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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

#441

Post by ellegriffin »

plorkyeran wrote: post #252
armorproof wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they didn't fit a search criteria? Got examples we can see?

A few I'm aware of: 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

Thank you!!!! This is very helpful. Looks like they aren't tagged as fiction which is why I couldn't find them. I'll definitely dig into these as some amazing case studies!

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#442

Post by ellegriffin »

narrator wrote: post #305
matsemann wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Martian was released one chapter at the time. Same with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. As for the last one, it's felt that it was written as it was going along, with certain changes the author normally would have gone back to fix. Like stuff ending up not mattering, or certain inconsistencies in the world building. But even for larger book series this happens. Like Wheel of Time, one can in an earli…

The Martian is probably the best example of an author really embracing the 21st century. You give the text of the book away for free on a website and make money off the people who want the audiobook, the movie rights, the kindle, etc. In the 21st century, entertainment is free, attention is expensive, so you have to give away your free entertainment to get attention and then sell the entertainment in more rarified me…

Yes! I actually interviewed Andy Weir for another piece for this exact reason. https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#443

Post by DVassallo »

spookybones wrote: post #328
DVassallo wrote: post #172

As an example of that middle ground mentioned in the article, I spent 2 weeks writing a short technical book about AWS, self-published it, and sold 6,587 copies and $133,030 in sales in 1.5 years.

I've seen a few success cases like this with technical works written over a short period of time. I think it's an achievement distinct from fiction publishing because you're tapping into a lucrative market and answering a need. Congrats nonetheless on the success. How much do you charge for a copy, and how much marketing do you do?

The price is $25, but I’ve experimented between $15 and $38.

I spent about $8K on ads (Reddit) but most of my marketing was organic from my Twitter account initially, and later it was mostly word of mouth.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#444

Post by ellegriffin »

eslaught wrote: post #236

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…

It's interesting because reading is so subjective. I think I've only ever liked a "best selling" book once or twice, because I like things that are severely strange and that is not to commercial tastes. So it's hard to judge "quality" collectively. It's hard enough to judge "quality" individually!

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#445

Post by ellegriffin »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #238
eslaught wrote: post #236

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

Agree.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#446

Post by ALittleLight »

alphabet9000 wrote: post #432

move 100% of books to ebooks and make them as obnoxious as possible. start adding things like loot boxes. pay a dollar to read a TOP SECRET crucial bit to the storyline that you simply wont get the Full Book Experience (tm). give it Social (tm) capabilities. show indicators where everyone else is reading and allow comments on any sentence in the book. feature self facing cameras on the ebook so you can live stream yo…

Kindle let's you highlight or comment on any section of the book. Highlights are somewhat shared across readers in the sense that I will sometimes see a passage that the Kindle says has been highlighted "315 times" or some such number.

The popular highlight annotations always make me wonder how so many highlights came to collide on a single phrase. Do some people highlight a passage because it's been highlighted by many other people?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#447

Post by NullInvictus »

stakkur wrote: post #280
ghaff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be skeptical that more than a handful of self-published books sold more than 100K copies (if that).

I don't agree. Self publishing has not only arrived, in some genres it outsells trad pub books. One discussion: https://mashable.com/article/self-published-authors-making-a... From that article: "According to Amazon's 2019 review of its Kindle sales, there are now thousands of self-published authors taking home royalties of over $50,000, while more than a thousand hit six-figure salaries from their book sales last ye…

It wouldn't surprise me. In many genres, I'm not sure there is a huge difference in the product put out by traditional publishers vs. that put out by direct publishing.

I own a lot of books, and a sizable chunk is fiction. Maybe I'm just picking up the best, but it feels like the freely published ones have the same amount of advertising, editing, and type-checking as the traditionally published ones.

Which is to say - absolutely none. It feels like in many cases, traditional publishing has decided to play the same numbers-game as the self-publishers and have given up on adding quality after they receive the manuscript. Ironically this may be why they're receding under the waves. Commodities is a hard place to get rich.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#448

Post by ellegriffin »

toomuchredbull wrote: post #330

Hasn't this always been the case? It's like being a playwright or any artist really. A very few successful ones, and lots of people who do it as a hobby. Even some of the successful ones are only successful in death, not life.

This is true, the creative arts have always been volatile as a career choice. And it's true that some of those artists become successful as a fluke or as an accident of their death.

But it's also true that many of the successful creatives intended to be successful, or at least tried very hard to be, and those were the seeds that set up for some kind of "big break." For example, in the case of Dan Brown, one of the most successful authors to date, he scheduled his own press tour, booked his own interviews, sent out press releases, etc. And his early books actually did pretty well, selling about 10,000 copies each because of his promotional efforts.

Of course he went on to sell millions of copies, but I don't think he would have accidentally become a best seller without developing a platform for his work with those early novels.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#449

Post by cafard »

defen wrote: post #321
cafard wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides , I noticed the passage He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of the Rambler, the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them'. I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it: Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque in faucibus orci, Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia…

Did he ever write it, or is this the Fermat's Last Theorem of authorial metacommentary?

The latter, I suspect. I don't remember any note to it in R.W. Chapman's edition.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#450

Post by ellegriffin »

dovrce wrote: post #125
joebob42 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, for whatever it's worth the classic is already guaranteed to be culturally significant. Other people will have read it and you can talk to them about it, which can be a fun exercise and may not be true for whatever random book you could otherwise read.

Exactly, anything that has survived 100 or 1000 years is most likely worth your time

Maybe this is the case for books after all. None of our television shows or movies will make it this long.
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