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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

#271

Post by ghaff »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #256
ghaff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? My assumption is almost certainly yes-- provided you made it through the big publisher gatekeepers. (And were able to parlay that into shelf space at the store.) - People probably read more books. There were fewer other demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I used to. - There was…

You're right, from everything I've read, but there are two other interesting data points: (1) The idea of the "midlist novel" or "paperback original" basically disappeared for a couple decades -- these are the old mass market paperbacks that you used to see all the time, about 4.25" by 7", that you almost never see anymore. (So, there was a kind of discounting: softcover books were a lot cheaper, even when adjusted f…

In SF, at least, the magazine ecosystem associated with short stories has taken a pretty big hit which means new authors tend to not get into the genre that way. Of course, that's a bit self-referential because "Why did that ecosystem largely go away?" and the answer is that I'm not sure. Though I'll note that a fair bit is online these days so maybe new authors felt that was a better way to build their name.

I'd also note that some of the better SF short story writers these days tend to write in a mix of genres and often publish in places like The New Yorker.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#272

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ghaff wrote: post #89
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…

>Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? My assumption is almost certainly yes-- provided you made it through the big publisher gatekeepers. (And were able to parlay that into shelf space at the store.) - People probably read more books. There were fewer other demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I used to. - There was…

For fiction publishers were small houses with semi-amateur owners. They had an interest in what they were publishing, and if they liked an author they'd provide opportunities and invest in a career.

For example Penguin, which was launched in the 30s to provide cheap literary paperbacks for the mass market - a kind of cultural levelling up instead of dumbing down.

Now publishing houses are relatively small departments in unimaginably huge media corporations. Penguin is now part of Penguin Random House which is part of Bertelsmann, which also owns BMG (Bertelsmann Music), RTL TV/Radio in Europe, and Arvato, which is a general purpose corporate offering logistics, finance, IT.

So it's not a family-owned business any more. And it is much more business than family, with the usual MBA culture of targets, ROI, and the rest.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#274

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

jimbob45 wrote: post #203
ghaff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no benefits, including insurance. That $100K for a fairly to very successful author starts to look a lot like a pretty middling $60K or so income in an office job.

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.

To be clear, I never said that it was greedy to want a $100k salary. It's a perfectly rational and ordinary thing to want. I wondered about how reasonable to was to expect to attain that level of financial success in writing.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#275

Post by fencepost »

Content is not the problem, there's a ton of content out there (even more now that self publishing is so easy). Discovery and discoverability are both the big problem and where the industry has been - be it books or music.

This reminds me of indy musicians who are able to make a living by working with and for their relatively small groups of fans. It's the approach pushed by the Beatnik Turtle guys in a book 15 years ago (Indie Musician Survival Guide or something like that), but I know both published and unpublished authors who've done the same (notably a few books in Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe, which was then picked up by Baen).

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#276

Post by ellegriffin »

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…

This is so relatable. I hunt out obscure books, but that's because I love really old surreal things and that is not the norm. And that's why only a few books get all the sales. Because they are the ones that turn up on Goodreads/etc. It's not bad that it works out that way. It's just, how do those other authors turn up on goodreads?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#277

Post by Aerroon »

sltkr wrote: post #149

> 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 she missed a few authors in other categories. Examples: - https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow (over $6,000/month) - https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3814558 ($8,203 per chapter, roughly 1 chapte…

The author of The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound $5262/month: https://www.patreon.com/puddles4263

The author of Azarinth Healer has 3317 patrons at $2 minimum: https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL

Basically, you can look through RoyalRoad, Scribblehub, WebNovel, and various other places where quite a few people seem to find success. And that's not even mentioning the people who write novels and publish them on Amazon.

>None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.

They're not. Or at least were not. They wrote web novels and acquired success because people liked their stories.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#278

Post by sdenton4 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #256
ghaff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? My assumption is almost certainly yes-- provided you made it through the big publisher gatekeepers. (And were able to parlay that into shelf space at the store.) - People probably read more books. There were fewer other demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I used to. - There was…

You're right, from everything I've read, but there are two other interesting data points: (1) The idea of the "midlist novel" or "paperback original" basically disappeared for a couple decades -- these are the old mass market paperbacks that you used to see all the time, about 4.25" by 7", that you almost never see anymore. (So, there was a kind of discounting: softcover books were a lot cheaper, even when adjusted f…

Short fiction was being bought by magazines with large reader bases. Magazines have essentially died as a medium over the last twenty years, and fiction magazines were on their way out well before then.

If you've got a larger reader base and lots of competition, you can pay a lot for content. If you don't, you can't. The various TV subscription services are playing the same game that the sci-fi magazines used to; they pay a huge amount to produce content for recurring revenue, in fairly tight competition with the other streaming services to have the best stuff. (Think the expanse vs the mandalorian vs unbounded quantities of star trek.) The primary medium for consuming sci-fi changed as it went more mainstream, but also magazines died generally.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#279

Post by peter303 »

tarr11 wrote: post #23

I used to read a lot more books 10-20 years ago. Now, I mostly read books on vacation. I think I have an unspoken budget of “words read daily” that is consumed by work and my mobile devices.

I check a 100 books out of the library each year. But probably read just a third before they are due. Book greed!

Pre-covid I'd mainly use the new non-fiction shelf. Since our libraries arent open in person yet, I mainly get book ideas from book reviews like in HN or NYT.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#280

Post by stakkur »

ghaff wrote: post #46
stakkur wrote: post #30

"98 percent of the books that publishers released" is the key phrase, and it's nothing new; the sell rate in traditional publishing has always been quite low. But this does not include books sold in all the other self-publishing ways.

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 year."

And 'self publishing' encompasses more than just Amazon, etc. --there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of authors selling books directly online.

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