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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

#451

Post by ellegriffin »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #205
dovrce wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Epic of Gilgamesh is roughly 3800-years-old. One has to wonder though if something has survived as an artifact only because there were a zillion copies of the then "Steven King's" latest, or if it truly was great and preserved with care by those with taste. You have to wonder if the then Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs down compared to other contemporary works.

I think about this all the time when it comes to archeological finds. How do we know this wasn't one of their worst works?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#452

Post by ellegriffin »

bombcar wrote: post #130

The "revenue earned self-published" is the key take-away - if you can sell 10k books a year (either 10 1k books or one 10k book) you can have a moderately comfortable income, especially if you have other work (or your book can come out of other work - thing books that are mainly compilations of blog posts or articles).

Yes! Exactly! It seems doable....

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#453

Post by cortesoft »

coldtea wrote: post #417
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…

> The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors. Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND l…

> So it's much much harder to make a living as an author today than in 1921.

And much easier to make it as a television screen writer.

The mediums have shifted

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#454

Post by hardtke »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #175
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…

Vonnegut I remember writing somewhere that radio and especially TV had killed the market for short stories in magazines, which were a great way for authors to get started. Here's some other things he said on making a living as a writer: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vonnegut-writing-i... Note that he got paid $750 for his first short story in 1949! I don't know how many places are paying first time author…

I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak in the 1990's and I remember his saying something along the lines of "I am one of the 100 people that are able to make a decent living writing fiction"

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#455

Post by ellegriffin »

kbenson wrote: post #258

> But could fiction do the same? That is a yet unanswered question. There are a few serial fiction writers on Substack—but none are paid. 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). I think those statistics are extremely suspect. I subscribe…

Thank you so much! These are excellent case studies. Will look into all of these.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#456

Post by Semiapies »

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…

From TFA: "There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month".

  $1000 * 12
But I get that HN isn't a place for usefully discussing this sort of issue, because it's packed with the people who are absolutely certain they'll be one of those 25.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#457

Post by ellegriffin »

vidarh wrote: post #327

A large part of this is that writing a book is easy. Writing a good book is hard. Writing a good book and getting it packaged well is harder . Writing a good book and getting it packaged well and marketed well is really high effort. I've published a novel. It's part of a series (#2 is being proof-read; link in my profile). Of the time I've spent on this project, writing is the smallest. I've found I can churn out ~20…

Agreed.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#458

Post by crazygringo »

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…

But... many movies and TV shows from 30 years are also still immensely enjoyable today. Or heck, from 70 years ago.

Why do you think movies and TV somehow age more than books?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#459

Post by jholman »

Rerarom wrote: post #366
bluGill wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closer to the later for most authors. Though every few dozen years there is another Harry Potter that everyone in the world buys and reads. For most you need to target those voracious readers and what they are willing to pay for - but be ever on the lookout as to how you can jump to the Harry Potter world where everyone buys your books. Harry Potter was good (in the first few anyway), but if you like that type of thi…

Please name one.

If you particularly wanted books that "didn't make it", I don't know anything about that. But maybe you just wanted books that are like HP but better than HP.

I read the first few HP, and thought they were dreadful, and thus never read the later ones, so maybe I'm not the person you want advice from, but here are some recommendations of novels/novelists in the same genre (fantasy novels, written for children, that hold up for adults):

Nearly anything by Dianna Wynne Jones, but I particularly enjoyed The Lives of Christopher Chant, Archer's Goon, and of course Howl's Moving Castle.

Susan Cooper's famous Dark is Rising series. Half the series is more normal-kid (starting with Greenwitch), half is more special-magic-kid (starting with The Dark is Rising).

Garth Nix's Old Kingdom, starting with Sabriel.

While China Mieville is very much not a children's author (really! don't buy a random mieville book for your young niece/nephew, really don't!), Un-Lun-Dun is an amazing book in this genre.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#460

Post by richardwhiuk »

bluGill wrote: post #385
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…

You could write the novel beforehand and then just release it month by month.
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