Writing books is not really a good idea

> The real success story here is N. K. Jemisin who was earning $5,068/month publishing fiction on Patreon before she received a traditional publishing contract and went that route instead. But she is the only real case study we have.

In particular, this line rings false, considering Wildbow is currently publishing fiction at $6000/month and has been steadily growing for years. Taylor Fitzpatrick[1] is publishing fiction at a per-story rate, which is harder to calculate a strict number for, but could easily be up there. SenescentSoul[2] is making at least $5000/month, but doesn't show the actual number on their patreon. I could go on; although I've read Wildbow's work in the past, I've never heard of the other two, and just found them by searching "writing" on patreon.

Of course, none of these are strictly writing novels: Wildbow is a web serial author; SenescentSoul appears to be the same, and the other is a short story author. This is perhaps why the author (intentionally? unintentionally?) seems to have left such a large area of successful fiction writing out of their article.

However, not mentioning the huge success of self-published LitRPG, romance, web serials, etc. in an article that is centered around positing the question "Could the creator economy work for fiction authors?" seems like a rather large oversight to me. None of these people mentioned are making the prized $10k USD/month that the author holds so highly (although [2] might be), but they're all extremely successful even relative to the world of traditionally published novels, and they're far from the only examples.

I understand that this author is quite focused on novels specifically, but self-published novels from romance/litrpg authors can also be quite successful; this is much harder to find numbers for than patreon-based authors, of course, so this is only an anecdote.

[0] https://www.patreon.com/wildbow [1] https://www.patreon.com/imogenedisease [2] https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul

Harry Potter was good (in the first few anyway), but if you like that type of thing there are ton of much better books that never made it.

Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons.

If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...

I published a novel in late november, and it's sales are low but steady to slowly increasing. A key aspect is that to "survive" past the initial bump you need to invest effort into building word of mouth and getting reviews, and that is a slow process. The people I got to help with marketing even actively advised against doing much marketing before we had a base of reviews, because they apparently find it almost impossible to get positive ROI on Amazon ads until there's a reasonable number of reviews.

I intentionally started writing a series, and everything I've seen and heard suggests series rarely even start selling decently until at least the 3rd volume, because people hold off to see if it's worth investing time in.

I'd advise against considering what happens to "most" books, because most books gets no marketing, no proper cover design, no effort in writing blurbs, no effort to push the books over time.

> I've made that as a pitching coach and umpire throughout my career, why not hope for it as a pitcher?

Writer/editor are fundamentally different roles than novelist. In the former, the people with the up front capital already know what they want, at least in a more concrete sense than "something that makes us more money than we put in." The focus is on selling whatever makes them money, whether it's a product or a trade publication or ad space. They don't really need the best, they just want to avoid the worst so that the writing/editing doesn't bring down the rest of the product, magazine, marketing, etc. That's where most of that $100k comes from: the value writing/editing brings to the rest of the operation that is actually generating the cash.

As a novelist, you are the product. Your story & marketability, the quality of your prose, how closely you follow the cultural zeitgeist, and so on become the dominant factors. Instead of derisking the money making part of the operation, you the risky money making operation. Such roles are almost universally on a bimodal income distribution. Major league pitchers get paid anywhere from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions but the next run down is the AAA leagues, which pay at most $50k a year. There are far more people making $100k/year supporting the pitchers than there are pitchers making $100k.

Think of it from an economics perspective (rough math here): according to [1] "only 690 million print books were sold in 2019 in the U.S. in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction." Lets assume physical to e-book sales are 1:1 (they're not) so a total of 1.4 billion books sold. Let's assume the average price per book is $20 (a tad high). There were 17.1 million new cars sold that year, lets assume at an average of $30k each (a tad low). That's a total market of $28 billion vs $513 billion dollars. Assuming 30% cost of goods sold for the former and 70% COGS for the latter that's $21 billion left over for the novelists or $153 billion gross profit from selling the cars.

Now there's certainly lots of room for you to make $100k/year as a novelist in that $28 billion but that is for all novelists in the US and - I suspect - academic textbook authors are probably making a disproportionate chunk of that money while inflating the average price per book. My assumption is very little of that $153 billion goes to writers but that number includes over 16,000 dealerships, all of whom need their copy for sales and marketing. The average dealership in the US sells 500-1000 cars a year with upwards of $10-20 million per year revenue so $100k/year for a writer would be a drop in the bucket for them, especially with freelancers. Multiply that by all the other industries and the numbers grow to overwhelming amounts: if 0.01% of $21+ trillion in general industry spending (going by GDP) goes to writers in a gaussian distribution, there's going to be a lot more $100k/year authors in that group than among novelists.

[1] https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...