251–260 of 630 posts
> 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). This is just incredibly wrong? There are quite a few web serial authors making more than $5000/month on Patreon.
Perhaps they didn't fit a search criteria? Got examples we can see?
> 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). This is just incredibly wrong? There are quite a few web serial authors making more than $5000/month on Patreon.
Perhaps they didn't fit a search criteria? Got examples we can see?
https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow $6000/month
https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth $6500/month
https://www.patreon.com/Magic_Smithing $10,000/month
https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon $17,000/month
https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba 4300 patrons with no $ listed but I've heard it's well over $10,000/month
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As to whether either form of self-publishing 'scam' or not, that depends on the expectations of the author. I think it's always been common to publish just to be published with no expectation of making money, hence the 'vanity'. But I have no data to back that up.
I have found my personal enjoyment of a book to be loosely correlated with the goodreads / B&N scores. This gives me at least some signal with which to choose a new book. So why should I, as a reader, try out a new author / book that hasn't been read by anyone else? I'm sure there are a few jewels out there, but I'm sure there are even more duds. Reading a book takes time, and I don't want to waste my time / money on random selections of books.
I've seen this type of analysis show up in a couple places, and I think it usually misses one critical factor: The vast majority of books frankly suck. I say this as an aspiring writer and as someone who (as part of that) has critiqued a bunch of books and parts of books. Even published books can be mediocre or bad. And this is even more true now in the days of self-publishing, where there's basically no barrier to p…
I would anecdotally counter argue that brand/audience/community building drives far more sales than the book quality
To be clear, when I say quality, I don't just mean this in the narrow sense of following the rules that writing teachers say you should. Harry Potter and Twilight both became popular because of some essence that they had---in my opinion, probably related to the world building and a certain difficult-to-describe experience of reading. Both of those books had "flaws" that were widely criticized. But they really hit home with their respective audiences.
Why did the first Harry Potter succeed, before J.K. Rowling had made a name for herself? In my opinion, it's because readers loved it so much that they went out and told their friends to read it. That's what I'm talking about when I mean quality---the irresistible quality that makes me fall in love with everything the author is doing.
Most books I see, even traditionally published ones, just don't have that.
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…
>Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? My assumption is almost certainly yes-- provided you made it through the big publisher gatekeepers. (And were able to parlay that into shelf space at the store.) - People probably read more books. There were fewer other demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I used to. - There was…
(1) The idea of the "midlist novel" or "paperback original" basically disappeared for a couple decades -- these are the old mass market paperbacks that you used to see all the time, about 4.25" by 7", that you almost never see anymore. (So, there was a kind of discounting: softcover books were a lot cheaper, even when adjusted for inflation.) There were authors who made a good living pumping out these midlist books at the rate of one or even two a year. The self-publishing boom has brought this back to a degree as ebook originals, although I've talked to more than a few ebook-first indie authors who insist they need to get out four or more books a year to make a living, so it's arguably harder for most. And of course that "most" is "most of those who manage to make a living that way," which is, well, not actually most!
(2) Short story rates used to be much, much higher than they are now when adjusted for inflation, to the point where there were people who made a successful living selling primarily -- or even exclusively! -- short fiction. I've never been able to get a good read, pun intended, on what happened here, other than a nebulous sense that readers' tastes just changed over the years (the "fewer other demands on attention" you mention was likely a big part of that), and those markets became less viable.
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…
> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is right there and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That random dude who wrote a series of posts on some…
> A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author.
The following is a bit tangential, but I keep thinking about it:
I was watching this video on the Barnum effect recently, which basically says that people are likely to believe in the accuracy of vague descriptions of their personality (think horoscopes; "Libras need security").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw&t=4m23s
The super-vague personality assessment, which was tailored to describe as many people as possible, included the wish for writing a novel (at 4m23s). That's how common this desire is/was? I wonder if the modern version of it would say "you have considered opening up on YouTube".
I think those statistics are extremely suspect. I subscribe to a few fiction authors on Patreon, and there's a few I did subscibe to but don't any more. I know of at least 4-5 fiction authors making a lot of money, like $10k+/mo ($15k+/mo in some cases) writing fairly niche content (litrpg and/or xianxia type work).
Then, when they get enough chapters for the current long-running fiction together, they bunfle it into a book and release on Kindle Unlimited, as an additional source of income.
Here's some examples:
- https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul - 2163 patrons as of now, minimum tier is $2.50/mo, but I suspect most people are paying $5 since that gives access to all advance chapters and not just some, and you can read delayed chapters on royalroad.com. So, probably somewhere between $4k and $8k a month, and this is their side hustle while in college I think.
- https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels - 1393 Patrons. There is a $1/mo option, but various tiers from $3/mo to $10/mo give you up to 50 advance chapters from where it's publishes for free on royalroad.com.
- https://www.patreon.com/jdfister - Page says they are making $4,116/mo from 517 patrons, similar situation as above with royalroad.com and advance chapters, as a point towards how much to expect the above people are making.
- https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth - $12,753/mo from 1,886 subsribers. Same situation as above with free publishing on royalroad.com and advance chapters.
- https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL - 3,317 patrons, my guess is they are making well above $5k/mo.
- https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon - $17,297 from 2,403 patrons. Similar as above. Books showing up on Kindle Unlimited.
These are just some people I actually read or read at some point in the past for a while, not a bunch I searched out that includes the top people. This is an answered question, IMO. If random web serials I'm reading are making this much money, I suspect there's a large amount of people making money this way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re-reading Pop-Psy and Airport literature is not the recommended reading. How about reading Hayek, Strauss for second time? How about reading man's search for meaning for the third time? You re-read great works, not NYT best shiller! (sic).
Why would you re-read them when you could read something new? Do you find you're actually getting a significant amount of value or joy from it the second time around? I ask because I think a good portion of the reason I enjoy software development is the absolute and total hatred I have for repetition in my life.
To your second point, to quote Prince, "There is joy in repetition".