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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

#471

Post by floren »

munificent wrote: post #383
gurkendoktor wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 write…

> 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.

This is something I've thought about a lot lately. It seems like if you show any hint of artistic talent or skill in some craft, everyone around you starts encouraging you to monetize it. You draw so well, you should have a patreon. You made some nice soap, you should sell that at the farmer's market. You picked up enough leatherworking to make a wallet, when are you opening the etsy store? I don't think that's right.

edit: nobody tells the person who changes their own oil "oh wow you should be a mechanic!", but god forbid you write a short story without submitting it to The New Yorker :)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#472

Post by nimih »

sidibe wrote: post #62
AS_of wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a great place for that! Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Deci... There are probably a lot of single people here that would benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem) We all "know" the algos. But…

I'm always surprised when people talk about rereading books. I get absolutely nothing out of books I've already read. Do you also rewatch TV series?

It depends heavily on the genre, at least for me. So-called genre fiction--mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, that sort of thing--really doesn't hold up to rereading, since the whole draw is, by and large, the setting and the plot. I still remember the solution at the end of Murder on the Orient Express, and I still know how Liu Cixin's theory of galactic civilizations is going to play out in the Three Body Problem, so there's not really a draw to reread those books: the language is serviceable but not exciting (at least in the translated TBP), there's no real symbolism/inter-textuality to dig into on further readings, &c. However, I still find myself rereading favorites like Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick every few years: the jokes are still funny, the language is still beautiful, and it's still enjoyable to ponder the references and metaphors the authors are (possibly) building.

Your comparison to television is a pretty good one, honestly. I've never really rewatched an episode of a serial television series (other than trying to refresh my memory when picking up a new season), since there usually isn't any substance there beyond the plot and characters, but I'll happily rewatch movies if the directing, cinematography, and/or acting are compelling enough.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#473

Post by coldtea »

cortesoft wrote: post #453
coldtea wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Well, it's not the same thing, just because it still involves writing and fiction.

That there are new jobs of a different kind is not much consolation when one likes the old jobs.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#474

Post by yesenadam »

swyx wrote: post #381
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 :)

> but it had issues

What were they? (Particularly if they're still issues)

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#475

Post by kbenson »

ellegriffin wrote: post #455
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.

So, interestingly, from being on the readers side and seeing how authors promote their works, and from actually brainstorming this with one of the above authors for a bit when they were first starting out, there's a clear path that can work if there's a ready audience to hook with your work for free.

1) Publish your work for free, either on a site dedicated to that genre like royalroad.com or some other way as long as you can get people invested and checking regularly for your work.

2) Be consistent and frequent in your output. More than once a week is good, but if you only publish something once a week, make sure you always have something to publish and don't skip ever. Buffered content is your friend.

3) A lot of the free readers (or even Patreon subscribers) don't expect book publisher quality editing. In fact, many will jump at the option to help you by being a proof-reader and let you know of typos, or weird sounding phrases, etc. I suspect many would prefer more often releases/more content as a trade for slightly worse editing. Some of those I posted above release 5-6 chapters a week, and typos are common. Nobody seems to mind.

4) I'm convinced as a reader the biggest thing that gets people to subscribe/be a patron is advance chapters. From my experience, you get to a really exciting part of the story, and want to know what happens, and from author blurbs letting people know there at 10-20 future chapters available from subscribers, it's hard to resist dropping $5-$10 to know there's a significant chunk of story you immediately get. It's also very hard to stop paying knowing you have a few weeks to wait before the free chapters catch up to where you were just reading.

5) Some authors take chunks past chapters off free sites a while after so they can publish on Amazon as a book (after editing passes, etc, so usually there's at least a few weeks past the current chapter). This probably synergizes well with people that find the author from their books and subscribe to read the latest one as it's written (e.g. Matt Dinniman for me). I'm not sure if you lose a lot of organic free reader growth though, and whether it's better or worse probably depends on how well your books do on Amazon (whether traditional or Kindle Unlimited).

Finally, I'm pretty sure there's a subreddit for authors that covers a lot of this and you can mine people there for information. I'm not sure what fiction genre's this extends to well, but I imagine most pulpy things which people like to consume in large quantities qualify. For example, I'm not sure of a romance webnovel site like royalroad.com, but I bet it exists, and I bet there are people on Patreon making good money from patrons because of it.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#476

Post by hooande »

floren wrote: post #468
vidarh wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, for scifi, the SFWA requires a market to offer 8 cents a word or more, I believe, to be considered a "professional market" for the sake of counting towards membership criteria. That means most of the bigger scifi magazines are exactly at 8c (a very few above) Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld for example, last I checked).…

> the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories. That's surprising; I subscribed to Asimov's for about 6 months back in 2015 and based on what I was reading, I assumed they must be publishing everything that comes in the door.

lol no, I wish. Good luck getting into any of the magazines mentioned in the grandparent post. The relative quality is debatable, but what you see is genuinely the best of thousands of submissions

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#477

Post by kevinmchugh »

floren wrote: post #468
vidarh wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, for scifi, the SFWA requires a market to offer 8 cents a word or more, I believe, to be considered a "professional market" for the sake of counting towards membership criteria. That means most of the bigger scifi magazines are exactly at 8c (a very few above) Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld for example, last I checked).…

> the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories. That's surprising; I subscribed to Asimov's for about 6 months back in 2015 and based on what I was reading, I assumed they must be publishing everything that comes in the door.

I can imagine they get a lot of submissions that are just absolutely wrong for their editorial purpose. There's a lot of hobbyist authors online who would love to get paid, and I bet a lot of them are submitting their fanfiction (or narrowly reworked fanfiction) to a magazine with no interest in it.

Also probably many people probably submit the same pieces over and over.

Btw if you find an outlet that seems to have no standards but also pays, the right thing to do is to stop being a subscriber and start being an author.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#478

Post by moron4hire »

mritchie712 wrote: post #364
peterarmstrong wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :) 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 essential…

My wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub!

DIY publishing through Amazon is dead easy. Source: I once packed up my blog into a Word doc and had it published on Amazon in a couple of hours one night.

Naturally, I did it to win a bet. But the bet was designed to teach a friend of mine a lesson, that he was using the unknown difficulty of self-publishing as an excuse to not work on his book. He finally stopped procrastinating and finished his manuscript within a few months.

The hard part of selling books is the selling part. I similarly goaded my own wife into writing a series of sci-fi novels and we (pre-pandemic) had been going to book fairs to sell them. We maybe did two a year, mostly just for fun. We usually sell enough to cover our expenses (printing fees, booth fees, gas to travel, food while we're out). But along the way, she's earned a handful of loyal readers.

We've never put a lot of effort into it, but she sells a few hundred copies a year of her three books. It's not bad, especially for a vanity project. There is a clear line pointing from "effort in selling" to "books sold".

Most publishers these days won't even look at you unless you already have an active readership. We've met a lot of other authors at the book fairs, seeing the same people every year. The ones who have publishing deals are having to do all their own selling, just like us, but didn't get to choose their own cover and are giving up a huge chunk of cash to the publisher. For what? So they can say they're "published"? Meh.

I've seen a lot of people approach their projects as, "If you build it, they will come". I'm sorry, but that's just not a thing. The movie from which that quote comes from (Field of Dreams) is about a literal miracle. You have to sell the book. You have to get out and beat pavement, whether you get a publishing deal or not. So if you have to do the work, you might as well keep the money.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#479

Post by panopticon »

la_fayette wrote: post #433
markwisde wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax). Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you e…

Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.

It's hard to tell based on the material available on the website, but it looks like their book isn't physical. If you go through the checkout process, it doesn't gather shipping information. I assume the <$1 figure was just the Stripe transaction costs.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#480

Post by moron4hire »

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…

> Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today.

That is definitely survivorship bias. Do you have any idea how many books are created in a year, even before eCommerce? The vast majority of them are crap.

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