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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

#421

Post by PeterisP »

lacker wrote: post #173

I feel like the article glosses over a key point: Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies. If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top -selling author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of this post is just assuming that they are…

Reaching the top 1% of their profession still means 1k-10k copies sold, nothing you can make a living on.

As the article states, just 0.01 percent of books sell more than 100k copies, it's not enough to be a great author (not average, but better than 99% of them) you'd need to be somewhat exceptional (better than 99.99%) in order to earn a salary from books.

IMHO there's just too much competition, there so many more "top 1%+" authors in any genre than anyone can read, and given the economics described in this article, many of them don't even bother with publishing and offer their amazing writing for free.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#422

Post by steelframe »

zffr wrote: post #404
steelframe wrote: post #375

I put some effort into writing a sci-fi novel some years back, but I've since realized that the highest income-per-word ratio that I can hope to realize from my creative writing efforts has to come from my perf self assessment.

I’ve always wondered how much of a direct impact your self assessment actually has on your compensation adjustment. At least in my current job, I feel like my manager already has a ball-park idea of the Comp adjustment to give me. It feels like I would probably get more or less the same adjustment no matter what I write so long as I write something reasonable

Yeah, I hear you. I've always put considerable effort into my self assessments, trying to pick just the right words to make sure it's concise yet potent. However I had already made up my mind to leave my previous employer by the time perf review cycle had come around, so I decided to understate everything as much as I possibly could, basically eliminating all superlatives and just stating as flatly as I possibly could all of the things that happened.

My project was "late" -- as in, later than an arbitrary deadline everyone around me was trying to hoist on the project versus what I said all along the timeline was actually going to be. Eschewing metrics, I focused on "soft" issues like supporting members of my team who were struggling with the sudden work-from-home transition. I deliberately kept any mention of ARR, growth, or anything like that out.

I still ended up with an "exceeds expectations" rating. My management must have made up their minds ahead of time about that, because what I wrote for my self assessment didn't support it.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#423

Post by Mehdi2277 »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #412
mritchie712 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here. There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Lean…

There are smaller similar sites to wattpad that are easier to get viewers for new novels. I like tapas, but probably several more worth exploring (unsure if woopread is only translations or supports self publishing). I'd likely submit chapters to several sites at once as a new author just to increase chance of building an initial following.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#424

Post by markwisde »

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…

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 end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much.

Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the money. I actually made more money selling this self published book than with my big editing company.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#425

Post by spoonjim »

allturtles wrote: post #211
michaelt wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? I suspect there is now a middle ground that didn't exist before: In the 1970s you were either selling >10,000 copies, or you weren't a published author. 'Self-publishing' had a reputation as a scam to extract money from naive would-be authors. (I'm not sure what the academic book market was like at the time) It's only with the rise of ebooks and print-on-deman…

I don't think this is true. Niche and vanity presses have existed for a long time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_press#History ) Academic presses are also mostly very low volume. But academics don't expect to make a living from selling books (at least not directly - books help to establish reputations which can help you in the academic job market).

"Vanity Press" means you spend money to get published. Modern self-publishing means that you're attempting to make an income, however meager, from your writing.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#426

Post by PeterisP »

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…

Wildbow is amazing. Her "Worm" series is literally 20 full novels sized, and works like this are (or was? read it many years ago) free competition to any would-be writer who would want to require - as the article suggests - $5 per chapter of an unfinished novel. I mean, all these Patreon examples illustrate that it definitely can work, but IMHO it's more accurate to treat it as "patron" sponsorship/charity/support out of goodwill, instead of as actual economic sales of scarce product.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#427

Post by Mehdi2277 »

akiselev wrote: post #407
ellegriffin wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is certainly valid, but it also assumes the current publishing model (as in, how could I, one writer, make $100,000 of the $28 billion pie). Which also assumes that I would need to reach mass appeal (re: sell lots of copies) as an author to be successful in that paradigm. What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already has a niche audience for my writing, to have those followers support me as a writer? C…

> What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already has a niche audience for my writing, to have those followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough value to that small audience, that they want to pay to subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100/year? Or 2,000 people pay $50/year? That's a completely different concept that a novelist so data from the classic publishing industry are likely useless.…

This is commonish in translation community. There are sites like wuxia world and woopread that have a lot of translations of east asian web novels that you can pay to see chapters earlier. Some do it as pay per chapter others as a subscription model for early access. I do also see a few self published fantasies/romances that do this on tapas but would guess few do well enough. Normal model here is short chapters of about 5ish pages sold for l0-20ish cents per chapter. This leads to many series having massive chapter counts. 1000 chapter stories are pretty common here and longest popularish one I know is like close to 4k chapters.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#428

Post by jrochkind1 »

snet0 wrote: post #363
jrochkind1 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you go down that path, it starts getting kind of dystopian. Should it be illegal for me to lend or give a book to a friend without paying a fee, because then they are "getting the experience without paying the price of admission"? I'm reading a book to three kids, should I have to pay more than reading the book to one kid? That's three times as many kids "getting the experience", same "price of admission"! Takin…

I absolutely agree, I don't think solving this problem is something that can really be considered. I do think it's a problem, though. I think you're taking my analogy of tickets too far, though. It was simply to highlight the fact that, by reading the book without paying the author a dime, you are getting permanent access to the materials without the author being paid, which I think is an issue. I think the only feas…

In fact, I think maybe in Europe second-hand bookstores do pay some kind of royalties? Maybe libraries do too?

In the US, the "first sale doctrine" has legally preserved the right to give, rent, or sell an object legally in your possession, without the permission of the copyright holder.

For 100 years (I believe the first sale doctrine was first established in 1908), it did not imperil the business of writing and selling books.

In 2021, that market does seem imperiled, as the OP is about... but I don't think the 100-year-old first-sale doctrine is to blame, or eliminating it would fundamentally change the market forces. I mean, if it was the issue, then the market for books would be fundamentally different (and better for copyright holders) in Europe than the US, but is it?

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#429

Post by megameter »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #419

Goals are very important to acknowledge. If you're only interested in income and are writing fiction, the numbers are against you. In general, as the author shows, writing isn't a great source of direct income. If, however, you've accumulated a lot of research on a personal topic and want to gather the threads together and reach some personal conclusions, long-form non-fiction is probably the only tool that's going t…

Related is also to choose to work in the appropriate medium. There are many things called books, but not all of them are defined by numbered chapters, carefully outlined paragraphs and artful prose - and it's the obligation of such that tends to act as a barrier.

A 8-page zine can usually get the essence of an idea out of your head, and the format lends itself to thinking about the overall aesthetic as part of the message.

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