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 earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store).
For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/
Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ 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.
I have had a 300 page, trade sized (6x9)soft cover book in publication since late 2012. Lightning Source/Ingram Spark handles the printing and distribution. It is a very niche title that has sold about 1500 copies with the only advertising a max $1 daily limit google ad that runs only a few days/hours of the week.
Ingram allows publishers (I wear both hats) to set the wholesale cut and whether or not to take returns. Bricks and mortar book stores require you take take returns and give them at least a 50% cut. I never wanted to go there so do not take returns and give a 26% cut, 1% over the Amazon minimum.
My print cost is roughly $5.25 and I clear a little over $6 a copy. I also have a kindle e-book edition available directly through Amazon at a list of $9.99 that nets me $6.70 a copy. I sell print copies about 3:1 over the e-book.
Unless the title is a tome, it can be printed as b&w with a print cost in the $4-8 range. Everything after that depends on your competition (for retail price) and your wholesale discount.
At the end of the day I don't see anyone getting rich on any book sales, print or electronic, that are not best sellers from known authors/celebrities. However, as supplemental income you can definitely make some coin with little post authorship effort whether print or e-book.
Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ 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.
Can I ask how you went about self-publishing and selling via a website? I'm considering this with a couple of short guidebooks I've written for learning a specific language, among other things, and am very curious how you got started and set it up with Stripe checkout and manage delivery, etc.
- Create a landing page via Github and use Github pages or Cloudflare pages to automatically update your domain when you push to your repo
- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)
- simply send the book by email when you get a customer
This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!
This model assumes the publisher does nothing. At least if you buy a OReilly or Wiley book you know it will be a decent standard. Many ebooks are junk and its not always obvious which ones.
Yup, having been burnt by a few bad e-book purchases (both, fiction and non-fiction), now I stick with big name publishers. Unless books are recommended by trusted Twitter or hn accounts.
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 essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons.
If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...
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.
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 Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels.
Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub!
Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.)
Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain.
(On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)
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.
Vanity Publishers (and variants like poetry "competitions") are a huge stain on the publishing industry. SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) maintains the Writer Beware website, a set of resources documenting, naming and publicizing such predators and their practices:
> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions
As someone who likes to write fiction myself, the idea of publishing in-progress feels incredibly alien. Typically, if I finish writing something, it's a first draft that I would revisit a few months later and rework. How are authors handling this aspect of wanting to re-edit if they're publishing chapters on the go? I seem to recall Stephen King describing locking his manuscripts away for six months before revisiting them. The in-progress model seems to work against this type of workflow, or are there ways of dealing with that?
This was incredibly common back in the early 1900s. Whole books were at first published in one-page installations in newspapers. Including the most famous Czech novel, Good soldier Švejk.
Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.
Right, so it's basically serialisation. Interesting, I always saw serialisation as releasing an already finished novel bit by bit, but just reading about the history of serialisation, it seems that was not always the case. Thanks for giving me the pointer.
> the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions
If you are into Chinese webnovels you'll be familiar with the subscription predatory practices that big companies like Qidian have, where the real cost of a whole 1500-chapter novel (inflated because of the perverse incentives of subscription-based revenue) ends up being close to 500USD
It is sad watching the transition from fan translations' funding trough donation pooling into predatory big-novel subscriptons/per chapter "tokens"
> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that.
Depending on audience and how you advertise to them, I've seen people be really successful on Patreon. I outlined some of that in a different comment here earlier, but $15k+ a month (from Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat esoteric genre fiction at Patreon.
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 :)
We treat all author support issues to hello@leanpub.com as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)
i dont wanna air their dirty laundry but go try them out and if you like them then great. they certainly seem to work for most people. they struggled greatly with my 500 page book and after about 6 hours of wrestling with it i just gave up.
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 population? So many questions.
I do also think that the expectation/standard of a $100k/year salary is a bit high. That's almost double the US median household income, for a job that can be done (some would argue is best done) from a house in the woods. I also know that some authors are turning to Patreon. N.K. Jemisen famously started a Patreon that allowed her to quit her job and begin writing full-time. I personally have donated >$100 directly to favorite midlist authors who have made a big impact on my reading life.
FWIW, I used to read more, but I still buy at least three or four full-priced books a year.
> 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 story-telling Reddit ends up getting it optioned by Hollywood and is now a major screenwriter. The sea shanty Tik-Tok'er is a major label recording artist.
Our culture's positive values of egalitarianism and opportunity say that whatever you want your life to be can be, if only you work hard enough to get it.
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 was a rarefied activity done by people who went to college and moved to New York City. For more, authors felt like an Other. It's not that their personal dreams of authorship were crushed by the lack of opportunity, it's like they never thought to dream it in the first place, any more than people dream of being howler monkeys or velour sofas.
But today, media is more than happy to show us all possible dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all of the lives you're likely to lead and show you only the best ones.
So I think today many many more people consider and try to become authors than ever before. But the total amount of time spent reading isn't growing enough to accommodate that. While some will find success (for however they choose to define that), the end result is probably a much greater number of dreams thwarted than attained.
"It is probably as unlikely nowadays that you would become as rich and famous as Bill Gates as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would exceed to the ranks of the French aristocracy. But the point is it doesn't feel that way. It's made to feel by the media and other outlets that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage, you too could start a major thing."
In the past, the big hurdle to becoming an author (or a musician, or a model, etc) was getting past the gatekeepers. You had to convince a publisher, or a label, or a modeling company that you were worthy and then you were in.
This seemed like an impossible task to most people, and many people gave up without even trying. But for those who did persist and attempt to get past the gatekeepers, there was a very clear goal, and the gatekeepers were very clear to you when you didn't make it.
The traditional gatekeepers to a lot of professions are being bypassed these days, so at first it seems like it should be easier now. You don't have to have any connections or convince a single person your stuff is worthy.
However, in reality that game is even harder now. The demand for the content hasn't changed much, and it is still just as rare to succeed in these fields as before. However, people never get the clear 'pass/fail' response from a gatekeeper, so people who will never make it are likely to pursue the career longer than they might have with a more clear rejection.
> 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").
The super-vague personality assessment, which was tailored to describe as many people as possible, included the wish for writing a novel (at 4m23s). That's how common this desire is/was? I wonder if the modern version of it would say "you have considered opening up on YouTube".
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 writer" means writing stuff right now and doing it well enough to make a living off of. Where before, many dreamed of writing as a thing to do after they've earned most of their wealth, now it is a means to it.
> 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 :)
>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 less absolute people reading books (perhaps as today they also compete with tv, the web, youtube, netflix, social media, videogames, and so on as everyday entertainment options).
So it's much much harder to make a living as an author today than in 1921.
It’s older books not Netflix that’s the real competition. Amazon’s unlimited bookshelf holds a lot more than just Lord of the Rings. That said, residuals are also much easier to capture now days than back when book stores had extremely limited shelf space so it’s not all bad. There is a real trade off of fewer sales in year one but more sales in year 2-20.
On the numbers side people have a lot more disposable income, capturing a larger share of revenue per person can completely flip the equation. Patreon, etc don’t have to individually provide enough to live off of as long as all revenue streams add up to a living wage.
I suspect if the objective threshold is say 50k USD inflation adjusted, today is relatively speaking a much better time to be an author than most people here are assuming.
Of course that’s ignoring all the vanity books being published. Simply having an ISBN number doesn’t really mean anything in today’s world.
When agriculture was invented, it put a bunch of hunter gatherers out of business. They weren't happy about it, they liked being hunters and gatherers.
But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing. Can't have Post-mates without workers and restaurants. Can't have restaurants without more workers and food distribution. Can't have food distribution without more workers and food processors... etc.
Ivy league english majors get jobs writing TV and movie scripts. Mass electronic distribution means that many many people get to watch the creative output of a small number of people. All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yep, the transition is difficult, and they'll complain about it, but society as a whole benefits.
>When agriculture was invented, it put a bunch of hunter gatherers out of business. They weren't happy about it, they liked being hunters and gatherers. But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing.
For many it remains still not that wise a decision.
>All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yeah, I hear burger-flipping is still in demand.
I appreciate the ELI5, but it's not that I don't know history, or I don't understand that some jobs die and others replace them.
It is that I consider some jobs dying a problem, whether they are replaced by something else or not, and doubly so in the way that that transition happens (and some people in each generation get the short end of the stick).
> it's not that I don't know history, or I don't understand that some jobs die and others replace them.
ok, but it's not that some jobs die and others replace them, it's that efficiency gains allow less effort to satiate demand and thereby create a labor/ingenuity supply for new endeavors.
the job of writing (or performing music, etc.) did not die, it's that the demand for satisfying arts consumption can be met by a smaller sector of the economy.
1921 is shortly after copyright became effectively infinite, and falls in the gulf of books that were lost because they were snatched away from entering the public domain.
I really don't see any good argument why copyright should last longer than, say, 20 years.
Would any potential authors decide it's not worth it to write books if copyright only lasted 20 years? What benefit to society does ~100 years of copyright provide?
How do you solve the Mickey Mouse problem? E.g., you have a character that has created an "empire" that an organization has the means (cultural/monetary) to prevent their creation from entering the public domain. You have to figure out what to do about those rare situations because they're the driving force for extending copyrights.
My ideal is like the old system (initial registration plus fixed term renewals). That actually worked well to balance interests and we should go back to it. Just make the renewals an increasing cost so that your 'Mickey Mouse' hits can continue to have effectively infinite protection while most won't renew and drop into the public domain.
I think Disney's control over copyright law has been greatly overstated because it makes a better story. Yes, they lobby in favour of longer copyright. But they're spending a measly ~$4 million per year on lobbying (total, not specifically on copyright) [1].
The boring truth is politicians in Congress were in favor of copyright extension (at least in 1998). Two reasons given were: 1) copyright industries give the US one of its most significant trade surpluses, and 2) the European Union had recently extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions.
I fully expect the copyright on the first Mickey Mouse cartoon will expire in 2024.
I don't think that sounds like the "boring truth". The Sonny Bono Act had wide support from the copyright industry [1]. Supporters also said that since perpetual copyright is constitutionally forbidden, that it should be "forever less one day".
That the extension was done under the guise of harmonization only shows that the lobbying was done one country at a time. That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
Isn't it kind of a given that the copyright industry supports pro-copyright legislation?
> That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
It doesn't show that. You're speculating that Congress supported copyright due to Disney's lobbying and dismissing the possibility that members of Congress who supported it actually supported it for the reasons they stated. The tricky thing with this kind of speculation is it's impossible to prove or disprove. Maybe it was Disney that convinced them. But you don't seem to have any evidence.
If it's so cheap to buy Congressional votes, why hasn't Disney been able to extend copyright again in the past 20 years? They've been lobbying every year since Sonny Bono. The copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.
If votes are so cheap, why can't we just buy votes to shorten copyright? Or at least prevent extensions?
The point I was more making is how do you handle successful things that are long term viable. Such as Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, etc. Though, yes, it's overstated the impact. The 1976 act was more impactful than the Sonny Bono Act.
Everything having a lifetime copyright has it's own problems, but cutting everything to 20 years creates it own.
If something has long-term public appeal, fantastic. Then the creators should be glad to have contributed something that lasted so long. But when you say "viable", I hear an implication of "commercial viability". I think that's a poor framework in which to understand copyright duration.
The public domain isn't meant to be a dumping ground for forgotten properties. Rather, the public domain is a wellspring from which new writers can draw upon. Just as I may name a character "Sherlock" (1887), "Romeo" (1597), or "Odysseus" (~700 BC) in order to bring in specific character traits, I may also want to name a character "Superman" (1938), "Gandalf" (1954), or "Skywalker" (1977). These are all part of our shared cultural heritage from previous generations, and we have a right to build upon that heritage to create something even better for the next generation.
That is why I think roughly one generation, 30 years or so, is an appropriate maximum copyright duration. As adults, every generation has the right to retell and remix stories and characters from their childhood. The current duration of copyright is a gross abuse of that right.
Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright. It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work. We've carved out tons of exceptions for copyright for things like parody, educational purposes, etc., but at it's core it's a distribution right and nothing else. Instead of working in an existing property, it's better to create something new, even if you're inspired by the other thing. The entirety of the music industry for how this works in practice in our current framework. The games industry also has lots of good examples of creating new works using existing ideas without violating copyright.
To respond to this specific point, though "...we have a right to build upon that heritage to create something even better for the next generation". We already do this, we create tropes and then write new stories using those tropes. Creating new is better than just rehashing existing properties and longer copyright terms actually encourage new works because you can't rely on older properties for your material. I think they're too long for virtually all works because most works are commercial failures. They could find new audiences if their distribution rights weren't locked up. MST3K is a great example of doing something new with an existing property that is only possible with term limits.
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The point of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". The commercial viability is the means through which that point is achieved. If at any time copyright isn't functioning to promote the arts, and instead hinders, then it isn't fulfilling the point.
While I do agree that the tropes are the stronger part, part of the reason why shared characters are so powerful is because they can immediately stand in to represent the trope. If I am writing a Robin Hood story, I don't need to spend time explaining who Robin Hood is, I can just start telling the story. If I am writing a story about "What if Superman were evil?" (e.g. [0][1]), then I need to first spend time explaining who the character is, describing powers, and then drawing just enough parallels so that the audience knows who I'm talking about without drawing so many that I get sued. It's a really boring way to start a story.
You should really read up on the history of copyright, because it's the genuinely the exact opposite of what you're saying. Copyright initially enforced restrictions on printing press operators and was used as part of the censorship mechanism. There's an argument that copyright actually slowed progress and countries with weak copyright advanced faster. It logically follows because allowing unlimited copies of works to be made regardless of ownership allows for dissemination of information quicker.
Progress of knowledge is covered differently and it's why the US has carved exceptions for facts (they're exempt from copyright) and we use a patent system for inventions. Think of current problems with companies like Elsiver that use copyright as a cudgel to keep academic papers from the masses.
Thank you for the link, and that is some very good background that I had been unaware of. There are some other interesting examples, such as Hollywood becoming the motion picture capital of the US by virtue of being farther away from Thomas Edison, and therefore harder to sue.
I definitely agree that copyright can, and frequently does hinder progress. My statement is perhaps limited to the US, where patents and copyrights are given an explicit goal in Article 1 of the Constitution, stating "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The "to promote the progress" wording is important, as it tells a goal, and not just a legal capability.
A thought experiment I like is to consider the best way to promote progress in the arts and sciences. Suppose there were a magic box, which could instantly tell the full value of any invention or artwork or writing. You put something in, and it tells you how much it benefits society. Then there could be a program set up to reward authors and inventors for making things. They come up to the box, put the work in, and get paid the amount that the magic box tells you. In exchange for contributing to society, there is some compensation for doing so.
Of course, no such magic box exists, nor can it. We could have some sort of a poll to determine the overall worth of a new book or a better can opener, but that would have a lot of overhead. So instead, for a limited time, we reward authors and inventors by giving them a temporary monopoly over making copies of what they wrote, and that can become a monetary reward by selling those copies. Because we don't have an objective measure of a book's worth, we fall back to subjective measures. But this is still fundamentally a restriction on society as a whole, not to reproduce something that they have purchased, and that restriction requires some ongoing basis. It cannot be forever, and it must always be in service of promoting the arts and sciences, because that is the only reason why the offer of a legal monopoly in exchange for open publication exists.
(As a tangent, I don't understand any basis for legal protections of trade secrets, beyond civil penalties for breaking a contract. Companies using trade secrets have decided not to accept the bargain offered by patents, and therefore should also not have the benefits of legal protections.)
(And a second tangent, I don't think that computer programs released without source code should be eligible for copyright protection. The authors have not fulfilled their side of the bargain by releasing a work in a form that can be built upon and expanded by society once their limited-time monopoly has expired, and so they should not receive the legal monopoly offered in that bargain.)
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
Yes, and that point is that it's not for ever.
> It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work.
Exactly. For a limited time.
Most of us only live for a single lifetime, so anything longer than that is effectively forever: If something is locked away by copyright when you're born, and still is when you die, then you don't ever get it free of copyright.
> The games industry also has lots of good examples of creating new works using existing ideas without violating copyright.
Games are interesting because games copy each other incessantly but almost never sue over copyright.
The actual source code and art would clearly fall under copyright, but not the gameplay. So when PUBG discovered the popular battle royale genre, everyone rushed to copy it and now we have Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty Battle Royale, etc. When Dota was popular, it spawned tons of clones. Minecraft spawned tons of clones. In some cases where the clones are too similar, the original creator may have legal grounds for suing, but they seldom do so.
Short of blatantly stealing assets from another game, it's hard to get in trouble over another game's copyright.
Yep, ideas vs execution. You see it in books and music pretty frequently as well. Twilight is a great example because it spawned a ton of clones. Music was pretty insulated until fairly recently with some lawsuits over similarities being a bit... questionable.
Side note, this has been a really good thread to read and respond to.
Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, and as far as I know, it's been fine. That might be why there have been so many movies and shows based on the character recently.
Imagine it's 2024 and the original Mickey Mouse cartoon just entered the public domain. How does this impact Disney?
-Anyone could watch Steamboat Willie for free (assuming it's online somewhere). I don't see this harming Disney.
-Another big studio like Warner could make a cartoon with the original Mickey. I doubt any of the big studios are even interested in doing so, but if they do, I don't think it will affect Disney's revenue.
-Small studios and independent artists could use the original Mickey character. I think if anyone does this, it's more likely to help than hurt Disney, by boosting Mickey's profile.
-Other manufacturers could make Mickey Mouse merchandise. This is probably the biggest direct harm to Disney, but I don't think it'll make much impact on their revenue.
Some things people couldn't do:
-Use the Mickey Mouse logo. It's protected by trademark.
-Make a sequel or spin off of a modern Mickey Mouse product. Another studio couldn't just make Epic Mickey 2 since Epic Mickey (2010) is still protected.
I'm not sure Disney makes much money off of Mickey compared to other properties like Star Wars, Marvel, Frozen, etc. Mickey's popularity seems to be waning. Apart from a few video games, he hasn't been in much recently. He has a TV show that did fine but isn't particularly popular.
Okay, but what about other popular properties? The first Harry Potter book was published 24 years ago. What if it were in the public domain?
-J. K. Rowling's net worth is estimated to be over a billion USD. She'll be okay.
-People would still buy new books written by J. K. Rowling.
-Only her earliest books would be in the public domain.
In most jobs, you can't expect to work for a few years and be set for life. I'm not sure why it should be different for authors (and it usually isn't). If your book won't make enough money for you to retire after 20 years of sales, you'd either have to write another book, or get another job. That's already the case for the vast majority of authors.
The trick to dealing with a 20 year copyright term is to keep making new works. Which is exactly what copyright was supposed to encourage.
Sherlock Holmes is not in the public domain in full. Most of the things we think of as 'Sherlock Holmes' are from stories still in copyright. It's why you see Elementary as a property and Sherlock as modern day. Counterintuitively they had to come up with new ideas because the existing ideas are locked up with copyright.
Couple of other issues.
"Small studios and independent artists could use the original Mickey character"
"Other manufacturers could make Mickey Mouse merchandise. This is probably the biggest direct harm to Disney, but I don't think it'll make much impact on their revenue."
The reason you've seen them make Steamboat Willie LEGO and the current "old-style" Mickey Mouse cartoons is because they're setting up a copyright argument if someone tried. They're also setting up the same arguments that Sherlock Holmes uses which is that the elements of Mickey in Steamboat Willie have been used recently and are thus still locked up by copyright. You can distribute Steamboat Willie, but can not otherwise use the property. The Sherlock Holmes case is here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163248743572192...
"Which is exactly what copyright was supposed to encourage."
No, copyright is an exclusive distribution right. It's a government granted monopoly to provide protection to creative works. The history of copyright is pretty interesting in an of itself and starts with the printing press in the 1500s. Long story short, though, it's always been about commercial exploitation of a creative work.
Yeah, not all Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain. As it says in the case you linked only 10 stories out of 56 plus 4 novels were still under copyright (now down to 6).
The Doyle estate lost the case you're referring to and Klinger was allowed to publish his derivative stories.
Disney could try to sue, but I don't think their case is any stronger than the Sherlock Holmes case if the defendant is only deriving material from the original Mickey cartoon.
Klinger was seeking declaratory judgement that he could use the non-protected elements. Doyle estate was saying he couldn't. It was agreed by both parties that he couldn't use elements contained in the 10 stories.
From the case listed "And the claim is correct, for he acknowledges that those copyrights are valid and that the only copying he wants to include in his book is copying of the Holmes and Watson characters as they appear in the earlier stories and in the novels."
Mickey Mouse will most certainly not be in the public domain anymore than he is now. Disney can also fall back on trademark law to take care of Disney's use as well.
I think we have the same understanding of the case then. We seem to have a different conclusion on derivative works based on the original Mickey Mouse once it enters the public domain. I agree with you that modern Mickey would still be under copyright.
It's a bit of a moot point in my opinion, because I don't think anyone outside of Disney would even want to make more of 1928 Mickey. It's old. It's not popular. Maybe they'd use him for a cameo or for parody, but shows already do that anyway, regardless of the copyright [1].
> How do you solve the Mickey Mouse problem? E.g., you have a character that has created an "empire" that an organization has the means (cultural/monetary) to prevent their creation from entering the public domain. You have to figure out what to do about those rare situations because they're the driving force for extending copyrights.
We have a mechanism for solving the problem of Derivative works that purport to be creations of the "empire": trademarks.
BTW, everyone focuses on Steamboat Willie (entering the public domain in 2024), but there are already several Mickey Mouse cartoons in the public domain: The Mad Doctor, Minnie's Yoo-Hoo, and Mickey's Surprise Party.
So, it is possible to create derivative Mickey Mouse works, just make sure that they can't be confused for works or products created or licensed by Disney.
I don't really have a good solution. My gut reaction is that having a system that rewards the same companies that pushed for infinite copyright duration, rather than removing their hold over our shared culture, isn't a good solution. That isn't the most pragmatic of me, but I'd rather not reward Disney for breaking the public domain.
The renewal system you propose seems like a pretty good idea. Not sure you even need the increasing cost. Just making it a small fee would probably mean 98% of works would never get renewed after the first term. Perhaps add a rule that the author can renew for free if he's still alive.
It's basically how the US system worked prior to 1976, though the terms were 28 + 28 renewal. Most didn't renew because they didn't make enough money to make the renewal worth it.
We won't know for a hundred years how many of the books that will be published in 2021 will be notable enough in 2121 to be on the 2021_in_literature wikipedia page.
One of the scenes I enjoyed in "Patton" was when Patton defeats Rommel through knowledge of Rommel's tactics. He yells, seemingly across the field to Rommel, "I read your book". (The movie actually makes it seem like Patton could read unpublished manuscripts of his opponent [1]) This exemplifies that famous people wrote books. They wrote memoirs and they wrote manuals. I couldn't say how the gatekeepers dealt with such books, nor how the potential readership found or regarded such books.
> But today, media is more than happy to show us all possible dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all of the lives you're likely to lead and show you only the best ones
Ironically it's those same social media aggregators that make the stars these days.
You can literally be an overnight success if you get lucky.
It’s funny to me how you think the reading amount hasn’t increased. I agree, yet what is the point of all those college degrees afforded - presumably as correlative of more literacy? I think this speaks further to your point about what people’s aspirations have turned into: mere fantasies.
Don’t get me wrong, I fantasize too, but I manage in eating a balanced breakfast. I think the obsessive component is completely disregarded in the realization of most “self-actualizing” aspirants. I can think of a recent read of Angus Black of AC/DC and how he turned his first guitar’s fretboard rotten from all the sweat. Focusing more on finding that obsession rather than fantasizing about becoming something you likely are not tooled for - say an author - will lead to a more satisfactory course through life. Otherwise, one is simply blindly and madly stabbing in the dark to achieve what someone like Bukowski will starve to do. It must come from within, not from without.
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.
Note that he got paid $750 for his first short story in 1949! I don't know how many places are paying first time authors that much today, and then you remember to calculate inflation.
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). Many will prefer much shorter works.
And of course that is before taking into account the competition - the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.
I've submitted a couple of stories, but decided that effort vs. relatively low potential payoff was so low that since I wouldn't really be profitable when factoring in time spent anyway it was better to just put my stories on my website and pay to promote them to relevant twitter followers to pull in readers for my novel and increase my following at the same time.
The few short stories I've published so far has as a result reached a much wider audience than most of the main scifi magazines reach. E.g. even Analog was reportedly down to 27k readers by 2011.
But of course being able to afford to do that is a pretty privileged position to be in.
> 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.
That makes sense... I suppose if I was trying to pick a dozen stories out of 1500, I'd start by looking for people I've published before, and even if their current submission isn't very good it beats wading through the dross. After that it's probably a matter of rolling up your sleeves, throwing out everything that's obviously unhinged or unusable, and slogging through the rest.
For sure. My guess is that the slush pile count is exclusively of unsolicited, unfamiliar authors. Someone they've published before probably skips the pile.
I think they might be publishing stuff their core audience really likes, btw. It's just that audience is probably a niche.
I think this is an ongoing challenge. You see it with comics as well, where Marvel and DC have gotten really good at knowing what sells to their niche audience. But their audience has been in lengthy decline, in part because they've focused on selling to their niche audience rather than figuring out how to broaden their base.
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
Vonnegut had to convince at least two gatekeepers: his own agent and the editor at Colliers.
I spent a large chunk of time a few years back looking into the questions OP is asking, and the ultimate truth I came to is this: whether you're self publishing or going the traditional route, you're going to need some established gatekeepers to support you if you're going to make it.
In 1949, those gatekeepers were traditional publishers. In 2021, we still have traditional publishers, but we also have content curation algorithms, social media influencers, podcast hosts, and platforms like Substack and Patreon. If you can get any of them to put resources into promoting you, you'll have a real opportunity of making it - that is, if what you're offering is any good.
If you can't or don't want to get the attention of those gatekeepers, it doesn't matter how good your content is, no one will ever find you.
Yep, in almost every industry it was always been 50% how good you are and 50% who you know. Over time, who you need to know to be successful has changed, and new artists need to adapt, as they always have. Getting an audience is easier than ever in history. That is amazing for hobbyists who just want some readers and recognition, and not great for those who want to earn a living while writing.
You can hustle up who you know. Late night talk shows are looking for anyone who is willing to be interviewed at 2am. And once in a while some big name will happen to have insomnia and notice you. However you have to do 2am shows with no idea if anyone will notice for a long time. While of course writing the next edition.
And, as in many other creative endeavors, all the hobbyists who just want some readers (or viewers or whatever) end up competing with people trying to put food on the table. Even if individually many do not have much of an effect, in the aggregate they do.
I assume even in radio and TV, not all segments are created equal. Maybe live, ad-libbed shows had a more detrimental effect, in the sense that at least scripted shows employ more writers?
Also, would it not make sense to look at writing even from a more indirect point? For example, millions of people enjoyed the creativity of the /Friends/ writers, without actually reading a single word. Should they be counted as successful as a book writer with millions of readers?
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"
100k is not that unreasonable of an expectation as the necessary base for a freelancer. Keep in mind that you will need to cover additional taxes that your employer would normally cover, and you will need to plan on variability so you need more cushion than a salaried employee. Add in the fact that an author would need to be in the top 10% of a competitive field and you need to start considering the opportunity cost of not getting an office job.
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.
I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k salary would be possible. I've made that as a writer and editor throughout my career, why not hope for it as a novelist? (or at least try for it!). It might not turn out that way in the end, but better to reach high than low!
> I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k salary
I don't think it's greedy either, but it's also obviously past the point of "can I make a living doing this". After all, median individual income is less than half of that.
"a living" and "the kind of living I want" are different things, obviously.
I disagree with the GP's characterization that it's greedy and you should definitely try for it, but I'm going to rephrase your statement thus:
> I've made that as a pitching coach and umpire throughout my career, why not hope for it as a pitcher?
Writer/editor are fundamentally different roles than novelist. In the former, the people with the up front capital already know what they want, at least in a more concrete sense than "something that makes us more money than we put in." The focus is on selling whatever makes them money, whether it's a product or a trade publication or ad space. They don't really need the best, they just want to avoid the worst so that the writing/editing doesn't bring down the rest of the product, magazine, marketing, etc. That's where most of that $100k comes from: the value writing/editing brings to the rest of the operation that is actually generating the cash.
As a novelist, you are the product. Your story & marketability, the quality of your prose, how closely you follow the cultural zeitgeist, and so on become the dominant factors. Instead of derisking the money making part of the operation, you the risky money making operation. Such roles are almost universally on a bimodal income distribution. Major league pitchers get paid anywhere from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions but the next run down is the AAA leagues, which pay at most $50k a year. There are far more people making $100k/year supporting the pitchers than there are pitchers making $100k.
Think of it from an economics perspective (rough math here): according to [1] "only 690 million print books were sold in 2019 in the U.S. in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction." Lets assume physical to e-book sales are 1:1 (they're not) so a total of 1.4 billion books sold. Let's assume the average price per book is $20 (a tad high). There were 17.1 million new cars sold that year, lets assume at an average of $30k each (a tad low). That's a total market of $28 billion vs $513 billion dollars. Assuming 30% cost of goods sold for the former and 70% COGS for the latter that's $21 billion left over for the novelists or $153 billion gross profit from selling the cars.
Now there's certainly lots of room for you to make $100k/year as a novelist in that $28 billion but that is for all novelists in the US and - I suspect - academic textbook authors are probably making a disproportionate chunk of that money while inflating the average price per book. My assumption is very little of that $153 billion goes to writers but that number includes over 16,000 dealerships, all of whom need their copy for sales and marketing. The average dealership in the US sells 500-1000 cars a year with upwards of $10-20 million per year revenue so $100k/year for a writer would be a drop in the bucket for them, especially with freelancers. Multiply that by all the other industries and the numbers grow to overwhelming amounts: if 0.01% of $21+ trillion in general industry spending (going by GDP) goes to writers in a gaussian distribution, there's going to be a lot more $100k/year authors in that group than among novelists.
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? 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?
This is different from selling books. It's selling a platform.
It STILL might not work. And I STILL might never reach that income. But it's an entirely new way to think about books and publishing and I'm curious to see if there's still a path for fiction writers in there somewhere....
> 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. You'll have to find out for yourself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know of some niches that certainly are supporting multiple independent authors at that amount per year or more, but they're all unique markets in their own right and I'd hesitate to extrapolate one from the other. In truth, I'd call most of those people analysts who write well and the few who work in fiction have semi-formulaic/restricted niches like writing material for GMs of hardcore D&D groups. Hardly work that allows one to flourish artistically.
tldr: Short answer: no. Long answer: ...is left as an exercise for the reader.
The value propositions creators bring to their markets are changing drastically. An artist whose content I follow across YouTube and Instagram is a vlogger and does a ton of design work outside of the scope of her more traditional "here is a painting, would you like to buy it or a print of it" offerings. She also engages socially with her fans. The whole thing works out to selling an experience/brand of a kind that didn't really exist in the past. I think it's fair to say that it's probably not possible to follow this path "as a writer" in the sense that "a writer" has meant in the past -- but that doesn't mean that this is a situation where "Short answer: no." is an accurate (or indeed respectful) answer to a question that she is asking by attempting the thing.
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.
To be clear, I never said that it was greedy to want a $100k salary. It's a perfectly rational and ordinary thing to want. I wondered about how reasonable to was to expect to attain that level of financial success in writing.
Recently in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, I noticed the passage
He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of the Rambler, the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them'. I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it:
Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque in faucibus orci,
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas,
Terribiles visu formae; Lethumque, Laborque.
[Footnote: Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell,
Revengeful cares, and sullen sorrows dwell;
And pale diseases, and repining age;
Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage;
Here toils and death, and death's half-brother, sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep. DRYDEN.]
'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an authour; all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.' I proposed to him to dictate an essay on it, and offered to write it. He said, he would not do it then, but perhaps would write one at some future period.
If you have a scalable product there is usually no middle ground. Either you are getting rich or just getting by, or even not getting by (last one the most likely one)
Is it? Can you elaborate? I think if you have a SaaS with happy 100 customers paying 10$ each per month it is easier to scale up to 10k customers than if you only have 2 customers to get to 200.
I'm not sure if these are outliers, and my "random" sampling is just picking out highly visible apps. But I've made good money off an app built in a month, and I've made relatively little from a book written in 3 months.
Software has a lot more variety. You can make say, a communist themed productivity app vs a forest themed one and these will appeal to different people.
I often suspect we haven't noticed the inflationary effects on this as a "high" salary as much as we otherwise would because of the psychological effect of the change from five to six figures. Yeah, the median salary is low, but that's been well-covered elsewhere about how it hasn't risen in line with costs or upper-percentile income - so think of this as just another example of "here's a field where you can't make a comfortable income anymore."
>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 less competition once you got through the aforementioned gatekeepers.
- There was less discounting. Books used to be sold at list price. And, subsequently, maybe at a small discount in some places.
- Publishers often provided support with marketing activities.
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 for inflation.) There were authors who made a good living pumping out these midlist books at the rate of one or even two a year. The self-publishing boom has brought this back to a degree as ebook originals, although I've talked to more than a few ebook-first indie authors who insist they need to get out four or more books a year to make a living, so it's arguably harder for most. And of course that "most" is "most of those who manage to make a living that way," which is, well, not actually most!
(2) Short story rates used to be much, much higher than they are now when adjusted for inflation, to the point where there were people who made a successful living selling primarily -- or even exclusively! -- short fiction. I've never been able to get a good read, pun intended, on what happened here, other than a nebulous sense that readers' tastes just changed over the years (the "fewer other demands on attention" you mention was likely a big part of that), and those markets became less viable.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
I'd imagine the number of books sold per year is strictly increasing.
If it's increasing because of a growing number of readers, then that's a winner take all scenario where Harry Potter sells more and more copies as each new reader hasn't read it yet.
If it's growing because of one extremely voracious reader buying up every book they can get their hands on, that's a scenario that favours more obscure authors.
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 thing there are ton of much better books that never made it.
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.
This suggests otherwise. (Although this is obviously not a complete set of data. I'd actually probably have expected a bigger falloff but maybe ease of acquisition leads to more people buying books they don't end up reading.)
I used to work in the industry. At least when it comes to fiction, it has always been hard to make a living as an author. A very large number of first-time authors never earn out their advance and therefore aren't able to get another book published. A reasonable portion of a publisher's authors are "mid-list", which consistently turn out books that earn out the advance plus a decent amount on top, and each new book also gives a slight boost to that author's back catalog. Long-term, this is how the average author earns a decent living: Output is maybe 3 books every two years. Early on, the advance might only be $15k to $30k per book, though once they earn out the advance they begin getting royalties. Once they have 6-8 books published, they have an audience and enough of a back catalog that they may earn up to $50k/book with royalties from the back catalog adding on a healthy bit on top. However "mid-list" encompasses a wide range, so this can also be lower or higher, especially because a mid-list author with 20+ books, turning out 3 books every two years, may still only get $40k advances based on new book sales, but with so many books in their back catalog even selling only 1000 copies of each book each year can add another $30k on their annual earnings. More if they're popular enough to get audiobook deals as well.
These are the authors that basically keep the lights on for the publisher. Overall though, profitable publishing is a business of breakout hits, the authors that sell 50,000+ copies and hit the best seller lists. Failed first-time authors and mid-list authors may mostly cancel each other out on profit, and it's those few hits that push publishers into the black.
There's an interesting book [1] that talks about how media changes over time. In short, new media forms replace older forms, pushing the older forms into niches. An obvious example is TV replacing radio, where radio used to be full of story-based content, but when that content moved to TV, radio became largely a niche form of media, focusing on music (and talk shows and weather etc).
This paints a picture of media forms along some continuum, which describes what you're looking for.
> 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-demand that niche, low-selling authors have become a thing.
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 presses have indeed existed for a long time, but 50 years ago they were widely seen as a scam, rather than a realistic route to a writing career.
Vanity publishers would tell every author their work had great sales potential, then charge them $2000 for $500 worth of editing, printing and marketing - so authors would not only fail to make money, they would actually make a large loss.
And they would generally sell the authors hundreds of copies of their printed book (because it wasn't economically feasible to do print-on-demand like today), which the author was expected to find buyers for. Most didn't, and many people clearing out the houses of dead relatives found dusty boxes of unsold books which cost the relative a lot of money.
I don't think that's a huge difference. It will still cost you money to get your Word doc into publishable shape (cover and interior design, editing, etc.) And you're still unlikely to make a significant profit on that upfront cost as a self-published author of PoD or eBooks.
As to whether either form of self-publishing 'scam' or not, that depends on the expectations of the author. I think it's always been common to publish just to be published with no expectation of making money, hence the 'vanity'. But I have no data to back that up.
The difference is with print on demand you can actually control your losses. When print was a printing press, the effort to setup the press meant that nobody sane would print just one book, it cost a few thousand to setup to print, and then each book was a few pennies. Inflation has raised the latter cost, while print on demand as lowered the previous to near zero.
Today you can decide how much your editor is worth. If your grammar and spelling is good you can pay less, or if you know it is bad (like me) you can pay extra until the quality is where you want it. You might even have a friend who will do the early editing for free (a trained editor shouldn't be wasted on spell check duties, but they are probably worth it once you think the book is done for final tweaks) Whatever this investment is, you can limit the costs.
"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.
I talked elsewhere about Louis Masterson - the Morgan Kane series sold 20m+ copies in his lifetime, but each individual edition of each book sold mostly on the order of thousands over multiple printings over a period of decades.
Low selling authors have been a big thing since always, because there are a huge number of markets that are small enough that it was (and is) not unusual for publishers in smaller markets to print on the order of a few hundred books per run for unknown authors.
E.g. in Norway (where Kjell Hallbing/Louis Masterson is from), 10k sold used to mean you were a big deal, and high up on the bestseller lists.
I know offhandedly that at one point it was possible to live on one's short fiction but now that's been entirely squeezed out. (Unless you're Ted Chiang.)
That is sad. :( In happier news, I wonder if you can look at things in terms of "creators of entertainment" rather than just authors and get a happier picture.
Like, for example, let's just consider authors and video game creators. Let's suppose that in the fifties, before video games, there were, say, 100,000 full-time fiction authors in the US. (That number sounds awfully high to me, but maybe.) Today, according to this article, there can only be at most about 7,000 full time fiction authors in the US. But according to this page[1], there are 260,000 people working in the videogaming industry. So if we only consider these two industries, that's 160,000 more people getting paid full time wages to create entertainment.
That's sad if you want to be an author, but if you're concerned about the overall creation mix of society, then maybe it's not so sad.
People “working in the videogaming industry” aren’t comparable to “fiction authors” but to “people working in the slice of the publishing industry involved in publishing fiction”.
And the slice of the videogaming industry that is analogous to authors is probably a vastly smaller proportion than of print fiction publishing because there is so much more non-authorial stuff to do.
That's a good point! From what I can find about 750k people are working in the publishing industry overall. It's hard to find statistics just for fiction publishing.
I have to admit I'm a little surprised. I would have thought by now the videogame industry would be bigger than books, but maybe it's not.
Don't forget the population difference. There are a lot more people now than back then. (I intentional didn't specify world population of some subset - interesting to think about each)
Does Ted Chiang live off his writing though? AFAIK he makes his living as a technical writer! (this might have changed in the last couple of years though...)
Someone at Microsoft could probably check to see if he's still an employee, but I highly doubt he's still working a day job. Though maybe he is. He's surprisingly not that prolific for someone who's so successful with his writing.
From TFA: "There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month".
$1000 * 12 < $100,000
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.
The numbers the author gives for patreon are blatantly false though. There's a few posts down in the thread of people like me who are wondering where those numbers come from.
Yes. Needs comparison to past years to be useful. Would also be helpful to compare books that came out in past year or few years to see how their sales trends. We also need to know what those books that are tracked are. Are they just in print titles? Or does it count 60 year old used biology textbooks for sale on Amazon no one wants? Or dated romance novels long past their prime? Because if those are included I'm not surprised they are struggling to sell 1000 copies. Even new books in niche academic fields can struggle to sell 1000 copies as the audience is so small.
I did mention Alexandre Dumas as a case study in a previous article. Here's a snippet:
"But there used to be another way. When Alexandre Dumas debuted The Count of Monte Cristo it was published as a feuilleton—a portion of the weekly newspaper devoted to fiction. From August 1844 to January 1846 his chapters were published in 18 installments for The Journal des Débats, a newspaper that went out to 9,000 to 10,000 paying subscribers in France—and readers were rapt by it.
In the forward to a 2004 translation of the book, the writer Luc Sante wrote: “The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled… is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else.”
It was basically “Game of Thrones.” Readers could not wait to get their hands on the next chapter and that bode very well for the writer who was not only paid by the newspaper in real-time for his work (by the word), but also grew the popularity of his work over the entirety of the time it was being published.
“The ‘Presse’ pays nearly 300 francs per day for feuilletons to Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, De Balzac, Frederic Soulé, Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau,” Littell’s Little Age, Volume 10 wrote in 1846. “But what will the result be in 1848? That each of these personnages will have made from 32,000 to 64,000 francs per annum for two or three years for writing profitable trash of the color of the foulest mud in Paris?”
That “profitable trash” earned those writers an annual salary of between $202,107 to $404,213 in today’s dollars—and the obvious disdain of that Littell writer who, even then preferred the merits of a bound and published book. The same volume goes on to say that Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845."
A comparison to the recent past and not the most successful French authors of the 19th century. For every Dumas making $200,000-$400,000 there was probably a hundred authors you've never heard of making $2000. And the market has changed so much since the mid-19th century as there is way more alternatives for people's time like movies, TV shows, video games, etc. with completely different distribution methods because of things like the internet enabling people to get content out for free.
You need to look back at the recent past and not just the most successful authors to see what the trends are. Is a random sampling of 100 authors from 2000 making more than those in 2019? Has the total number of books sold sharply declined?
Ever read Boswell's life of Samuel Johnson? Samuel Johnson was a poet, which was about as close as you could be to a rock star in terms of popular culture fame in the 18th century.
I would call it more of a hope than an expectation. Really what I'm trying to figure out is if it's possible to monetize a niche audience (with fiction content) and make a living from it. I guess we'll find out...
And thanks for the luck!
The funny thing about writing is that writers mostly hate writing. Writers like being writers. They also like having written books. But the process, they despise.
This is very different from other arts. Musicians enjoy playing music a lot. Performers, in general, love to perform. Even painters, I think, like to paint.
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 to work, whether you publish or not.
There are many more indirect benefits for various niche genres. If you reduce it all to money, you're not going to be happy. Everybody can publish now and as a result of that, most books are not that great. One wag said that the great majority of books published today shouldn't be published at all. I tend to agree, at least in terms of publishing for a wide audience. It's just that book publishing doesn't have to be like that.
I'm starting on another book this year. Each of my previous books has had less than 1,000 readers and I'm happy as a clam. In fact, I really don't want to start publishing to a mass audience. In my opinion, looking at writing only in terms of a mass audience is the best way to start writing a lot of highly-targeted trash. Everybody is already trying to write the next version of serialized pulp fiction. That's why, in my opinion, no matter how well you write for any sized audience at all it's only going to end up being mediocre (by comparison). If, however, you write reasonably well on a laser-focused extremely small niche that you have great passion for? You win even if you get only seven readers.
Beat the game by not playing by the rules they give you.
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.
> 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 chapter/month)
- https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba (no dollar amount, but 4,345 patrons and a $1/month minimum tier should translate to roughly $8000/month)
etc. None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.
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.
There's also the path of the "Kindle Unlimited" after-the-fact self-publisher.
I've seen several times now where an author does this:
1. Publish their novel serially on a site like Royal Road. Build up a subscriber base, get on the leaderboards, try to grow.
2. Publish it to Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited requires that no other copies be available online, so remove it all from the original site.
3. Continue writing new content as "book 2" on the original sites to try and stay discoverable and on top of the leaderboards. Hope new readers will read the first few books on Amazon, thereby finally earning some money.
These are great, thank you! They didn't show up in the fiction category, but makes sense since they are using other terminology. I'll definitely look into these as case studies!
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.
I love that Wildbow writes the female point of view that you assumed he was a she (assuming that wasn't a typo). He's still going strong--current work is Pale (https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/) which I can highly recommend.
Proud patron of Wildbow here, I admire his work ethic so much, he has been writing 10000+ words per week for at least 7(?) years without interruption and the stuff is high quality too, great world building all around.
https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/ is what he has been writing for the past year and I still look forward to the chapters on Tuesday and Saturday every week. There is also a whole community of readers who gathers in the comments section or the subreddit to theorize and speculate, it is a lot of fun.
Yes, I was wondering where the author got those numbers, There's also https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul who probably gets more than 5k a month since the minimum tier is $2.5/month
Harriet is a great kids' series (as is Dragonbreath). Just to include it here, most of Vernon's writing for adults (which is what her Patreon focuses on) is under the pen name T. Kingfisher. "Jackalope Wives"; Clockwork Boys (fantasy novel); Swordheart; The Twisted Ones; A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking... fun, quirky, interesting stories! (Her grown-up webcomic Digger was under her own name, though.)
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 signal with which to choose a new book. So why should I, as a reader, try out a new author / book that hasn't been read by anyone else? I'm sure there are a few jewels out there, but I'm sure there are even more duds. Reading a book takes time, and I don't want to waste my time / money on random selections of books.
It depends a lot on what books. Many technical books age extremely quickly. You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose.
But even in literature there is timing, themes, references and fashion. You'd have a hard time writing Don Quixote today, because hardly anyone reads chivalric romances anymore, so the vast majority of people wouldn't know what you're even parodying. And I suspect most modern readers of Don Quixote don't really get it, excluding those with an education in european medieval literature.
Even without going that far, there are fads and fashions. If you want to write about wizards or vampires there probably are better and worse times to do it.
Even playing your cards right, how likely are you to get a hit? Because there's really no lack of good books on most any subject at this point, and it takes a very dedicated reader to exhaust the existing catalog, and the easiest way for a reader is to find out what's popular and try that, rather than giving a new author a chance.
> You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose.
I think even here it depends on what you're trying to get out of it. I wouldn't read K&R to get the latest information about how to write modern C, but I read that book once every 5 years or so because there are timeless aspects at its core. This is even more true of a book like SICP.
Yeah, but doesn't that make the point? Don Quijote has outlived the works it's parodying and people still want to read it, even if they need a lot of footnotes to get all the references.
> Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today
I'd argue that there's a large amount of books that don't age out of their value. There's a lot of good material out there written over a hundred years ago that's more enjoyable that the average modern book. Even books which are tightly coupled to their time period are all still relevant and valuable today.
A funny example, I was reading an author yesterday who discussed a social issue at a local university, and quoted a professor who shares the exact name of a well known professor today who comments on similar issues.
Most of what I read is well over 30 years old, if not older. And very much of it still reflects the world today.
> Even books which are tightly coupled to their time period are all still relevant and valuable today
As an example of this I would cite "Mr Britling Sees It Through" [0] which was written by HG Wells during World War 1. It was published in 1916 and describes in a novel the public reaction to the early stages of the war - and Wells had no idea how the war was actually going to pan out when he wrote it. I read it in April last year, one month into the first COVID lockdown. Some of the reactions Wells describes (from fear to to panic buying to concerns about the economy) were exactly what was happening in the pandemic. I found it amazingly relevant even given the massive changes in society over the last century because in many ways basic human nature is just the same now as then.
Similar to The Plague by Camus. The progression basically goes:
1. Everyone ignores it since it's "not serious"
2. People play it down for political reasons
3. People start dying
4. People lock down
5. Alcohol sells out
At least where I am, this is exactly what happened.
When I read books, I enjoy it a lot more when I read a "known great" book. It's easier to just pick up a Dostoyevksy, Kafka, Saramago, or Murakami or whatever. Chances are I'm gonna like it, or it'll be entertaining enough.
When I try to explore my own likes, it ends up being frustrating because it takes a lot of trial and error. Consequently, I have no insensitive to read books that are recently published. It makes a lot more sense to wait for people to read books for me and tell me what are the great ones every decade. Meh, it works for me. Yes, I end up reading mostly 19th and 20th century stuff, but it feels sufficient.
Back when I was a kid my mom had a box of 7" vinyl records she gave me. For every Elton John or Hendrix she had, there were dozens of absolute garbage records. People often make the claim that music was better back then. No, it has just been filtered for you.
For books I tend to do the same as you. I have a finite amount of time on this planet and so little time to read in the first place. I usually reach for something older than 20 years.
It is interesting to note that even with these there are fashions. Abe Kobo was once casually referred to as Japan's most famous writer and now the name will get you a lot of blank stares, while Murakami was unavoidable for a while but is probably on his way out (I get the sense someone ten years younger than me is far less likely to be a fan).
ME TOO. I pretty much only read classics. They are just so philosophically complex! I wish that we read now, like we read then. But I suppose television and video content are an art in their own way, and I could adapt my writing preferences to the screen. But I just have no interest there. Perhaps I'm just stuck in another century!
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?
Your comment, in addition to that of some of the sibling comments to this one, is why I take such in incredibly dismissive attitude to the argument that piracy will mean that no new music, movies, or books will be produced. Even if it were true in an absolute sense—not a single wealthy failson made a passion project, bored teenager wrote better-than-the-original fanfiction, or freepunks made stuff for the joy of creation—there are already multiple lifetimes of music to hear, books to read, and movies to watch. Why should I care that they are not new? If you do have a genuine preference for contemporary works with modern themes, I understand why you would disagree with me. However, either of us trying to argue further in this hypothetical discussion would be less effective than agreeing that we disagree.
Sometimes they even improve, recently I was reading an old Stephen King where he spends a couple of paragraphs describing the rotary dialing process. When I first tried to read this book 30 years ago that was the sort of mundane detail that made the book such a slog, now it feels more like the attention to detail you appreciate in a period piece.
I think a lot of TV shows have reached the point where they're aging a lot slower too. If you launch a new sci-fi show today for instance, you're competing for eyeballs against Star Trek: TNG which hold up well in the modern day. When TNG came out old shows hadn't aged as well and the were unavailable to most people. DVD's and now streaming have given TV the equivalent of used book stores and creators now have to compete against the back catalogues.
That indeed does seem to be something of a challenge. I don't really find the Goodreads/other ratings that likely to predict whether I'll enjoy something, but there are countless famous works of fiction I mean to read which I know are, even if not necessarily to my taste, proven worthwhile to many people for a long time. Then there's a giant grab-bag of stuff of unknown quality with little way for me to sort through it. Unless I read a review of it that stirs me I'm unlikely to pick it up.
Not the OP, but the first two reasons why TV & movies from 70 years ago age worse are:
1. Quality of special effects
2. Specifically for TV, it was often treated as the medium where you dump scripts that weren’t good enough to be made into a movie.
The vast, vast majority of content from 70 years ago doesn't have special effects at all.
And I'm sorry but that's not how scripts work. Episodic television and one-off movies have entirely different dramatic structures and aren't even remotely interchangeable. You can't just turn a movie into TV.
One of the greatest TV shows of all time, I Love Lucy, is from 70 years ago. And in terms of enjoyment, it hasn't aged at all. Nor did it require special effects. ;)
Above all, the 1950's was called the "Golden Age of Television" for a reason! [1]
Sometimes those old books are fun in a quaint way. Talk about "negros" where you are expected to understand why the person isn't bad per se, but automatically unable to be anything other than a basic servant. We can laugh at it now, yet it was so common and wasn't even mentioned.
And then of course look at ourselves and wonder what the next generation will laugh at.
> 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.
Correct, but also beside the point. OP was saying that it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest one's time and money into new works when there are so many older, vetted works that remain to be read.
In the month it will take me to finish reading Storm of Swords, I will watch ~10 movies. Plus, I'm reading Storm of Swords, which needs no additional support from readers to be discovered or validated--though I still want to read it. Plus, I digitally loaned it from my local library.
I own a number of books (~200) and have probably owned x4 that total in my lifetime. Maybe 1/3 of those I paid full price for new. The rest I sourced either cheap on Ebay or about free from second-hand stores. I've spent probably less than $4,000 total on books, not counting textbooks, while being in the minority of people who buy and read books.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, but the question that comes to mind is something like this: how many people like me does it take to support one professional writer?
Non-fiction writers are way more likely to have other income sources than fiction writers. For example, I'm reading Marketing Made Simple (Donald Miller), which was free with Amazon Prime. I'm quite sure Donald Miller and his company are not sweating how much money they get from a Prime reader: getting anyone to read their book strengthens their overall sales funnel.
I've been an Audible paid subscriber for 10 years. I have 138 audiobooks in my library. At $10/month, that means I've paid Audible $1200 for ~2000 hours of "reading". Using the 25% royalties mentioned in a child comment (no idea if that's accurate) I've paid authors only $300 for all of that. That seems super low! And I imagine I'm in the top quintile in terms of paying for "books".
how many people like me does it take to support one professional writer?
Back of the envelope, I would estimate authors get 1/4 of book sales as royalties, so you've sent $1000 to authors in your lifetime. I don't know how old you are, maybe that's $100/year since you were at book-buying age. If an author gets by on $30k/year then it takes 300 people like you to support a professional writer.
That's not bad, really. If you watch 120 movies a year then you're probably supporting the movie industry more than the book industry but it sounds like you prefer movies to books anyway so that's fair.
I buy quite a few books. Almost all digital now. I probably buy a book every other month now. It'd be more, except that...
I also subscribe to Amazon Unlimited and read a lot of books on it.
I never buy movies now. If the theatres were open, I'd see 2, maybe 3 movies in a year with my wife. The rest I watch on Netflix/etc when they come out for free. I watch maybe 6 movies a month, and 4 of those are because we have a virtual movie night with a lot of friends every week since Covid started.
We watch a lot of TV, but again, Netflix/etc. We don't even pay for cable. We never buy TV series unless it's something really special.
While there are some that make meaningful amounts of money, all my experience suggests that writing non-fiction tech books for example, is overwhelmingly reputational.
I certainly still own--though I've gotten rid of a fair number--a lot of books but, no, I don't read a lot any longer. Maybe about 10 a year which is probably 20% of what I once did.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that buying second-hand books gives no money to the author.
I don't know, morally speaking if this should be the case. It does feel wrong for people to get the experience without paying the price of admission. Can this be solved logistically, though? And do publishers factor this into their RRP?
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"! Taking the book to my brothers house to read to his kids -- nope, that's illegal unless you buy another copy?
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 feasible solution is a kind of royalty fee on resales, but I can easily imagine this becoming a logistical nightmare. As I said, I'm not sure this problem has a workable solution.
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?
That same logic presumably applies to libraries. Books are physical objects at the end of the day just like a piece of pottery someone made. First sale doctrine explicitly allows the owner to lend or resell it to someone else.
Yes! Exactly! Right now the ebook library model is based off the physical book library model where the library purchases a certain number of ebooks (say 10) and the author only gets a portion of the royalties on those ten copies, and then the library loans those copies out to an unlimited number of people.
It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties every time someone reads their book. (Similar to how an artist gets paid everytime their song is streamed). I might actually write about this for a future post.
This is what I think the best course looks like. I know there are issues with Spotify's model (at least, I have heard people make this claim), but given that music had to transition to a streaming-based model (and considering that written text looks to be slowly going this way, too) the per-consumption royalty looks good to me.
Of course, instantiating this in the real world is another question. For ebook libraries, it certainly seems plausible, but for regular libraries?
Right, exactly. And we could learn from spotify (pay the creators more). But the ebook library is huge now and could easily be transformed. The only problem is that they aren't charging a monthly subscription fee (like Spotify) and so they would have to use donation dollars to fund that. And yet, I have to wait 15 weeks to get a book on my kindle because other people are reading it first, which seems very outdated.
> Books are physical objects at the end of the day
Disagree with this. There has been a very short period in human history (roughly from the invention of the printing press till the rise of ebooks/audiobooks) where books were primarily physical objects. Stories were told and preserved orally for thousands of years, and who knows where the future of the medium is.
Stories aren't books though, there's a reason we differentiate between the two. It's like saying a vinyl equals a song; it's merely the container that holds a song in a static form. It's not the song itself.
Buying a house from a homeowner gives no money to the original builder, or the first human being to inhabit that piece of land. Do you feel guilty about getting shelter without paying the price of admission?
I think this is a disingenuous comparison. Builders get paid to build houses. Authors, to my knowledge, do not frequently get paid to write books, they get paid when they sell books.
When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything. When you resell a book, you are (possibly) denying the author a sale.
> When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything
You're denying the builder a sale of a new house.
Re-selling books is already legal. You bought a physical item, not the right to use the item. Ownership implies the right to dispose of the item as one wishes. You asked whether it was morally correct. I was showing you that many other things are frequently resold with no moral implications.
In this case, Emily crowdfunded her novel using the cryptocurrency ETH. People "invested" in her book buy purchasing the NFT, so that they can later sell their investment again (and the writer will get royalties if they do).
I think this might be a little too out there to become mainstream. HOWEVER, I do think the library model could be tweaked to favor the author.
Right now the ebook library model is based off the physical book library model where the library purchases a certain number of ebooks (say 10) and the author only gets a portion of the royalties on those ten copies, and then the library loans those copies out to an unlimited number of people.
It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties every time someone reads their book. (Similar to how an artist gets paid everytime their song is streamed). I might actually write about this for a future post.
But things I cannot resell I would pay less for. For certain items the amount I'm willing to pay is a function also including what I can sell it for when I'm done with it.
Yes, I absolutely agree. When you buy something you imagine yourself reselling, you can factor the resale price into the total cost.
I don't think this is a counter to my argument, though. I'm not saying it is wrong to be able to resell books, I am just pointing out that reselling books without the author receiving any money strikes me as morally improper. As I mentioned in another comment, I'm not convinced that there exists a decent solution to this problem, and I imagine that it's at least in part factored into RRPs, but I just thought it was something to consider.
Well technology is solving this problem, e-books are not transferable so there is no secondhand market. Problem solved! (but don't expect to ever inherit a book collection that has titles you'd never heard of, that opens your eyes to different things).
> Not to mention, an author would have to come out with one book a year to maintain that salary.
Your math looks odd to me. You look at the amount a book earns in a single year and extrapolate that to the author's annual salary, but seem to assume that once the first year is up, the book stops earning. Does books earning passive over multiple years affect the numbers?
For what its worth, my single non-fiction book has generated passive income for about seven years now.
I fully agree with your larger point that earning a living off fiction is exceedingly difficult these days. I hope fiction authors can find new revenue models like you're exploring that are successful. But I fear that fiction will go the way of poetry and theatre where it becomes a niche art beloved by some but rarely lucrative enough to devote yourself full time to it.
"Most books peak in the first 10 weeks after their debut, then exit the market."
This is "most" so of course there are exceptions. And it sounds like you are one of them. That is amazing! Did it have a big bump at front, and then decrease over time? Or have you seen other bumps later on?
I do wonder if serial content might be better. Because you get a bump every time you have a release, vs. only every three years when you have a whole book release.
Either way, I'm fairly certain that it's like you say, and that fiction will go the way of poetry and become to niche to make a living from it. But I'm going to at least give it a go and see what happens!
I think that is largely because most writers don't know how to or don't care about marketing.
I published a novel in late november, and it's sales are low but steady to slowly increasing. A key aspect is that to "survive" past the initial bump you need to invest effort into building word of mouth and getting reviews, and that is a slow process. The people I got to help with marketing even actively advised against doing much marketing before we had a base of reviews, because they apparently find it almost impossible to get positive ROI on Amazon ads until there's a reasonable number of reviews.
I intentionally started writing a series, and everything I've seen and heard suggests series rarely even start selling decently until at least the 3rd volume, because people hold off to see if it's worth investing time in.
I'd advise against considering what happens to "most" books, because most books gets no marketing, no proper cover design, no effort in writing blurbs, no effort to push the books over time.
Oh I've heard that. The classic "third book" being the one that goes viral. (Gillian Flynn, Dan Brown, etc.)
I agree with you on considering most books (most books don't market), but even trying to learn from the successful books isn't entirely encouraging. Even the best ones don't see a lot of reads.
But the industry is rapidly changing. We don't all watch the same three television channels anymore. Niche content is more the norm than mass marketed content.
I think the whole "creator economy" is still in its infancy, and we have yet to see whether it will actually allow creators to monetize in a meaningful way. But it's worth engaging with it as an experiment to see what happens!
It's not just that the third book is what takes off, but that sales of book 1 and 2 rarely takes off before book 3 is out because people hold off and might sign up to your mailing list etc. but won't read until they know there's more coming.
I do certainly think the market is massively geared towards a tiny number of best-sellers, but there are a number of people who still have success with modest sales of individual books simply by focusing more on building a back catalogue and marketing to a fan base more likely to want to buy "everything". You can afford to spend quite a lot more on ads if a single sale might lead to 20 more than if one book is all you have.
But that require you to think about it as a business, and a lot of writers don't want to deal with that bit.
I know at least a few that will not buy any book in a series until it is completed, due to the number of book series that simply have petered out part-way though.
But it's a technical book on programming, so the whole economic and time model are just totally different compared to fiction. My model was to serially publish it online for free. There's a link to the mailing list at the top of each chapter. When I finished a chapter, I'd put it online and tell people about it. That did a good job of building up the mailing list. Then when the print edition was done, I could use that to tell people about it.
I had absolutely no expectation of this, but somehow having it online for free has been really good for actually selling copies too. I don't know if it's because it raises the book's profile, or because people can try before they buy, or maybe that just feel grateful that they don't have to buy? Either way, it worked out way better than I expected.
> I'm fairly certain that it's like you say, and that fiction will go the way of poetry and become to niche to make a living from it. But I'm going to at least give it a go and see what happens!
I really hope you're successful. Even if the money is falling out of it, fiction is the best way I know to share insight about the human condition with others. We'd be poorer as a species without it, regardless of what capitalism thinks.
Agree. My non-fiction, niche book generated some income for almost 10 years even though it was outdated after the first 5 or so. I am guessing that in fiction they can earn for a lot longer. There are also other effects to take into consideration: Even a moderate hit will generate interest for previous books; books in a series or in a trilogy will boost each other’s sales. Not that getting the moderate hit is easy in any way.
These are two completely different statistics: 1) last year, new releases sold poorly, perhaps unexpectedly (NYT article's claim); 2) last year, a relatively small portion of all currently released titles sold a lot of books, and most titles sold few books (linked article's data).
Pulling from the central table, last year: one title sold over 1 million copies; ten titles sold a collective 5-10 million copies; 267 titles sold a collective 26-133 million copies; 7,294 titles sold a collective 70-700 million copies; and 2.6 million titles sold between 0 and 2.6 BILLION copies. My guess is that last number is way closer to zero than 2.6 billion, so I'll exclude it when I say: the table the author cites shows that last year sold 100-840 million copies. Digital copies! Nearly double that when you include print books. So there's no support for the author's claim, "Books as a medium just don’t have an audience—or rather, they have a very niche audience."
Was last year bad for new release sales? Seemingly, according to NYT. Was last year relatively bad for all book sales? Maybe, I don't know. Does the data support the implication that 0.0001% of new authors will make a living? No. It says that 0.0001% of all currently selling books will single-handedly earn a living for their author in that year.
My wild guess is that authors make most of their money from new releases, so we'd really need to see the data underlying the NYT article on new releases, not this article on all online book sales.
Hmmmm, I think you're looking at that table wrong. Ten titles sold between 500,000 and one million copies (not 5-10 million copies). And 267 titles sold between 100,000 and 500,000 copies, (not in the millions). That top line is the highest one.
Isn't it saying that ten titles each sold between 500,000 and one million copies? So collectively they sold 5-10 million copies?
(I really enjoyed the article, by the way, once it was past claims about this data-- the points about fanfic and story monetization are important ones)
Oh, yes you are correct there. In online sales only (I don't have the brick & mortar numbers). So to your point, people are buying books, it's just that they are all buying the same top selling books. And thank you!!!!! I'm still trying to figure out the industry enough to succeed in it, but it's a hard industry to succeed in as it turns out!
I feel if you're including digital copies you need something to correct - I've received a number of kindle e-books for free that I've never even downloaded. There's no harm in adding to a collection when it's digital, whereas I am much more picky over free physical books.
Fair point-- I don't know how the data defined a "sale." However, the numbers are almost identical for print books, just a little lower. But same order of magnitude.
She's WAY off with her data, because she's only going classic publishing and ignoring the fact that the 'new and untested' serialization model has many successful practitioners and has for a long time. To get to NK Jemisin's 5k per month on Patreon, she went down past 22 writers on the graphtreon rank.
This part: 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).
That's just wrong. Pirateaba, Zogarth, Kosnik4, Shirtaloon, Wildbow, SenescentSoul and more make more than $5,000 a month - there are a bunch. There's a model here and it's working.
She didn't have success on Patreon because she didn't use a platform like webnovel, royalroad, her own website or something similar to release the free tier and link to the patreon like everyone successfully using patreon to pay for their writing does.
For me, the main reason for lowered annual books read is "no commute" (it IS possible to set time aside just to read, but over the decades, I have gotten used to read on buses, tubes, trains, planes... and thus frequently forgetting that I can actually just read whenever I want to).
Pre-COVID, I usually managed 120 to 150 books per year. Now, it is probably down to about 40.
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.
Rereading a book, one could pick up on things that were missed previously or that have been forgotten about. Also, one might be in a different life situation or mindset from one read to the next which could alter the perception or enjoyment of what's being read. Not to mention that some prose can be appreciated for its beauty.
TV shows, movies, and albums are often revisited by people who enjoy them. Even as I write this, I'm listening to an album right now that I've heard dozens of times before. I may not always be in the mood to listen to it, but my enjoyment of the music has not been eroded by how many times I've already heard it. Rather, being familiar with it, I appreciate both how it's composed, played, and the nuances that are now apparent to me that I certainly missed on my first listens.
One of my favorite books when I was younger was "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" by Scott McCloud. It was visually appealing to me at the time, but after several readings, I started to really grasp its concepts as an educational art book.
> Also, one might be in a different life situation or mindset from one read to the next which could alter the perception or enjoyment of what's being read
Catcher in the Rye springs to mind. Interesting reading at different times.
One additional point is that when you know where the plot is going and things that are "unknown" at the time, one can appreciate some of the hints or world building even more. Like a detective novel or so, on re-read knowing the killer one can analyze everything and get a new experience from the same content.
I also re-read like people listen to music. I read Harry Potter 1-3 a few times waiting for book four, then 1-2-3-4, then next year 1-2-3-4-5 etc, and then each exam period at uni I would read it when relaxing. Like, just turn my brain off, I don't want new input, just replay something. So I've probably read the first 3-4 books 30+ times (I had a count up to 20 or so).
I also find re-reading books frequently have diminishing returns, but after some time, you and your world changes, which results in you having a different point of view when you re-read the book.
As you change, the meaning of the book to you changes as well, and gives you new perspectives along with new ideas. E.g. a specific villain or a side character in the book might not be attractive or simply confusing to you, but as you re-read the book, you realize that you get them and they now make perfect sense.
Books, TV series, movies, music...if I make some emotional connection while experiencing it, I'm likely to want to repeat that experience later.
When I buy a book (or in the olden days, a DVD/etc), I'm factoring rereadings into the value proposition. If I don't think I'm going to want to reread, I'll prefer to get it from the library.
So, most content in my personal library is there because I expect to experience it repeatedly. And I'll tell you, it can be fascinating to take some experience you treasured as as preteen, and then experience it anew from the perspective of a parent. It's pretty funny relating more to the dopey dad and less to the hero.
But not everything is about getting a different take on repeat experiences. Sometimes I just want another hit of whatever that piece of media made me feel.
I do both. And movies. If it’s not worth reading or watching a second or third time, it wasn’t worth it the first time. I read Hamlet every year or two. It gets me every time. I’ve seen the Maltese Falcon about five times, and it still amazes me with its perfection each time. I’ve seen the Pickle Rick episode of Rick and Morty three times, and I fully intend to watch it three more times. Pure genius. Anything good has layers and details that usually can not be fully appreciated the first time through. Do you only listen to a song you like once?
"Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book."
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.
The complexity of A Song of Ice and Fire... You get a lot out of a second read-through. There the density of the plot development is so thick that you don't even know what you're supposed to focus on. Some things that are mentioned in the first few hundred pages can resonate much stronger after reading the last few hundred pages.
That's just one example. It obviously depends on the book.
Getting "absolutely nothing" out of something seems more like a choice.
At different points in your life great stories can impact you in different ways. A simple example of one that could do this is The Road by Cormack McCarthy. I never had kids, but from what I've heard people who read it after becoming a parent are hit with far stronger emotions than those who don't have kids.
Actually, yes. I haven't done it with books, but there are a few shows I've rewatched. Usually it's something I enjoy having on in the background while I do other things, similar to having background music. It started as me just knowing I liked the show, and not needing to pay full attention to it to follow along. But I notice a lot of new things on subsequent viewing, and knowing the basic plot already I'm able to appreciate how the writers are setting things up, establishing the characters, etc. in ways that become very significant later. And the first-time through I just don't notice that kind of thing or appreciate it. It feels like getting more depth in the art of it rather than just experiencing more breadth from another artist.
I also look at paintings more than once in my life, consume my favorite meals more than once and so on. For those without a perfect memory, re-reading a good book can often teach us new things.
Rereading (or "reexperiencing") something can be very valuable. Since you already know where the destination is going to be, you get to focus your attention on more of the little details you might not have picked up on the first time through.
With that said, I only occasionally do it for books because of the time commitment. I have a large list of books I want to read, and only read about 25 books a year. So if I am going to reread something, it's usually for a specific reason or I am was in a specific mood.
When Vladimir Nabokov was teaching literature, he instructed the students to read each novel twice, to get over the plot suspense so they could concentrate on the details. When they appeared for the final examination, they encountered questions like, “Describe the wallpaper in the Karenins’ bedroom”.
While I understand the idea of rereading a few books here and there, it's pretentious assholery to imagine you shouldn't read new books because you're getting older. That's just an idiot who pretends to be the smartest guy in the room. There aren't too many types of people more pathetic than someone who never tries new entertainment. "I only like the old stuff". Because someone is only a good artist or writer after they've been dead for a century.
I re-read maybe 5% of books, and I tend to get a lot out of re-reading. Nassim Taleb said something like "if it's not worth re-reading, it was not worth reading in the first place".
My re-watch rate on movies and TV series is much higher, probably 85% of movies I will watch more than once. TV series, maybe 50%.
Some people just read or watch and never care to think much about it after. That's cool too; doesn't hurt me any.
The value of re-reading will be low if you’re reading high noise to signal books that could be compressed into a blog post (e.g. anything by Adam Grant).
If you read more dense books of philosophy, literature, or otherwise you’ll get a lot more value out of re-reading since you likely have missed things upon first read. Same thing with tv shows that contain a complicated plot vs. ones that are churned out for quick consumption.
I’m as surprised at your surprise! I’ve seen The Office in its entirety more than 10 times, my other favorite shows 3-5 times each, and most generally popular shows at least twice. Often when a new season arrives, I start again at season 1 if it’s been a while. Same goes for my favorite novels, of which there aren’t as many.
Perhaps it’s relevant that I have a terrible memory for plot.
I'm the same for fiction; I can't read a fiction book twice. My SO can re-read the same fiction over and over. I just don't get it. Now, there are some movies I can watch again. But only once or twice and then I'm done for a very long time.
Re-reading Pop-Psy and Airport literature is not the recommended reading. How about reading Hayek, Strauss for second time? How about reading man's search for meaning for the third time?
You re-read great works, not NYT best shiller! (sic).
Quite an assumption to make about those that don’t like to re-read books. I love reading, I’m very picky about the books I read, and yet I find I’m only re-reading a small handful of books, many years after I last read them.
I had to make some assumptions - given the OP said they did not see any value in re-reading. Not every thing is a candidate for re-read, for the fact of the matter 90% of airport literature is not worth single read let alone re-read.
Take any good from my post and leave the rest. I am not the most finesse commentator.. but at least I am not accusatory.
Why would you re-read them when you could read something new? Do you find you're actually getting a significant amount of value or joy from it the second time around?
I ask because I think a good portion of the reason I enjoy software development is the absolute and total hatred I have for repetition in my life.
For some highly complex books, a reread is more like a re-analysis of the text based off of ones existing knowledge. There will be nuances and details that were missed the first go around, that is uncovered the second time around, making the understanding of the piece richer. It’s like mathematics- everything is built on fundamentals.
(Some people also derive comfort in familiar stories.)
More than 90% of things that are new to me disappoint me. I don’t know how to find new things, especially fiction, with the expectation that it will hold my interest. Whereas something new from my favorite author has much better odds, and rereading my favorite novel is a sure thing.
1. It’s totally easy to miss things when reading: certainly little delightful details, or even whole ideas or plot points.
2. It’s not like there are millions of great books out there. Some entertaining ones, some informative ones, a few that are both, and a very few life changers.
> As you get older, you should read fewer new books,
What? Why? Who says?
I plan to read just as many if not more new books as I get older.
I do not understand your answer about "the leverage algorithms can provide".
I enjoy reading new fiction books. Why "should" I do it less as I get older? If I someday retire, I would plan to use some of my additional free time to read even more books.
It has been about 15+ years since I had watched TOS star trek. I recently started watching them again. I recently went back and am watching 1 a week, same with Stargate. I find them very enjoyable again. Some books/movies/shows work better at a particular pace. I found that binge watching them makes them decidedly less enjoyable. Other shows are basically designed to be 10 hour movies. So those are OK to do that with (westworld being an example of that).
Sometimes it is worth taking a break and give it a decent amount of time. Then watch it again. I have a few dozen shows I know I liked when I was younger. I could even give you a 'outline' of one of the shows that I could make up. Yet for the life of me I could not tell you exactly what 1 episode was about without looking it up. I know I liked them. Yet I no longer really remember them. Those are ripe for revisiting. But sometimes it is best to leave them as 'fondly remembered' and my older sensibilities do not match what I had years ago.
But yeah watching the same thing every other day and you will grow bored with it.
I also recently went through the TOS. It really holds up. The best episodes are timeless. TOS has an energy and drama that I don’t see in any of the shows or movies that leach off of that world. I’m probably biased, as TOS is part of my childhood, but it’s the only one I like.
I don't know if you should but it's not a bad advice. I do that occasionally, re-read a book I read as a teenager or young adult and it is interesting how sometimes one can pick up different details or understand things differently.
1. Leisure reading is at an all time low and declining [1]. I think reading books will go the way of live theater and classical music performances. It won't go away, but instead of a common, "every-man/woman" type of outing, it will be more niche/special occasion. I.e. whereas tons of people used to read often for pleasure in the early part of the 20th century, it is heading more towards a "only on vacation" or other special-occasion type activity for most folks.
2. Publishing has always been a hit-driven business, but my thought is that, like many other industries affected by the internet, it has consolidated even more (i.e. it's much easier to search and buy just based on "top" lists than it was previously - a popular book can reach a ton more people, but it's much harder to be popular in the first place).
I don't think it's going to turn into a "special occasion" activity. Rather, I think you're going to have a smaller and smaller number of voracious readers, but those readers will continue to consume books at a pretty steady pace.
And for those readers it's about consistency. Looking at the Chinese translated web novels: the stories don't even have to be great, but they have enjoyable characters and there's an enormous amount of content.
People read machine translated stories! Sometimes you can't even tell what's going on based on those translations, but people still read them.
The parallel to performing arts is the most plausible, yet optimistic counter I've seen to "people don't read books anymore." Fiction has its Harry Potters just as theater has its Wickeds, and Patreon is set to enable the closest literary equivalent to an urban live theater scene.
I look at the question of money and art at two levels:
1. As an individual, what is the right mindset to have about my creativity? At this level, I agree with you. Looking at the economic trends, the only sane way to create and feel good about it is to do it in my free time, focus on the intrinsic reward and have some other job that pays the bills. I'm very fortunate in that my other job takes good care of me.
But there is another level I think about a lot:
2. At the cultural level, is it good for a society if people can only make art in their leisure time? I consider art to be (among other things) the mechanism by which we define, share, and propagate our culture. Our artworks teach each generation what we value and how we think one should live. They show us what it means to be human.
If that art can only be produced by people wealthy enough to have sufficient spare time (books, poetry, and painting) or giant corporations (film, TV), then you place complete control over your culture in the hands of the rich. Do you remember in the 80s and 90s when it seemed like almost every movie had an anti-corporate angle to it? Did you notice that they all stopped doing that? What should we expect when huge corporations are producing almost every film we see.
Should we be surprised to see that our society is failing to solve inequality when most books are written by the wealthy, about the wealthy, for the wealthy? How are those at the top supposed to understand and care for those at the bottom when those at the bottom don't even have the time to share their stories with them?
I think a just society needs art-makers to be able to focus on their art without worrying about money because it's the only way to ensure that everyone at every economic level gets to participate in defining our culture.
This is well said and puts into words something I have struggled to articulate for a while.. Thanks. Always nice to see other people value the arts in the tech sphere. :)
Not always about the wealthy, but often at least through the lens of the wealthy. Rich people write about poor people differently than poor people would write about poor people.
But also, yes, often about the wealthy. Here's synposes of four of the five current NY Times Bestsellers:
> Over twenty years ago, the heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors — and the items stolen from her family were never recovered.
> Until now. On the Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials WHL3.
And:
> While Maisie believes the boy and wants to help, she must maintain extreme caution: she’s working secretly for the Special Operations Executive, assessing candidates for crucial work with the French resistance.
And:
> There, Stone finds that a dual-pronged threat is hiding in plain sight among the stately houses and exclusive coastal clubs, and the incursion isn't easily rebuffed. These enemies have friends in high places, funds to spare, and a score to settle with Stone . . . and only the cleverest plot will draw them out into the open. From luxuriously renovated homes to the choppy ocean waters, the pursuit can only lead to an explosive end.
And:
> Straight as an arrow special agent Kate O'Hare and international con man Nick Fox have brought down some of the biggest criminals out there. But now they face their most dangerous foe yet-a vast, shadowy international organization known only as the Brotherhood.
Directly descended from the Vatican Bank priests who served Hitler during World War II, the Brotherhood is on a frantic search for a lost train loaded with $30 billion in Nazi gold, untouched for over seventy-five years somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Europe.
These are stories about the elite. You may argue "Well, sure, but people like reading about the rich and powerful because they are more exciting to read about." But that is in itself partially a result of a culture we've built that says that your story is less meaningful if you aren't successful or powerful.
> You may argue "Well, sure, but people like reading about the rich and powerful because they are more exciting to read about." But that is in itself partially a result of a culture we've built that says that your story is less meaningful if you aren't successful or powerful.
There is something to what you say, but perhaps less than you think. Stories about unjustly downtrodden members of the elite overcoming adversity and opposition to return to their rightful place in the social order (eg. every fairytale princess ever) didn't circulate as oral traditions for centuries due to the patronage of the upper crust. Nor can you really explain the popularity of the current incarnations of these stories (eg. as Disney princesses) that way.
Incidentally, I (vaguely) recall a story about a wizard from an alternate reality seeking out a baby switched at birth with one in our world. Said baby grew up to be a garbage man in our world, but always felt out of place. Said wizard offers to return said garbage man to his rightful place in the magical realm.
Bapr gurl'ir erghearq gb gur zntvpny ernyz ur'f unaqrq n oebbz naq gbyq gb fgneg fjrrcvat bhg gur fgnoyrf.
This was a short story (perhaps even a short-short), and not Zelazny's Wizard World novel (or any other novel).
The "about rich people" part is probably a distraction now that I think about it. With regards to culture building, I think it's much more important to focus on who is telling the story, not what the story is about.
Poor people telling stories about rich people still enables the poor to have agency in culture building. (And, in fact, it is probably most effective to have them tell stories about the rich so that the rich can be seen from an outsider's perspective.)
As someone with many lifelong creative outlets, I can think of 3 reasons to create. 1. You love doing it for it’s own sake 2. You can’t help it 3. You believe in your heart you have something to say that must be said. You may well be delusional about the last one, but I still consider it a good reason.
I agree. When I started to treat my writing endeavours as a hobby rather than as a path to fame, glory, riches and world domination, I also started to enjoy the writing process a lot more. Nowadays I only write when I want to write, and I only write what I want to write. It's a freedom I've come to cherish.
Do you finish anything though? A lot of writers find that the effort of finishing the story is a lot more work than writing the early parts and so they have half-finished novels in their files that realistically they will never finished.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide if that is okay or not. For me, I know I have too many unfinished projects and so my stories will remain dreams that never get written down.
Thats most of everything though. The hardest part of finishing your programming project is the last icky bit that you really didn't want to do yet, or bug fixing, or polishing. The last part of painting is the touch ups, and thats also the longest part. Its much easier to just come up with a sketch of a piece of art (or any project) than it is to get into the nitty gritty painstaking details that it requires before you can say its finished.
I've finished 3 novels, and one remains half-written. My downfall is always the world building - I often find it's more fun daydreaming the world rather than having to deal with cantankerous characters who refuse to go where the plot needs them to go, and always argue about everything.
I don’t think you have to approach creative endeavours as hobbies at all. If you chose to approach them as a job, however, then I think you should do exactly that.
If your writing is your business, then how can you justify spending 2-3 years working on a single project with no prior funding and a sales projection of less than 2000 copies priced at whatever a book costs? Imagine if build software startups the way some authors try to become full time writers...
I get it of course. We all know the romantic story of the creative master who only puts out a single master piece per decade, but that’s something you do when you’ve made it. Not when your projected sales are less than 2000 copies.
Worth noting that serial fiction is far from a new creation or invention.
Charles Dickens wrote most of his work as a weekly or monthly serial, and that's why his stories rip along with regular cliffhangers. His single volume works were mostly less popular and less well known today with the exception of A Christmas Carol.
He wasn't alone either - his success with The Pickwick Papers led many others to follow, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes stories originally serialised in The Strand magazine.
This model of quality fiction being in magazines never really entirely went away in terms of a mark of quality - even though they now print short stories rather than serialisation, it's likely much harder to get your fiction into the New Yorker than it is to get a publishing contract - so it's interesting to me that it's making a return.
As somebody who has wanted to write fiction for some time, but could not conceive of sitting down and writing a book in the traditional way, this appeals to me.
As a keen reader, I'm excited to see what comes out of it, too.
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 not that great a writer, that they cannot reach the top 1% of their profession.
Writing books is like making video games. Many people dream of creating one, and the vast majority of them are pretty bad. Nevertheless, some incredible books and video games are created, and the stars make a lot of money. Writing books may not be a good idea if your plan is to write some average books and make an average amount of money, but if you think you can write an amazing book, then what else can really compare?
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.
> Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the top-selling author, selling over a million copies?
Pretty much not. The vast majority of best selling books are produced by the same few authors year after year. It's far more marketing than meritocracy. Some of those authors farm out ghostwriting duties to numerous authors who will get paid some fixed rate (not royalties) to do most of the writing.
Or, to put it a different way, the odds of becoming an author that sells more than 500,000 copies are probably similar to or less than the odds of becoming a successful Hollywood actor. And probably similar to creating a video game like Minecraft or being one of the founders of a unicorn.
Even in the video game development industry, the stars have to start somewhere. Notch himself started as a developer at King before moving on to Jalbum, then Wurm Online, before even starting Minecraft.
How else do you get the skills to create a masterpiece without starting on average titles for average pay?
Selling a million copies would put them in the top 0.00003% of their profession - merely being in the top 1% only puts you in the ramen-eating 1k-10k sales bracket.
"While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one."
a great book can have much more social impact than any movie, tv show, or other medium. Books allow for detail and development that is unrivaled by other mediums
I think this is very open to debate. How many people in the world have seen Star Wars? I would argue that no book short of the Bible has had a higher impact.
"Buck Rogers is a science fiction (and later, particularly space opera) character created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., subsequently appearing in multiple media".
Star Wars is basically that, as a movie, tuned and optimized. It's a complicated question, but I think it's quite possible Star Wars would not and could not exist in the absence of the original, pre-Star-Wars, novella.
Which became all sorts of things such as comic strips… but started as a book.
I have one big issue with the book industry... many actually... but related to the article, all this whining is self imposed.
Literary books are marketed far heavier than genre. This is the equivalent to arthouse films vs what actually makes money as a movie/show.
Let's take one similar plot. A chemistry teacher is diagnosed with cancer, cant get treated and eventually dies. Literary and arthouse will do a discovery piece on how this person copes with death and cries with their family, then character dies. Genre... the dude builds a meth empire and everything the arthouse did, the genre adds in. Let's be serious about which was really going to be successful and why.
Entertainment is about escaping boring. You fail that, you fail in general. Most book lists are boring people with boring problems doing boring things.
The book industry did this to themselves by shitting on the genre writers. The publisher that does a marketing campaign, "to hell with boring literary books" and pushes mysteries, scifi, cozys, fantasy and others, they'll open up to the demographic that's not "regular readers". Thats about 70% of a population is an untapped market. Most people who dont read on a normal basis have been trained by school and the book media that fun books are "wrong". I have zero sympathy for the book industry in this regard and I'm an avid reader. I've converted more non-readers than any guilt tripping article regarding this problem.
I don’t really see the evidence backing this claim. Most popular fiction books on Goodreads are not exactly “deep.” Publishers aren’t some stupid ideologues either. It’s far more probable that books simply can’t compete with the addictive, visual, social entertainment that is growing by the day.
This isn’t such a big problem either. The minority that does read books are still huge in absolute terms, and we have more options than ever to read.
> It’s far more probable that books simply can’t compete with the addictive, visual, social entertainment that is growing by the day.
The thing is, they aren't competing. Those attracted to addictive visual social entertainment weren't likely to read a book anyways. The type that enjoys both does both, and does not consider one to be a replacement of the other.
I think you're spot on. I'm an avid reader but I enjoy all the "low-brow" stuff. Tropey high fantasy, cheesy sci-fi, formulaic legal thrillers, I love it all. If it has "spy" anywhere in the description I'm in.
But you're right - the only books I ever hear about from a marketing standpoint are the ones my wife is reading for her book club. So either Oprah talked about it, or it's part of the "book club marketing machine" or whatever.
I wish the publishing industry could turn things around. I think the low percentage of people who actively read fiction is ultimately a bad thing. Binge watching Netflix is not the same as binge reading a good book series imo.
I might have to add "spy" in the description of my next novel.
> the only books I ever hear about from a marketing standpoint
I'm actually pushing my novel via Taboola at the moment. It's definitively not profitable in terms of sales of a single book, but interestingly in terms of signups to my e-mail list it's one of the best I've found, and I'm spending a tiny amount on it each month on the theory that I'm reaching users who are less jaded and more likely to be outside of the typical bubble I reach on e.g. twitter, and who might well turn out to be worthwhile to be able to repeatedly market to over time in the hope of seeding some word of mouth outside of my normal audience.
Half the fun for me (this is a hobby) is trying to figure out the marketing channels that will work...
The low percentage off readers isn't a bad thing: they buy book after book and keep the industry going. Sure there aren't as many as would buy a movie (however you get your movies - cable, dvd, theater...), but that is still a large enough niche to be worth serving.
However expanding the niche would be a good thing.
> The publisher that does a marketing campaign, "to hell with boring literary books" and pushes mysteries, scifi, cozys, fantasy and others, they'll open up to the demographic that's not "regular readers". Thats about 70% of a population is an untapped market.
Tor? DAW? You talk like no one ever thought of publishing science fiction or fantasy books. It's been going on all along!
Like I said to another commenter, avid readers know these publishers. Outsiders who would potentially read from them dont know they exist. Non readers think books like The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter are once in a lifetime books. They're actually fairly normal genre pieces. Difference was, these were marketed better.
Every major publishing house has a SFF imprint with its own marketing budget and does marketing campaigns. Tor dot com (Macmillan), Orbit Books (Hachette), etc. They have marketing campaigns on youtube, tiktok, instagram, twitter and more. They have little video trailers, cover reveals, physical and collectible advance copies etc.
When there is a book that "everyone is talking about" (i.e Oprah or the New Yorker or whatever) it's usually a memoir of someone's difficult life, usually a member of a declared "oppressed" group. For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me."
I read that book. It's not even supposed to be enjoyable, and it's not really great writing or something that I feel like I need to tell my friends about. Essentially it's stuff you feel like you "should" read rather than you "want" to read. Like vegetables instead of ice cream. The ice cream is the page turning thrillers where some guy is beating up criminals in parking garages and chasing art thieves around the world.
The book industry puts its highest profile promotion on vegetables instead of ice cream.
The average person who doesn't visit a bookstore has zero clue. If you're a reader, its all duh, but you're acting like an elitist then. Just because you know, doesn't mean outsiders know. At that, the "right books to read" attitude pisses me off. Its everywhere in some form or another in popular media where someone can accidentally see it.
The industry is constantly marketing to their diminishing demographic instead of trying to figure out how to increase it again.
Talk to non readers to find out their knowledge set of what kind of books are out there. Again, I convert folks all the time. I get zero a year readers to an average of 6 to 10 a year. Mostly because i used to hate reading until i got converted as well. I know the pain points.
I know the following will sound like something only a sock puppet would say, but I created an account just to agree with the level of rancor you've got towards the boring-by-default literary world. I got serious about writing as a teen, and being a serious writer meant aping the great literature I was reading -- ie an emphasis on fine prose and emotional weather reporting -- which led to an acute lack of juice in my fiction. Trying to remedy that now, and always looking to hear more from people working on that same project.
So... out of curiosity, what are you looking for out of a blog? A few people have commented I should over the year. I dont have one, but I've thought about doing one.
Based solely on this comment thread, I say this should be post #1:
"I convert folks all the time. I get zero a year readers to an average of 6 to 10 a year. Mostly because i used to hate reading until i got converted as well. I know the pain points."
I used to read 30-ish novels a year, and now it's more like 4. Would love to get back on the horse, I'm sure there are plenty of others. Finding fun books to read is tough.
As for post 2, 3, 4...? I dunno, but I'm on Twitter at atseajournal, and happy to hear about whatever.
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.
Even if your manager will mostly rely on their own judgement, the write-ups will be the only thing that future managers (at the same org) can rely on to learn about your work, and also for things like promotion, your manager will probably need to convince a committee, so being able to draw from your self-assessment will help them argue your case.
“Novelist” is not a job where lots of people would be expected to be making healthy middle class incomes. An average person is going to be able to read maybe a few thousand books in their life and the older books don’t get any worse so there is more competition every year.
How many basketball players are earning more than $100,000 a year? Not many, because everyone who likes basketball wants to watch the same few people who are really great at it. The same is true with novels, so unless you have the talent and drive and hustle to get to the top of the game, then you should consider your writing a hobby just like the suburban dad playing basketball with his buddies harbors no thoughts of trying out for the Chicago Bulls.
One book that really changed my life was "Feeling Good" by David Burns. It kinda popularize Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But the book wasn't an overnight success. It languished for years as his publisher refused to put any marketing dollars into it. They made it clear that his book wasn't really gonna get any love. Anyway, one day he got a call from Phil Donahue's producer. If I recall correctly, Burns had spent years doing any local spot he could get, and made it a point to be extra appreciative and grateful to anyone who interviewed him. One of these people went on to become one of Donahue's producers. (Donahue was in the class of Oprah back in the 80s and 90s). Overnight, his book became a huge success.
There's a lot of stories of 'overnight' successes actually being many many years in the making. Anyway, this was just one relevant one that came to mind reading this.
A friend of mine is a genre fiction writer and he makes good money the hard way: by getting his books optioned for film & tv.
He has no kids, is married to someone whose family has a lot of money, and spent twenty years achieving very little while writing a lot.
But he worked like a dog on his fiction and currently has multiple books in various levels of 'development' and a film set to be shot this year with a known leading actress (not known to me, but certainly to fans of the genre).
Ultimately I think some success can only be achieved by grinding, and not everyone is in a position to do that mentally or financially.
I encourage all authors to self publish. I self published two books, prices are $99 and $199. I only sold 2500 copies in 3 years but it's a nice supplement to main income since there is no publisher and only fee is Stripe's. I often read online about authors who sold 50,000 or 100,000 copies with big-name publisher but made less money than me. Which is ridiculous.
I recommend having some knowledge for free, for example, open source project. Charge more per copy and expect lower number of sales. Continuously improve project and book. Collect reviews in respectful way.
> As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers.
She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with each chapter being released individually.
I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters. Or long delays. Episodic gaming was a big hype in the game industry for a while but it suffered really heavily from these issues and it's now pretty much defunct. A few companies like telltale made it work but even telltale is now out of business. The 'early access' model was also tried there but is failing for similar reasons: There is no incentive to ever finishing a game, in fact the incentive is to never finish it.
It also means you'd be spending $100 on a single book. In this model you pay $8-$9 a chapter, normally this is the price you'd pay for an entire book. I also wouldn't want to wait for the next chapter every time. I don't see this working out at all.
I don't know what the answer is. But I don't think this is it.
Edit: As many people have pointed out this model has been around much longer, even before the internet... I didn't know that and thanks for pointing it out! I still don't think it will work for me as a reader though. I view a book as a unit, and having reading sprints of a few hours per month will dilute the story for me.
Serialized novels used to be common, though. Many of Dickens's novels were famously serialized weekly. Alexandre Dumas' famous novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were also published as serials. There are plenty of other examples. More recently, apparently In Cold Blood and Bonfire Of The Vanities were both initially published as serials.
Even today, comic books are effectively serialized narrative stories that are pretty reliably published on schedule and have writers who have to keep up for months at a time.
> Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between.
Different writers have different approaches to work. Some writers work in highly productive sprints with long fallow periods, and you're right this model probably wouldn't work well for them. But some novelists do work steadily (Stephen King I believe still tries to write for a couple hours every single day and only takes relatively short breaks between novels), and the fact that this model used to work for a number of books that are now considered classics seems to indicate it can still work in at least some cases.
I'd actually be more worried about the consumer side - the death of magazines makes this model tougher. A given author can reliably produce a novel over the course of a year or two, perhaps, but probably not indefinitely (comic books solve this problem by having writing teams do arcs and then swap out the writer). Magazines used to bundle multiple authors, so subscribers weren't affected by the break period of a single author. In a world where people subscribe to individual authors on Substack and there's no bundling of many authors writing, yeah, it's a tougher sell.
> His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
Weekly instalments worked at that time and, while it would still work today to some degree, I see a lot of change in direction to binge-ing shows and books.
With that being said, in Japan web-novels are quite common among teenagers - which later on might get a publishing deal to get a print version. BUT, the authors are not professionals and write as a hobby, and making money with their stories happens when they get the print deal, and not publishing online.
It works in China, but there the authors get paid by word count. And yes, it does lead to exactly the types of problems you can imagine. But there are so many of these stories that some end up being very engaging.
Also, sites like Royalroad and Scribblehub have a fair few authors who make a significant amount of money through Patreon and the like.
> I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters.
Not just from the author's side. From a reader's perspective this would also not work. I don't want to start reading a book a chapter at a time. I don't even like reading books that are part of an unfinished series.
For me, as someone who reads quite a lot of books, there is nothing more satisfying than finding a new series that you are interested in and discovering the entire series is already finished. You can then just binge through the whole thing.
The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.
I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.
> The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.
While I know that feeling somewhat…
> I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.
… how would that work when series of books (at least the ones I'm familiar with) are often written and published over the course of several years, or perhaps in some cases even decades, i.e. much slower than your typical Netflix series?
At those timescales, that means authors would be getting neither feedback nor payments for a very long time, and it also increases the risk that in the end, the whole thing might not be published at all.
While unfinished series of books (or unfinished books themselves for that matter) can indeed be frustrating from a certain point of view, I still think the world is mostly a better place for them having already been published even in that unfinished state.
There are enough books where the first few were good, but the final was terrible that I'm not sure I agree. I've learned to be happy with never having finished some series because they started great but by the middle weren't worth finding out how it finished.
Maybe novels in a series need the literary equivalent of a recap, so one can remember who the characters were and what happened, instead of having to reread the whole series to understand the newest book in the series when it comes out.
The effort of picking a story up again is a fair argument against. There are some genres (crime fiction) where I think that the anticipation of waiting for a chapter could genuinely add to the experience.
Yes exactly, I don't like this at all either.. I know I will get less absorbed in the story if I have to wait a month in between each chapter and in the end I'll just give up.
This is almost exactly what a subgenre called LitRPG does. The authors usually run a Patreon where patrons can read chapters in advance. If you look at this [0], there are 4345 patrons and the lowest tier is $1.00, giving a lower bound of $52k per year. Although it's likely to be far more higher than that, if you look at the patron->dollars ratio here [1]. In general, the model seems to function very well in some specific scenarios.
Serialized fiction is basically how many many classics came to us. Today, lots of online fiction, like Andy Weir's The Martian or Scott Alexander's Unsong, starts out as serialized fiction that comes out in sections. The episodic model for books isn't novel.
Amazon is launching a new serialized book program called Vella.
It seems sort of overly complicated to me in that Amazon will sell "tokens" to readers in batches with discounts for volume. The tokens can then be spent on episodes on Vella at the rate of 1 token per 100 words in the episode.
Apparently this is a thing they're copying from elsewhere, and it's supposedly huge in China.
Martha Wells does this with her Murderbot Diaries books [1].
The series is fantastic and the latest book was great, but £8 for something that I finished in less than an hour felt a bit steep. Especially for an ebook with literally 0 marginal cost.
I'm sure it took me more than an hour to read that book, but I really enjoy that series so it was well worth the price to me. It's definitely a short book (novella?) but I get almost as much out of it as I do longer books.
And if the larger books are artificially padded, I actually enjoy them less.
- I've paid $50 for an e-book with content that I thought was really valuable (and it was worth every penny).
- In the 2020s the book could be accompanied by supporting material (webcasts etc) which would increase the perceived value.
- Some people would be prepared to pay more for early access and to support an author they really like.
I think that part of it is a change in focus of the book's content: rather than being accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible make it really valuable to a subset.
Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to book length. A series of chapters with more dense content would be, in my view, be much more valuable (counting the cost of my time).
And of course as others have noted that many great books have been published as serials (albeit in magazines and newspapers).
>Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to book length.
I think by the time you took your scalpel to a typical business book, you might be left with 50-100 pages. The core idea is probably a magazine article but there are usually useful examples, context, etc.
The problem is that publishing industry economics demand something more like 250 to 300 pages (and truth be told a lot of readers would feel a bit ripped off if they paid a typical book price for a 75 page book).
Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't some made up BS as supported by real customer experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably lack the story to make it stick.
There is actually an 18 page summary of Crossing the Chasm in my local Amazon store - it gets 2 star ratings.
I think that there are some potentially conflicting forces:
- a short exposition is probably better for the reader
- less than 200 pages is seen as poor value for money
- people generally expect to read from start to finish
For me I'd much prefer books which fail the read from start to finish test but have clearly signposted sections that I can choose to read and sample from.
Sherlock Holmes started with this model (being published in The Strand Magazine with other stories and articles) and it's still used for manga. It's a little bit different as they were not single-author, but I don't see why it couldn't work again.
> Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between.
Getting inspired is a part of a job. Here's an example:
"Someone once asked Mr. Faulkner if he wrote by inspiration or habit and he said he wrote by inspiration, but luckily inspiration arrived at 9 every morning."
I think most readers would scoff at those price points, especially when comparing to the plethora of content available from streaming services such as Netflix, which is at $8-9/month for individual use.
That being said, is there a model for a group of authors/publishers that is $8-9/month for a growing large selection novels (a la Netflix catalog)? If there is, it probably won't 'solve' any of the issues the article and others are bringing up here.
Some authors seem to chop up their novels into 3 or more novellas. Vandermeer's Southern Reach was all released around the same time and could have been one book from the outset. He would probably deny it, but w/e. Can't say I blame authors.
Word is that people on average don't read more or less than in the past. If that's true I wonder what's responsible for disparity. Are there more authors than before?
Yes, I think there's a strong possibility this might wind up being the case. My idea is only a working hypothesis as I try to figure out a model that will work for the fiction author and right now I'm banking on the idea that it USED to work (and that Substack CURRENTLY works). But I am definitely open to ideas if there is another one that might work better!
It was the dollar figures that didn't make sense to me. Sure, if you can sell your fiction book for $100 on an installment plan, that brings in a lot more money per fan than a $10 book sold in one shot does. But those two scenarios seem rather different not so much because one is episodic but because one is getting 10x the dollars for the same final product.
Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month
I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months, even for authors that I absolutely love. With my reading habits, I couldn't even afford to pay that much across the volume of books I read if most of my favorite authors switched to such a model.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If I paid $8/month to every author that I like enough to buy most of their books, that'd easily end up at $500+/month, and maybe $1,000/month. Compare that to buying all their books (even in hardcover), which is around $1,000 per year.
Plus I have no interest in reading things a chapter at a time. I read one book or series from start to finish at a time. I don't like jumping back and forth between many different novels.
>I'm not paying > $40 to read a single book over the course of multiple months
Me neither. Maybe I would buy the book in a presale, but that's it. This kind of selling just work for early adopters, the kind of people who stand in line for hours to buy a new product.
> Not to mention, an author would have to come out with one book a year to maintain that salary.
I wouldn't classify releasing one book per year as a full time job, at least not based upon on the data provided.
Turning a writing into a full time job means:
- Investing considerable time into promoting a book, in an effort to net more than 10,000 copies sold.
- Writing books that are heavily based upon research, in which case your book should be selling for more than $15 per copy.
- Publishing more than a book per year, most likely in forms other than books (unless you're an established author).
I'm not going to pretend that consistently writing 300 words of publication quality material per day is easy. Some of us are lucky if we can do as much one day in a year. On the other hand, it should not be easy. At the very least, an author is implicitly asking each reader to invest several hours of their life into the product of their labors. Authors need to be willing to put as much effort into writing as readers put into their livelihood.
1000 books sold does not imply 1000 true fans. Just because someone spent $10-$30 on a book, that doesn't mean they read the book, or like the book, or are willing to drop $100 for the author's next book (or next 12 months' output).
Computers and the Internet have democratized culture in a way never seen before. This is both good and bad. Newspapers are dying. Television is dying. Hollywood is dying. Books are dying. Now we have people co-creating on blogs, YouTube, self-publishing, and fan-fiction websites. The production quality is certainly down from the peak of professional culture, but software tools are helping individual creators gain an edge.
The consumer is absolutely winning right now. There is a lifetime of free diverse content just a click away. Traditional publishing and distribution cannot compete with that. The era when you could win a short story award and receive a decent advance on a novel to support yourself is going away, if not gone already.
The future model for all upcoming artists is going to be pushing out content for free for years while building up a fan base until your advertising and Patreon can sustain you.
The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at marketing to create the audience will be the key divider between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring amateur.
So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.
This is basically what publishing houses & record labels do, but they're still so caught up in the actual physical production of stuff. Now everything is digital there's no actual need to make books or records.
There'll be a new set of "promoters" who handle the hottest new talent. Getting signed with one of them is the guarantee that you've "made it" and you might actually be able to make a living from this.
Then the promoters will be publishing their own collections of stuff, or creating their own subscription services, or finding some other way of cross-promoting their creatives to the audience of the other creatives they manage. Then it becomes a matter of choosing which promoter(s) you want to follow.
And then we're back to where we were, with gatekeepers for content.
>So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.
Well, that's basically what you hire a public relations person for. The problem is that now you're having to invest, perhaps significantly, in making a bigger impact.
There's a misalignment of incentives, though. Hiring a PR person is different from signing a contract with a promoter/publisher/marketing partner.
The PR person wants to be noticed by journalists. They get paid the same regardless of how much money the creative makes. But their next gig depends on being noticed by journalists.
The marketing partner wants to sell lots of whatever it is that the creative makes. They're on a % of sales (or more usually, it's the other way around and the creative earns royalties based on sales). They need to build an interested audience that they can then market to for other creatives.
I fully agree. In fact, I think (hope) that most of the writers who are selling only hundreds of copies of their books are actually just bad marketers. I think this is why the myth of the Big Four publishing house exists, because those publishing houses used to come in and scoop the writer out of obscurity by marketing their book. Now they look for a writer who already has a big platform so they don't have to spend the marketing budget and can wind up with a "sure thing."
If instagram is a model, then its already started. My feed is basically just guitars/bass/drums and motorcycles. There are these instagram pages who “promote” other pages who pay them. Once the creator is large enough they can decouple and let the feed algorithm work.
Same goes for meme pages, actual models/actors. My guess is this is nascent stage before it really becomes a dominant force for filtering/promoting content.
The scariest part about the latter model is how the hell are we going to find any more Susanna Clarkes, J. D. Salingers, and any other author that doesn't want to or isn't able to buy into the parasocial nature of patreon and similar platforms? What if the author isn't hot, charismatic, or pleasant to listen to?
I don't look at Patreons that often, but if I think about the dozen or so that I have (maybe half of authors) none of them have had pictures of themselves on it, or audio recordings of themselves.
So, I mean, it takes being somewhat charismatic in writing, but of the other properties you list... I don't seem them as important at all. Moreover, being charismatic in writing seems to be practically a requirement for being a good author.
Nor is it like the previous model did not have biases, you needed to be good at selling yourself to publishing houses and the like instead of to readers directly, but you still needed to be good at selling yourself.
I used to be that way. I created social media accounts this year (and started writing this newsletter) because I realized it was the only way to get my work read. There are so many amazing books out there that only ever see a couple readers because they don't market. It's just a hard reality (unless readers decide to go all indie and hunt for obscure books on the internet, like I do. But I'm sure I'm in the minority).
My biggest fear with that is the opportunity cost. It’s hard to commit to a total unknown as it’s likely their writing will be a waste of time to read unless there’s some assurance it’s competent, interesting, and novel writing.
Where does one even start to find the next Pynchon for example?
> The consumer is absolutely winning right now. There is a lifetime of free diverse content just a click away.
Theoretically the consumer should be winning. But the glut of content (TV shows, new bands) and the supplementary marketing for that content (blog posts, tweets, IG, newspaper articles) makes it very difficult to actually locate the content itself.
"One click away" suggests that I should be able to acquire it at any store. But that is not true either. Some things are exclusive to a streaming network or store (Apple Music/Amazon).
There's a discoverability problem here, as well as friction when it comes to acquiring the product itself.
Is this the natural outcome of having larger retailers?
In the era of small local book stores, the store owner had large discretion on what to stock. Different book stores would naturally stock different books and cater to different preferences. The customer would have options to discover new books, but would also have popular books sometimes "hidden" by the book sellers preference.
If every book reader is hooked into the same recommendations/search feed will they naturally move to reading the same books?
Yes, but more specifically, large retailers track the way books sell and order authors based on prior success. So if an author has a down book it can trigger a spiral where the big stores order less and less. Amazon isn't impacted by this in the same way because technically everything is on their shelves, but the B&Ns and the like of the world it does (and before they went under Borders as well).
On the other hand B&N had a lot more books. The small bookshop was typically filled with the same trash that I'd never read. (that is the definition of trash book: one the person making that claim would never read - those retailers stocked them because that is what most people read)
Small bookstores can be more driven by personal taste of someone, be it a book buyer if they have one or the staff. Like the way a lot of indie bookstores will have tagged books recommended by the staff in each section, sometimes the normal big names (Game of Thrones) but sometimes by far less big name authors they are passionate about.
It's the natural outcome of publishing being cheap and supply of aspiring authors being much higher than the demand for novels. The money which used to be concentrated in the hands of the few who could convince publishers to do business with them is now spread thin among many niche authors.
Further, every modern author is competing with every author who ever lived. I could read the science fiction you wrote last year or I could read Asimov, Herbert, Card, etc. and they're often cheaper and more socially relevant.
I was curious about the oft cited quote "x% of Americans never read another book after high school" and I found this interesting StackExchange post with links to older studies by the National Endowment of the Arts [1]. It shows that reading rate has droped 16.5% from 1982-2002 for high school graduates from 54.2% to 37.7%. The trend is higher education::more reading, but it is dropping across the board.
I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books.
The choice is often "Do I take a chance with this thing published last year? Or do I just pick up one of the 'classics' that I haven't read yet?"
I usually end up going with the latter simply because I don't want to spend many hours reading something that ends up being "meh" and I assume that going with something considered a "classic" is safer. Though they do occasionally end up disappointing :)
> I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books.
Sturgeons law definitely applies.
Reading (or watching, or whatever) only older stuff is basically using survivor-ship as a curation filter. It's a viable approach, although will definitely miss good stuff.
If you don't do this, you need some other way to discard most of the crap.
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.
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.
Many writings from the ancient world survive only because of quotes in other books. It's likely that works that were heavily quoted were among the best.
But of course, that doesn't preclude the fact that there may have been much better works that didn't make it to us.
> there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and only 268 of them sold more than 100,000 copies
I'm confused... just the top 0.0001% (268 x 100k) is 26.8M, yet they claim only 2.6M books were sold total for the full year. Am I missing something obvious?
they are comparing apples and orangs as total books sold is those sold online + those sold through bookstores.
That being said it points to not that writing books is not economical viable but that have someone else publish it is not economically viable!
My bias, I am self publishing my first book at the end of this year in flutter app dev with using paid article writing using Medium.com to pay the costs of setting up the LLC, and other costs such as purchasing a brand new mac laptop.
Note, since most people in tech do not buy 2nd screens just to read and use a book it's some skewed towards the 45k number in those niches, my own opinion. Most publisher advertising gets one to the 15k number which is why I am using a social-media and Medium article combined route to advertising the book.
It’s confusing but the percentage figure means that 2.6 million individual titles were sold or available to be bought. Only 268 of those titles sold over 100k.
I think the 2.6 million books refers to 2.6 million different titles that were sold rather than the total number of book sales across all titles, which as you pointed out is significantly higher than 2.6 million.
It's also not clear if those numbers are just 'trade' books (i.e., books sold through regular bookstores), or includes academic titles, textbooks, reference books, etc. I mean, there's a lot of stuff published that has a fairly specialized or otherwise limited market. Probably the overwhelming majority of books fall into categories that are never going to sell 100K or more no matter what.
Besides the shoddy number work, does this really tell us anything?
I mean, if everyone read "exactly what was needed" then that would significantly change the distribution since the current is based on "what marketers make me think I need."
Therefore, this article could be viewed as positive improvement of efficiency in the book buying market. Ie more people buying "the book they need" vs "want because of flashy marketing" based on increased access to search and reviews.
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).
I feel that this article might suffer from being a bit hyperfocused on specifically publishing novels, and therefore ignoring other forms of fiction.
> The real success story here is N. K. Jemisin who was earning $5,068/month publishing fiction on Patreon before she received a traditional publishing contract and went that route instead. But she is the only real case study we have.
In particular, this line rings false, considering Wildbow is currently publishing fiction at $6000/month and has been steadily growing for years. Taylor Fitzpatrick[1] is publishing fiction at a per-story rate, which is harder to calculate a strict number for, but could easily be up there. SenescentSoul[2] is making at least $5000/month, but doesn't show the actual number on their patreon. I could go on; although I've read Wildbow's work in the past, I've never heard of the other two, and just found them by searching "writing" on patreon.
Of course, none of these are strictly writing novels: Wildbow is a web serial author; SenescentSoul appears to be the same, and the other is a short story author. This is perhaps why the author (intentionally? unintentionally?) seems to have left such a large area of successful fiction writing out of their article.
However, not mentioning the huge success of self-published LitRPG, romance, web serials, etc. in an article that is centered around positing the question "Could the creator economy work for fiction authors?" seems like a rather large oversight to me. None of these people mentioned are making the prized $10k USD/month that the author holds so highly (although [2] might be), but they're all extremely successful even relative to the world of traditionally published novels, and they're far from the only examples.
I understand that this author is quite focused on novels specifically, but self-published novels from romance/litrpg authors can also be quite successful; this is much harder to find numbers for than patreon-based authors, of course, so this is only an anecdote.
I feel like I'm one of the few people that still does purchase books. In 2020 & 2021 I bought music theory books from amazon + jazzbooks.com, and I had some Korean books imported by a friend. I have the space and bookshelves to house them though.
I don't think you're alone (I much prefer hardcopy) but possibly a dwindling demographic.
One thing I have noticed is a decreased quality in print. I ordered some Rust books from Amazon (printed in house) and they basically seem to be ebooks that have been printed out, loads of whitespace in random areas and no signs of proof-reading. I don't think this helps the cause. Have been using Waterstones more recently but they are a little slow on some more of the ecclectic subjects.
"I ordered some Rust books from Amazon (printed in house) and they basically seem to be ebooks that have been printed out, loads of whitespace in random areas and no signs of proof-reading.
Yeah, there were multiple books that I read the reviews on amazon and people were complaining about the poor print quality. One of the Ted Greene books I got had a typo on the 2nd page in the table of contents, so I'm not sure if any proof reading is being done really.
I’m not sure where the author got the whole “people don’t read books” either, unless it is meant to be taken literal, this excluding audiobooks.
I’m on 20+ books read in my good reads challenge for 2021, all paid for, many through audible but some directly from the black library (yes it’s very stupid warhammer fiction), but all of them have been audiobooks and the ones I didn’t get through audible cost me 33 euros a piece. So you’re not the only one buying books, there is at least two of us!
Most people just don't read any books. Whether I buy physical or audible mainly depends on the books content. Story-heavy books (most) are great on audible, more technical stuff deserves physical.
I prefer both for this reason. With physical it's easy for me to mark it up/add tab bookmarks for fast reference. If I buy a book I try to find it on libgen as well so I can carry it around / search digitally.
"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.
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.
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.
I don't know where she gets the idea that serial publishing isn't done currently. Pirateaba, creator of wanderinginn.com has 4342 patreons (10k per month at least). At that point who cares about the NYTimes bestselling list?
Being good at writing servicable prose and story. Writing for a genre that has an online following (litrpg isekai in this case). Consistent output (e.g. twice per week -- in this case it is kind of insane: a novella per week). Then post it to sites where the readers for that niche are (e.g. royalroad.com , topwebfiction.com).
Follow me on a naive exercise here:
Zoom out from books only let's look at some media that are competing for people's attention in 2021.
(not exhaustive:)
- Video-games (including mobile)
- Social Media (fb, tiktok instagram etc)
- Video streaming services (youtube, netflix, etc)
- Music (single purchase and streaming)
- TV (yup still going)
- News (TV, and online mostly)
- books (print and ebooks)
Let's state that most of these industries have seen the amount of content published increase exponentially in the last 15 years.
Assuming that premise to be true is it really that much of a surprise that the average income of each content author is decreasing?
The only way that would be surprising is if the number of available attention hours was increasing at an even faster rate (which i guess would not be impossible if you could measure the masses of digital consumers who entered the "attention market" in that same time period).
My guess is that the scales tip a lot to the supply side though.
We simply have too much stuff being produced now and not enough people to consume it.
Then there is the fact that in the open publishing models we have now the market does get flooded with a lot of below par quality stuff.
The way we deal with it now is typically by some sort of popularity based algorithm that aggregates attention on a few winners and produce a huge long tail of "looser" content.
I don't know if i have the right "picture" here but it is certainly my gut feeling that there is too much stuff out there for it to retain the same value.
I really enjoyed this @ellegriffin and it's something I wrestled with about twelve years ago when I wrote my first novel. I had gotten some positive feedback from a few friends and started to wonder if it was "good enough to publish."
Luckily I moved very quickly from that question to "my" answer which was "no" and mirrors your thought:
> If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies on Amazon, perhaps it’s time to face the music and realize that writing books—like knitting or playing the harp—is nothing more than a hobby. Something I can do for fun on the weekends but should never hope to earn a living from.
It seemed very obvious to me that I was neither a good enough writer nor a dedicated enough self-promoter to ever make it work. Twelve years and 16 novels later I am happily churning out 1-3 bad novels every year and loving every minute of it.
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?
Specifically for technical books, reaching a niche audience is perfectly fine and these things tend to grow an audience over time as they become reference material.
Perhaps more importantly, writing a technical book is professionally akin to doing a PhD: you show a depth of subject matter knowledge and ability to sustain a long form project.
A lot of books are written to claim “ownership” rights over certain ideas. These “rights” are convertible to other items of value: lectures, consultancies, academic appointments, jobs of all kinds, etc. This is almost the sole rationale for technical books- the value of being considered an expert.
> 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).
These numbers are off [1]. There are a few creators who do earn more than that, but don't disclose their earnings, only the number of patrons. But even if we restrict our discussion to only those who disclose their earnings, there's at least 10 people who make more than $5000 a month on patreon in the creative writing category.
Bookstat didn't share the list of 268 books with me, but they did share the one book that sold more than a million copies in 2020: it was a Kindle-exclusive Thomas & Mercer title called “If You Tell” by Gregg Olsen…
We’re getting very very close to the point where a group of amateurs can make a ‘major motion picture.’ Not quite yet... but it’s getting closer. CGI can create sets and even characters; AI tools to assist with rotoscope and backfill are becoming quite incredible.
These tools are still packaged in relatively inaccessible environments (such as Blender and AfterEffects and others.)
But, that’s changing too.
In short, it’s going to become increasingly tempting to a creative type to ditch the book he’s writing and, instead, make a movie.
Sounds silly.
But, what occurred in the musical realm (where rank amateurs can simulate an entire orchestra on their PC if need be) is going to happen with Movies.
Books — as a vehicle for drama — may not be coming back.
I think you are right with the analysis and prediction but wrong with the conclusion.
What will happen when anyone can make a movie on their home computer that looks just as good as a Hollywood production is not that current book writers will make them. It is that the market will be flooded by visually fine, but structurally inept movies that no one will want to watch.
Ironically, what you’ve described has also happen to books to some degree. The self-published ‘Createspace’ or ‘KindleDirect’ books are usually cringeworthy.
It’s the old curator problem... if it becomes trivial to create something in a medium, it’s more important then ever to have a gatekeeper or curator to help identify the good stuff.
>The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.”
this is somewhat misleading. It includes tiny publishers, niche publishers, niche non-fiction, and so on. Such as "top 100 hiking trails in the Bay Area" and niche stuff like that. Fiction debuts by top publishing houses tend to be much more lucrative for the author and sell way more copies. Most aspiring authors tend to write fiction for a general audience, not niche non-fiction.
Perhaps, but most aspiring authors are in the 98% that don't get significant sales. Once you get into the big publishers they will throw the marketing you need behind you - but they won't touch you unless they believe Opera will love you (or whatever the big promotion they needs)
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 pressing "go" before you're ready.
What I see in the central table in the post (a couple paragraphs down from the top) is a power law distribution: at each successive level, roughly 10-30x more titles are able to get there. Sure, some percentage of those successes are due to a pre-existing platform. But how many writers are truly writing at the level of quality of the best-selling authors? I know, for my part, that after doing half a dozen or so major passes on my book, I still get critiqued for a variety of issues, some of which are embarrassingly basic.
Look, I'm not saying writing is a great way to make money if that's your primary goal. But I do think there's more correlation here between quality of writing and sales than most people give credit for. It takes a lot of work to get there, so most people just don't. But that's not to say that the opportunity doesn't exist.
I do appreciate the thoughts on alternative platforms though. Just because the journey is hard doesn't mean I shouldn't be trying to maximize the money I can make along the way. :-)
To be clear, when I say quality, I don't just mean this in the narrow sense of following the rules that writing teachers say you should. Harry Potter and Twilight both became popular because of some essence that they had---in my opinion, probably related to the world building and a certain difficult-to-describe experience of reading. Both of those books had "flaws" that were widely criticized. But they really hit home with their respective audiences.
Why did the first Harry Potter succeed, before J.K. Rowling had made a name for herself? In my opinion, it's because readers loved it so much that they went out and told their friends to read it. That's what I'm talking about when I mean quality---the irresistible quality that makes me fall in love with everything the author is doing.
Most books I see, even traditionally published ones, just don't have that.
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!
I wonder how serializing a novel would mesh with most author’s work flow. I guess most would want to write it first and release monthly an already finished product?
A lot of 19th century fiction was done this way. Authors (Dickens, etc.) tended to work from a loose outline and construct the details as they rolled along.
Peer at those books closely and you can see some odd detours that were shut down. Also some padding to get more segment-by-segment payments. But it's workable
Absolutely, but it was completely profitable for the author. Alexandre Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845. And it's estimated he was making about that much per installment writing The Count of Monte Cristo. People followed it like it was Game of Thrones!
Serialization was quite common in science fiction pulp magazines also.
It's interesting to consider the meta-version of serialization..novel sets. Nothing new here, the Oz books being an obvious example, but it's funny how it plays into a human need to both read about familiar characters or places and to have physical sets of books that match.
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 earlier book read about Lan sitting and sharpening his sword. Some books later it's mentioned that his sword never loses its edge. So in later versions of the first book it has been changed to him sharpening his knife instead.
But my guess is those things would happen on a larger scale when not having the opportunity to go back and edit previous chapters.
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 mediums like movies, audiobooks, even kindle, that require higher production costs than writing a blog.
I helped a writer friend move a writing workshop online last summer. This was one of the topics. The crowd seemed evenly split between:
- write it at once and release in chunks.
- release it as you write.
- And the most interesting (in my opinion), release it as you write and then if it’s popular, do a full round of edits based on crowd feedback and self publish the ‘definitive, crowd edited edition’.
There are quite a few writers who publish a chapter or two a week on Patreon.
It can produce some strange incentives: For one thing, they start getting reader feedback after every single chapter, if they want it. Some writers develop really fast-paced styles.
For another, they often start releasing chapters as they are written - meaning they can't have an editor who reads chapter 20 advise them to go fix an inconsistency back in chapter 4.
Also, some writers realise the moment they bring the story to a conclusion, they stop getting paid. That's OK for comedy/slice-of-life/X-of-the-week content - The Simpsons has no need for character growth or overarching plot lines - but works poorly for other genres: What good is a romance where the characters can never kiss, or an epic fantasy where the one ring can never be thrown into mount doom?
Of course, some of these incentives are hardly new: Other media have been subject to them for years.
Release it chapter by chapter and put it up on substack/patreon or just for free in blog-style format. That's what ithare.com and some other programming books did to build an audience before (self) publishing.
Most of what I read is serial fiction, and it has been for years. The most popular site these days is Royal Road, with authors offering a Patreon subscription for early access to chapters. It has the same lopsided power law distribution of funding as any platform for paying artists, but there are plenty of authors making a living of it.
It's strange to see people speculating about whether this is possible, since it's already here.
> Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views.
This is a pretty unhelpful comparison as I'm not aware of any major read as much as you want book subscription service that pays dividends to the author. What's the value in purchasing a book versus merely "viewing" a movie?
I thought about writing books (technical stuff) but then realized there is nothing I can do about piracy, pdf/epub/etc are just a few clicks away. unlike music and movies that you have some leagues to enforce IP laws once a while, for books there is essentially none. It's hard to get motivations considering writing books are so demanding.
I believe most authors of technical books get most of their payback from it in the form of enhanced status for consulting gigs, being as they are the person who "literally wrote the book" on topic [x]. I have heard that has been the case for quite some time.
I won't say piracy is a non-issue. OK, it's a non-issue. The issue is if no one knows or cares that you wrote a book on a tech topic. To the degree people do, the far bigger deal in general is that you have now written a book on tech-related topic that can be career-enhancing in many other ways. This is not universally the case perhaps, but it's the way to bet.
TBH, I find a downside of publishing through a traditional publisher is that I can't just freely distribute in digital form.
> 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).
This is just incredibly wrong? There are quite a few web serial authors making more than $5000/month on Patreon.
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!
As others have pointed out, I don't think we have all the right data to really make conclusions, especially in a historical context here. But if the trend is exactly what the title is implying, I wonder if social networks are a contributing factor here and amplifying virality: more of the people who read are sharing / discussing what they're reading, and that's influencing more people to then go and read the same thing. Fewer people going and browsing the entire selection to pick out something they want to read.
I'm reading (well, listening to audiobooks) more than ever, but indeed I'm selecting things that are already significant topics for conversation, or books that were already made into movies (and thus are also popular). Beyond that, I'm consuming podcasts, etc. and things with business models closer to that the author is suggesting.
The numbers are quite frightening but honestly, it is a crowded market with millions of professional, semi-professional and hoobyist authors all trying to stand-out.
I have read a few books recently, that are quite well-known, and didn't really find the quality very high. These are books that have gone through the high barrier of publishing and distribution so they can't be "garbage" but yet, they were underwhelming.
On the other hand, I have read some books which are outstanding and unique. They have a USP over other books, which is why they should and could succeed.
In such a crowded market, one should not expect to make a good full-time salary, just like most footballers and musicians would be lucky to make enough to live on, let alone a good salary.
> Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views.
Reading a book takes far longer than watching a movie. Assuming ten hours for a book, that's 5 million "read hours" compared to 102 million "watch hours" (assuming 90 min) for the top movies. Plus, movies can be watched in the background or socially in a group. I'm not saying reading is not a niche - it probably is far smaller than it used to be -, but it's not as niche as this statement makes it out to be.
But you can’t possibly make a work like “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “infinite Jest” into a movie. Hell, most adaptions of Hemingway are awful (original “Old Man and the Sea” not withstanding) because literature is not easily adapted to other mediums. It can only exist as writing because it is writing that challenges what reading is.
Lots of non-literary fiction, like “Game of Thrones” translates well and having read the books and watched the show I’d probably agree with your assessment here - optimize for time. But real literature is only good as literature.
I'm not saying one should optimize for time - I fully agree that movies and books can be quite distinct in what they accomplish.
My point is that you can not stack up movies and books 1:1 for sales, as people have limited free time and one person watching exclusively movies, for example, would generate far higher watch numbers than a person only reading books would buy books (everything else being equal). While not ideal, I think comparing them by time spent gives a far better comparison of what is currently popular than simply comparing sales numbers.
I’d isolate literature from this though. Literature has always been a medium with a limited audience. In the past due to most people being illiterate compared to modern times where it isn’t accessible to many people due to literary complexity.
The last 100 or so years has been an anomaly in that for the first time in history we had a highly literate population that could read fiction. And for much of this era movies and TV were not as accessible to create or consume. But today it is both affordable to create, distribute, and consume fiction via the motion picture therefore making written fiction niche as the audience for it isn’t interested in the literary aspect of it so much as the story telling element. So as we’ve had cumulatively more content disseminated at at accelerating pace it has made most written fiction as obsolete as the parlor singer or traveling news reader. Implanting the stories would do to TV what TV has done popular books.
May be it time or effort, modern story dissemination technology allows people to consume more fiction per hour. I only think most people weren’t reading because they liked to read. They wanted to consume stories and now fiction books are just not able to compete with TV streaming. But literature should be continue on as it has.
The hardest job i ever had was writing taxonomies, bibliographies and chapter 3 of CLASP. It later became OWASP. Anyone who writes books for a living is doing the worst job ever in my humble opinion
I've decided this article is so unclear in its terms that it is unusable - for example:
"According to Bookstat, which looks at the book publishing market as a whole, there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and only 268 of them sold more than 100,000 copies—that’s only 0.0001 percent of books. By far, the more likely thing is to sell between 0 and 1,000 copies—and there were 2.6 million of those last year (96 percent)."
what is up with that 2.6 million, it isn't explainable by just being 'the number of titles!'
This seems to match how music is consumed as well. You can release a great EP or album, but unless you're a marketing savant or you're well connected to someone who has a large following, your work will not be discovered or listened.
There's simply too much music being released every day for anybody to discover it, so your best bet is to target a rather slim niche where you might have a chance to come to the surface with a small clique of rabid fans of the genre, and slowly build mass appeal one fan at a time.
While the outliers (read: successful) are as sexy as a gold rush, they are rare. That's not to say you should not try. Do what you must. Someone has to be the next outlier.
The reality is, the combo of quality and quantity is a unicorn. You have to have something exceptional in some way. The scrapheaps of history say that's easier said than done.
Put another way, in order to get to that golden 1,000 fans at $100 per year, how many months will you have to publish? 24? 36? More?
The writer of this article seems to be unaware of existing communities of exactly what they are taking about.
They mentioned Jemisin's patreon as if she's invented the idea or is the only one who's had success doing it, which is simply not true.
Go to https://royalroad.com, view top rated stories, click on basically anything and you'll see patreon links of authors making thousands of dollars per month/chapter.
Yes, I totally understand that there are authors earning money from their AO3, royal road accounts. But, very few are making a living doing it. Jemisin was an exception. Of the fiction writers that currently have a Patreon account: "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 hope that there are more, and if you can find them please let me know!!!
Hmm, now that I look into it more closely, most of these authors are making less than I expected. I've never actually visited most of their patreons to actually check, but yes most of them aren't making that much from it.
It doesn't actually counter your main point, but I do think I have dug up more than 1 making more than $5000/month.
https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL has 3317 patrons with a minimum donation of $3 per month, so even though the actual number is hidden that should be more than $5000
Sounds like being the aggregator of a bunch of niche products can be profitable, but I don't think it explains how the producers of that content actually make money off the situation while being part of the long tail.
> Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views.
So, this really means that the problem is not with writing, but the medium (book). Because all these Netflix films were written by someone. Instead of concentrating on the 11 books, the writer who wants to make money should concentrate on writing movie scripts for Netflix or similar.
The medium (movie) requires getting someone to spend millions on crew and actors to shoot your script
This is not necessarily any easier to achieve than writing a bestselling book, especially for a first-timer, and by the time the Hollywood accountants have finished calculating your share of the revenue, not necessarily any more lucrative.
But it was never easy for someone just starting. You'll probably have to write books for close to free until something becomes successful. The equation is the same both for books or movie scripts.
The first book you self-published or practically gave away to the publisher will be a book, if not a bestselling one.
On the other hand the first movie script is vanishingly unlikely to get turned into a movie, and the fact you've written movie scripts that weren't developed won't help you get your next script taken more seriously.
It’s probably worthwhile to consider both fiction and non-fiction and literature. I’d imagine fiction in particular is dying but literature and non-fiction are selling as well or better than historically, which means not mainstream but sustainable to the (very) limited count of authors capable of making it, literature in particular.
I’m not concerned if we don’t uncover the next Stephen King (he’s got a few great books though!) so long as the next Pynchon is published.
The data is also quite sparse and almost certainly missing a large chunk of the worlds population. Looking at their website, I doubt they’re covering the Chinese domestic market. I’d also be surprised if they’re covering say Bangladesh, or Indian non-English books or content. Same with Indonesia.
That right there would probably throw all the numbers off dramatically world population wise.
Somehow I get the feeling that people are dropping qualifiers left and right. For instance the 2.6 million is books sold online. And more importantly I strongly suspect someone somewhere failed to mention this was all U.S. only. At least I suspect it is.
I was surprised by how low the reported total number of books is. Then I realised they're only reporting online book sales. However, the number still seems quite low.
Yes, it's only online book sales. NPD book wouldn't give me numbers on print sales. Though I learned in a previous article that print sales tend to be less than online sales.
I see now from up thread, this is 2.6 million individual titles, not actual book sales. To me, this still seems low. Unfortunately, the bookstat website linked in the article won't load for me, but I wonder if that is only the total number of English language titles (sold online).
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 finish fewer books?)
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 how much readers will accept.
I often attend the annual literary scifi convention. They have plenty of panels on how to increase sales. Becoming a popular "brand", e.g. Asian zombie novels, helps. Writing sequels and prequels to a modest central hit can help.
Interestingly this group has lasted decades, from well before digitalization and the internet. The latter is a two edge sword, providing more market and competition at the same time.
OP mentions that the publishing business is ripe for disruption but I believe that happened a decade and a half ago: it’s called self publishing. The problem is there’s no way to collect the data. Many self publishers have been kind enough to document their successes on this site, but many more have a reason not to do so. There is often perfectly good reason not to reveal a lucrative niche.
There were more than twice as many adult nonfiction books than adult fiction books sold in both 2019 and 2020 in the US, according to Publishers Weekly.
> Traditional publishers are looking for a sure thing. They want an author who already has an existing platform and can guarantee an audience.
This seems factually untrue. Obviously, that's the ideal author that they will pay out big advances to, but publishers publish tons of books by unproven authors.
They publish a lot of books hoping to find a few that take off and sell well.
The thing not mentioned or at least something which is quite opaque here is an easier access to foreign markets (did stats include those?). This sounds almost like a no brainer to me: self publish and translate your books to other languages - maximize the reach with additional investment. Obs I do not know the costs involved in translating the books.
This is a manifestation of the general rule, "don't do things that scale" - at least if you're not the absolute best in the world at what you do.
Whenever something has high fixed and low marginal costs, this sort of winner-take-all distribution results. It's the exact same for indiegames, smartphone apps, or digital music.
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).
I am planning on writing a book but only to say I did for my professional career. Money from it would be nice but its ultimately just an investment into furthering my main source of income. People really trust your opinion on something if you say you literally wrote the book on it... for some reason.
I really liked this piece and I'm quite curious how genre fiction's overall subsidy of traditional publishing houses factors into this. The answers to all these questions are very different for e.g. genre romance authors than for e.g. literary nonfiction authors.
Another feasible option is finding a niche market and publishing quality books that are either new or out of print to build that community. https://lostartpress.com/
There is always Asimov's approach. Just publish more books.
Over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1,000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years, I published an average of 1,700 words a day.
- Isaac Asimov
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.
Reading books has always been a niche activity. Many (most?) people don't have any books, and haven't read any since they were forced to at school. Of course HN readers will skew towards readers but they are the minority.
Another thing about books is: why take the chance of reading a book that is new? There’s thousands of classics to occupy yourself with as a reader, or even books from 20 years ago that have stood some test of time.
One challenge I had with the opening statistics in the post is that it treats all books being equal in writing quality and market demand. Just because I write a book, doesn't entitle it to be bought.
There are plenty of people selling their own e-books online and taking closer to 100% (minus processing fees) of revenue. Agreeing to 15% only makes sense if you have a huge distribution deal.
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 yourself reading. Allow users to Like your live streams and display metrics on every page.
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?
"The one where writing books is not really a good idea". Griffin cites 1000 true fans [0], where for $100k target income, you want 1K fans at $10 month. For me the consumer, that's $100/year per author, times I don't know how many subscriptions I'd budget. It's weird to think that the creative marketplace runs on patronage, but I suppose that's true going back at least to the Renaissance. She's opting to serialize her fiction on substack, toward the possibility of greater scale at lower unit cost.
Yep. This is the consequence of differential equation-like behavior of accumulating attention, popularity, power, virality, reach, wealth, big name publishers, etc.
The rate of change is roughly proportional to the amount present. The biggest gets even bigger, faster.
Maybe we should restructure our value system a bit to value writing a book more.
The takeaway from this article is "writing books doesn't produce value, so less people should do so." Everyone agrees (or professes to agree) that books have value. So why don't they have value? We can decide, we're not slaves to the market economy.
Good point. More than a few I would wager. It's also a way to pay a politician in a backdoor way.
Having said that, I'm amazed that so many of those titles are actually bought, they do appear to be at least somewhat popular. Any thrift store has piles of Presidential biographies and outraged-about-a-President books, they're over by the microwave cookbooks.
Yeah, for example, the Republican National Committee spent over $300K on Donald Trump Jr.'s book, which it then turned around and gave to donors, and $100K more on one of his other books. It spent over $400K on Dan Crenshaw's book and almost $100K on Tom Cotton's book. When Herman Cain was running for President, his campaign committee bought up pallets of his book that happened to be on sale at the same time as his political candidacy. The RNC also spent over $100K on a Sean Hannity book. The DNC spent nearly $100K on Chelsea Clinton's book.
The FEC is apparently on board with all of this, as long as the candidate isn't... using the books their campaigns purchase for their personal use. I guess the next time Ted Cruz gets shamed into staying home during an ice storm, he'll be disappointed to know that he can't burn his own books for warmth.
There's probably a book in this history of books as payoff, from Grant's memoirs on up.
There is some value to these ridiculous autobiographies (not so much for the I-hate-the-President-books). In 100 years, some future historian can draw from 'The Art of the Deal', 'Dreams From My Father', and probably some biography of Millard Fillmore to reach a conclusion. In the long run, they are all non-entities.
Either that or her own campaign committee. If she got her campaign to buy the books and give them away to campaign contributors, it's totally fine as far as the FEC is concerned.
This is expected and falls under the Pareto distribution. All human creative endeavors follow this distribution (movies/ tv shows/ music) at different scales. Even some weird ones like most commonly used words follow this. Jordan Peterson has an excellent lecture on describing this phenomenon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEWRykSgwE
> 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 to a few fiction authors on Patreon, and there's a few I did subscibe to but don't any more. I know of at least 4-5 fiction authors making a lot of money, like $10k+/mo ($15k+/mo in some cases) writing fairly niche content (litrpg and/or xianxia type work).
Then, when they get enough chapters for the current long-running fiction together, they bunfle it into a book and release on Kindle Unlimited, as an additional source of income.
Here's some examples:
- https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul - 2163 patrons as of now, minimum tier is $2.50/mo, but I suspect most people are paying $5 since that gives access to all advance chapters and not just some, and you can read delayed chapters on royalroad.com. So, probably somewhere between $4k and $8k a month, and this is their side hustle while in college I think.
- https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels - 1393 Patrons. There is a $1/mo option, but various tiers from $3/mo to $10/mo give you up to 50 advance chapters from where it's publishes for free on royalroad.com.
- https://www.patreon.com/jdfister - Page says they are making $4,116/mo from 517 patrons, similar situation as above with royalroad.com and advance chapters, as a point towards how much to expect the above people are making.
- https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth - $12,753/mo from 1,886 subsribers. Same situation as above with free publishing on royalroad.com and advance chapters.
These are just some people I actually read or read at some point in the past for a while, not a bunch I searched out that includes the top people. This is an answered question, IMO. If random web serials I'm reading are making this much money, I suspect there's a large amount of people making money this way.
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.
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 ~20k words a week if I put my mind to it, so a 60k-80k novel is doable in a month. But then it needs to go through an editor (and you need to spend money on a decent one), and a proofreader, and a cover designer (no, unless you're an artist with some design flair your self-designed cover will rarely cut it for fiction), and then you need to market it, including putting in high effort into getting people to review it (but caution: soliciting reviews is a minefield - Amazon does allow you to offer a free copy, but you must be careful not to influence the reviews).
All that, and you still will very likely not sell very much at first (irrespective of quality; and of course part of the challenge with self-publishing is that there's a lot of self-delusion about writing quality going on). Charlie Stross mentioned on Twitter a while back that it took many years (10?) before he made more than 5k/year from his writing. That was with building up a back catalog.
So if you want to write for money, you need to decide whether you see this as buying a lottery ticket (write and submit to traditional publishers and hope you have the next Harry Potter etc.), or if you're ok with being paid per word (submit queries to magazines).
Or if you want the long, hard slog to build up a back catalogue and fan base. People do manage to build serious income streams that way even with small sales per book, but it takes time and a focus on writing fast and churning out as many books as you can. My favourite example is Kjell Hallbing, who under the pseudonym Louis Masterson wrote 100+ western pulp books - the most well known is Morgan Kane (the books were released from the 60's onwards; warning: the originals are very pulpy and dated to start with, but the recent English translations are apparently particularly bad).
He sold ~20 million plus during his lifetime - an astonishing number for a Norwegian author (given the Norwegian market is only 5m).
The key was the number of books, and getting translated to 20+ languages, and time. On average each book only sold about 10k per language - some more, some less, of course - over a period of decades. But write enough and sell it over many enough years in many enough markets that are not as saturated, and it adds up.
(Or maybe you don't really care about the money, in which case you can do exactly as you please.)
For my part, the writing is a hobby. If it starts to accumulate income over time, then it'll be a great bonus. I'm writing pulp-y, short sci-fi novels in part because I like reading that, in part because it's easy to write as a part-time/hobby project compared to some 250k word monstrous volume.
The TL;DR is that writing a book is a really great idea if you like writing, but if you do it because you want to make money, you need to realise from the start that the writing will be a relatively small part (doubly so if you're planning to self-publish), and that short of figuratively winning the lottery you'll need to write a lot of a long period of time for it to start paying off. If you want a get-rich-quick scheme, writing books is probably a bad idea.
One thing that has bound to affect new book sales, especially on the tail, is the increasing ease of buying used books online. It's kind of like the way that eBay altered the music store instrument business.
Pirated e-books probably have chiseled away some of the business.
Having said that, the book business looks to have been in a slow decline for some time. I don't doubt that social media and internet reading generally have made people less able to read long-form work. I'd add that it looks like authors have been falling down a slide of lessening language complexity over the decades.
> Pirated e-books probably have chiseled away some of the business.
Not just that but also licensing.
I live in Europe and it happens a LOT that I can't get a book I want here. Either it's not yet released because it's released in phases. I read English only, however publishers tend to wait to release the English version until the local translation is out, so they don't lose potential sales of the translated version.
Also, some books are simply not sold here for some reason. It happens so often that I go through the Kindle app and then end up with the "This item is not available in your region" message.
At that point I go the easy way. I could get a US prepaid card and use a VPN or whatever but I'm not going to go out of my way to throw money at them. If they don't want to take my money, then they won't get it. I know I'm hurting the authors more than the publishers but I'm just not going to wait for it to become available here.
If you can't get a book legally or conveniently, there isn't really any sales to be "lost" because you wouldn't buy it. There is no real injury if you can't acquire something otherwise. You're not stealing a book from a store to cause a loss.
So, it's either do without or find a way to get it. And then, you might make an extra effort to acquire it if it's really good and encourage others to find it too. Not as a rationalization but as a human habit: pirating some content, within reason, leads to increased sales overall rather than a decrease.
Pirated ebooks have definitely chiselled away at the business. I haven’t paid for a work of fiction in nearly a decade thanks to ebook-sharing communities. Just 2–3 years ago LibGen was something known only to a niche of torrentfreaks, but it seems like suddenly all of my bookish friends know about it and use it.
(The exception is when I like a classic work of literature enough to want to buy a hardback copy that will last the decades. But that almost always means buying on the used market, because older hardbacks had quality sewn bindings, while hardbacks today are likely to have flimsy glued bindings. So, thanks to publishers skimping on quality, the author gets no remuneration even when a reader of the ebook decides to purchase the physical artifact.)
I agree with everything you've said here. I haven't bought a paperback for years (decades?).
Now that I think of it, practically every book I have any interest in is OOP or there is a nicer version of it available from some time ago.
In terms of ebooks, it'll be interesting to see if we continue to live in an increasing land o' plenty in terms of copyright violation (also including music and video) or if the hammer will come down on that. It's easy to imagine a legion of paratroopers outfitted in Disney uniforms doing a bit of digital axing on servers throughout the world.
One implication might be that this is the time to become a data hoarder.
You have to assume no one will read the book and you won't necessarily get rich but make it good for your own work ethic and prepare just in case it were to blow-up.
It's sad that fewer and fewer people read books anymore, most people are too glued to screens looking for notifications, swiping, or playing games. (I almost ran-over a guy glued to his phone who nearly avoided being ran over by a bus through dumb luck and walked right in front of my car.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055&p=2
It's a good thread; I recommend it.
(Comments like this will go away once pagination does—it's just a performance workaround. Sorry for the annoyance.)