,000 a month - there are a bunch. There's a model here and it's working.

She didn't have success on Patreon because she didn't use a platform like webnovel, royalroad, her own website or something similar to release the free tier and link to the patreon like everyone successfully using patreon to pay for their writing does.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#222

Post by scottrogowski »

This is a manifestation of the general rule, "don't do things that scale" - at least if you're not the absolute best in the world at what you do.

Whenever something has high fixed and low marginal costs, this sort of winner-take-all distribution results. It's the exact same for indiegames, smartphone apps, or digital music.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#223

Post by andrewzah »

_joel wrote: post #54
andrewzah wrote: post #10

I feel like I'm one of the few people that still does purchase books. In 2020 & 2021 I bought music theory books from amazon + jazzbooks.com, and I had some Korean books imported by a friend. I have the space and bookshelves to house them though.

I don't think you're alone (I much prefer hardcopy) but possibly a dwindling demographic. One thing I have noticed is a decreased quality in print. I ordered some Rust books from Amazon (printed in house) and they basically seem to be ebooks that have been printed out, loads of whitespace in random areas and no signs of proof-reading. I don't think this helps the cause. Have been using Waterstones more recently but t…

"I ordered some Rust books from Amazon (printed in house) and they basically seem to be ebooks that have been printed out, loads of whitespace in random areas and no signs of proof-reading.

Yeah, there were multiple books that I read the reviews on amazon and people were complaining about the poor print quality. One of the Ted Greene books I got had a typo on the 2nd page in the table of contents, so I'm not sure if any proof reading is being done really.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#224

Post by armorproof »

lacker wrote: post #173

I feel like the article glosses over a key point: Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies. If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top -selling author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of this post is just assuming that they are…

You've reminded me of a Stephen King quote:

"While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one."

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#225

Post by coliveira »

ellegriffin wrote: post #114
salamandersauce wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Needs comparison to past years to be useful. Would also be helpful to compare books that came out in past year or few years to see how their sales trends. We also need to know what those books that are tracked are. Are they just in print titles? Or does it count 60 year old used biology textbooks for sale on Amazon no one wants? Or dated romance novels long past their prime? Because if those are included I'm not…

I did mention Alexandre Dumas as a case study in a previous article. Here's a snippet: "But there used to be another way. When Alexandre Dumas debuted The Count of Monte Cristo it was published as a feuilleton—a portion of the weekly newspaper devoted to fiction. From August 1844 to January 1846 his chapters were published in 18 installments for The Journal des Débats, a newspaper that went out to 9,000 to 10,000 pay…

But these authors were the 19th century version of Dan Brown. They made far less than a modern writer of similar success would make.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#226

Post by runevault »

sidibe wrote: post #62
AS_of wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a great place for that! Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... There are probably a lot of single people here that would benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem) We all "know" the algos. But…

I'm always surprised when people talk about rereading books. I get absolutely nothing out of books I've already read. Do you also rewatch TV series?

At different points in your life great stories can impact you in different ways. A simple example of one that could do this is The Road by Cormack McCarthy. I never had kids, but from what I've heard people who read it after becoming a parent are hit with far stronger emotions than those who don't have kids.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#227

Post by michaelt »

allturtles wrote: post #211
michaelt wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? I suspect there is now a middle ground that didn't exist before: In the 1970s you were either selling >10,000 copies, or you weren't a published author. 'Self-publishing' had a reputation as a scam to extract money from naive would-be authors. (I'm not sure what the academic book market was like at the time) It's only with the rise of ebooks and print-on-deman…

I don't think this is true. Niche and vanity presses have existed for a long time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_press#History ) Academic presses are also mostly very low volume. But academics don't expect to make a living from selling books (at least not directly - books help to establish reputations which can help you in the academic job market).

Vanity presses have indeed existed for a long time, but 50 years ago they were widely seen as a scam, rather than a realistic route to a writing career.

Vanity publishers would tell every author their work had great sales potential, then charge them $2000 for $500 worth of editing, printing and marketing - so authors would not only fail to make money, they would actually make a large loss.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#228

Post by armorproof »

lacker wrote: post #173

I feel like the article glosses over a key point: Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies. If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top -selling author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of this post is just assuming that they are…

Even in the video game development industry, the stars have to start somewhere. Notch himself started as a developer at King before moving on to Jalbum, then Wurm Online, before even starting Minecraft.

How else do you get the skills to create a masterpiece without starting on average titles for average pay?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#229

Post by bun_at_work »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #47

It would be interesting to have a timeseries plot of this sort of information. Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? Presumably there was some point at which the ease of making a living as an author peaked. This article suggests that time is in the past, but how far in the past? Has the absolute number of people who can make it as an author decreased, or just the relative fraction of the human popul…

There's an interesting book [1] that talks about how media changes over time. In short, new media forms replace older forms, pushing the older forms into niches. An obvious example is TV replacing radio, where radio used to be full of story-based content, but when that content moved to TV, radio became largely a niche form of media, focusing on music (and talk shows and weather etc).

This paints a picture of media forms along some continuum, which describes what you're looking for.

[1] Media Literacy, W. James Potter

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#230

Post by subpixel »

A friend of mine is a genre fiction writer and he makes good money the hard way: by getting his books optioned for film & tv.

He has no kids, is married to someone whose family has a lot of money, and spent twenty years achieving very little while writing a lot.

But he worked like a dog on his fiction and currently has multiple books in various levels of 'development' and a film set to be shot this year with a known leading actress (not known to me, but certainly to fans of the genre).

Ultimately I think some success can only be achieved by grinding, and not everyone is in a position to do that mentally or financially.

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