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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

#381

Post by swyx »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #315

One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.) Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and e…

totally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week continuing to market it and to serve the book community)

would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#382

Post by dionidium »

dale_glass wrote: post #297
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #254

Unlike movies/TV shows, books tend to 'age' relatively slowly. Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today. Not only that, but there are a literal ton of books out there that have been read by hundreds of thousands of people and reviewed extensively. 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 sign…

It depends a lot on what books. Many technical books age extremely quickly. You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose. But even in literature there is timing, themes, references and fashion. You'd have a hard time writing Don Quixote today, because hardly anyone reads chivalric romances anymore, so the vast majority of people wouldn't know what you're even p…

> You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose.

I think even here it depends on what you're trying to get out of it. I wouldn't read K&R to get the latest information about how to write modern C, but I read that book once every 5 years or so because there are timeless aspects at its core. This is even more true of a book like SICP.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#383

Post by munificent »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #257
munificent wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Great comment! > 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=4m2…

It's a little different. I think there has long been a thing were many people dreamed of spending a fraction of their retirement writing their memoirs, or something along those lines. It was a dream in roughly the same category as owning a sailboat or moving to the islands. Kind of a "one of these days" leisure aspiration.

Today—because we are all so intensely culturally obsessed with financial success—"being a writer" means writing stuff right now and doing it well enough to make a living off of. Where before, many dreamed of writing as a thing to do after they've earned most of their wealth, now it is a means to it.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#384

Post by ineedasername »

Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month

I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months, even for authors that I absolutely love. With my reading habits, I couldn't even afford to pay that much across the volume of books I read if most of my favorite authors switched to such a model.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#385

Post by bluGill »

naomiajacobs wrote: post #337

The idea of charging per-chapter (yes, I know it isn't a new model, Charles Dickens, etc) is interesting for: - the restrictions it'll impose on the authors - it means authors will have to know the entire plot up-front and can't redo or rearrange chapters - the pressure to have every chapter end with a cliff-hanger or something else to get the user to buy the next chapter - the effect on the reader (will people finis…

There is opportunity to rearrange things, but it is limited. You need to tell your readers what happened, and make sure the plot works for both readers who accept the change and those who don't. I'm guessing it works best to limit this to corrections ("last week I said that Joe did X, but of course he died last month - it was supposed to be Joe's cousin Frank"), but it is an area that I doubt it well explored to see how much readers will accept.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#386

Post by jogjayr »

snet0 wrote: post #360
jogjayr wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a house from a homeowner gives no money to the original builder, or the first human being to inhabit that piece of land. Do you feel guilty about getting shelter without paying the price of admission?

I think this is a disingenuous comparison. Builders get paid to build houses. Authors, to my knowledge, do not frequently get paid to write books, they get paid when they sell books. When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything. When you resell a book, you are (possibly) denying the author a sale.

> When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything

You're denying the builder a sale of a new house.

Re-selling books is already legal. You bought a physical item, not the right to use the item. Ownership implies the right to dispose of the item as one wishes. You asked whether it was morally correct. I was showing you that many other things are frequently resold with no moral implications.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#387

Post by chiefalchemist »

How many apps do really well?

How many albums do really well?

How many movies do really well?

While the outliers (read: successful) are as sexy as a gold rush, they are rare. That's not to say you should not try. Do what you must. Someone has to be the next outlier.

The reality is, the combo of quality and quantity is a unicorn. You have to have something exceptional in some way. The scrapheaps of history say that's easier said than done.

Put another way, in order to get to that golden 1,000 fans at $100 per year, how many months will you have to publish? 24? 36? More?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#388

Post by rland »

Maybe we should restructure our value system a bit to value writing a book more.

The takeaway from this article is "writing books doesn't produce value, so less people should do so." Everyone agrees (or professes to agree) that books have value. So why don't they have value? We can decide, we're not slaves to the market economy.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#389

Post by ska »

ellegriffin wrote: post #285
jimbob45 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You two make excellent points. Although the author seems greedy for wanting a 100k salary, that 100k is going to feel closer to 50k for reasons outside of their control.

I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k salary would be possible. I've made that as a writer and editor throughout my career, why not hope for it as a novelist? (or at least try for it!). It might not turn out that way in the end, but better to reach high than low!

> I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k salary

I don't think it's greedy either, but it's also obviously past the point of "can I make a living doing this". After all, median individual income is less than half of that.

"a living" and "the kind of living I want" are different things, obviously.

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