[HN Gopher] Writing books is not really a good idea
___________________________________________________________________
Writing books is not really a good idea
Author : ellegriffin
Score : 382 points
Date : 2021-05-10 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ellegriffin.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ellegriffin.substack.com)
| giantg2 wrote:
| I would have been happy if my toddler book was published and sold
| even $5k copies.
| sublimefire wrote:
| 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.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
| Vvector wrote:
| > I do also think that the expectation/standard of a $100k/year
| salary is a bit high.
|
| Agreed. Most writers do it because they love writing, not
| because they expect $100k/year. The money comes after the
| success. I wish her luck
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| bun_at_work wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] Media Literacy, W. James Potter
| salamandersauce wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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 Debats, 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 Soule,
| 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."
|
| https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Feuilletons still exist even now at least in Germany but
| they are more devoted to cultural commentary.
| coliveira wrote:
| But these authors were the 19th century version of Dan
| Brown. They made far less than a modern writer of similar
| success would make.
| cafard wrote:
| Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, and Sand? They turned out some
| hack work, no doubt, but also a fair bit that is still
| read.
| coliveira wrote:
| I'm talking in terms of success. Of course any French
| writer of the 19th century is better than Dan Brown.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| >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.
| jbay808 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| Rerarom wrote:
| Please name one.
| jholman wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
|
| https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-
| publish...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I suppose the assumption is predicated on a rising
| population.
|
| Also you'd think last year might have led to more people
| reading books.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Vonnegut I remember writing somewhere that radio and especially
| TV had killed the market for short stories in magazines, which
| were a great way for authors to get started.
|
| Here's some other things he said on making a living as a
| writer: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vonnegut-
| writing-i...
|
| Note that he got paid $750 for his first short story in 1949! I
| don't know how many places are paying first time authors that
| much today, and then you remember to calculate inflation.
| iib wrote:
| 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?
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| floren wrote:
| > 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.
| padobson wrote:
| 750 dollars in 1949 is about $9,000 in 2021.
|
| 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.
| pie420 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| hardtke wrote:
| 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"
| [deleted]
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
|
| I love this TED talk by Alain de Botton on success:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY
|
| He says:
|
| "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."
| cortesoft wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense.
|
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > So it's much much harder to make a living as an author
| today than in 1921.
|
| And much easier to make it as a television screen writer.
|
| The mediums have shifted
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_Attacks
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Great comment!
|
| > A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of
| becoming an author.
|
| The following is a bit tangential, but I keep thinking about
| it:
|
| I was watching this video on the Barnum effect recently,
| which basically says that people are likely to believe in the
| accuracy of vague descriptions of their personality (think
| horoscopes; "Libras need security").
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw&t=4m23s
|
| 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".
| munificent wrote:
| 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_.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| I love this. Thank you for sharing!
| scubbo wrote:
| > the total number of brass rings
|
| TIL of the associated phrase, thank you!
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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.
| allturtles wrote:
| I don't think this is true. Niche and vanity presses have
| existed for a long time
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_press#History)
|
| Academic presses are also mostly very low volume. But
| academics don't expect to make a living from selling books
| (at least not directly - books help to establish reputations
| which can help you in the academic job market).
| spoonjim wrote:
| "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.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| allturtles wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 100k isn't what it used to be.
|
| 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."
| KittenInABox wrote:
| 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.)
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-
| statistics/employment/vid...
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Writing novels isn't comparable to writing video games
| outside of very niche genres, which are probably in a
| similarly sad state to fiction overall.
| [deleted]
| Semiapies wrote:
| 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.
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 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.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Well reasonable is a whole other thing. And I'm
| definitely not being reasonable! :)
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| "Never tell me the odds?" :) I wish you the very best of
| luck.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| akiselev wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-
| publish...
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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....
| akiselev wrote:
| _> 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
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| 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.
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| > 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.
| cafard wrote:
| 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.
|
| (entry of Thursday, 14th October)
| defen wrote:
| Did he ever write it, or is this the Fermat's Last Theorem of
| authorial metacommentary?
| cafard wrote:
| The latter, I suspect. I don't remember any note to it in
| R.W. Chapman's edition.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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 $30k on their annual earnings. More if they're
| popular enough to get audiobook deals as well.
|
| These are the authors that basically keep the lights on for the
| publisher. Overall though, profitable publishing is a business
| of breakout hits, the authors that sell 50,000+ copies and hit
| the best seller lists. Failed first-time authors and mid-list
| authors may mostly cancel each other out on profit, and it's
| those few hits that push publishers into the black.
| andi999 wrote:
| If you have a scalable product there is usually no middle
| ground. Either you are getting rich or just getting by, or even
| not getting by (last one the most likely one)
| Siira wrote:
| Isn't software a big exception to this?
| andi999 wrote:
| Is it? Can you elaborate? I think if you have a SaaS with
| happy 100 customers paying 10$ each per month it is easier
| to scale up to 10k customers than if you only have 2
| customers to get to 200.
| watwut wrote:
| No. Software follow the same pattern.
| DVassallo wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| This is great!
| spookybones wrote:
| 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?
| DVassallo wrote:
| The price is $25, but I've experimented between $15 and $38.
|
| I spent about $8K on ads (Reddit) but most of my marketing
| was organic from my Twitter account initially, and later it
| was mostly word of mouth.
| ableal wrote:
| If memory serves, Gore Vidal said something like "a famous writer
| will be like a famous ceramicist".
|
| Ah, here we go: https://www.npr.org/2012/08/01/157696354/gore-
| vidal-american...
| makstaks wrote:
| 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.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Is there somewhere to find the names of the 268 books?
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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...
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Wouldn't have guessed! Thanks, and really interesting article
| :)
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Thank you!
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 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.
|
| No mention of Patreon either.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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!'
| chasingthewind wrote:
| 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.
|
| All the best as you continue to chase the dream!
| ellegriffin wrote:
| This is the best thing I ever heard of. I want nothing more
| than permission to write badly and still love it.
| subpixel wrote:
| 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.
| smithza wrote:
| 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
| lacker wrote:
| I feel like the article glosses over a key point:
|
| _Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more
| than 500,000 copies._
|
| _If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best
| case scenario is having it sell a couple hundred copies_
|
| Isn't the best case scenario here that you are the _top_ -selling
| author, selling over a million copies? I feel like the author of
| this post is just assuming that they are 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?
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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
| greedo wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| but what is the social impact of star wars besides spawning
| sequels?
| bluGill wrote:
| A ton of cheap plastic light sabers at birthday parties.
| And millions of Yoda one-liners all over.
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| nixtaken wrote:
| You are assuming that the top 1% got there based on merit and
| not money laundering -- a major feature of the business these
| days.
| armorproof wrote:
| You've reminded me of a Stephen King quote:
|
| "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."
| armorproof wrote:
| 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?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| For anyone else who was surprised by that stat, don't forget
| that this is for books _sold online_.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > 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.
| II2II wrote:
| > 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.
| AS_of wrote:
| How is audible factored in here? I've 10X'd my audible intake
| over the past year.
| solomonb wrote:
| Three paragraphs into the article is a chart that includes
| audio book sales.
| AS_of wrote:
| Does that accurately represent the model of audible credits?
| Or just actual purchases of audio books?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Is the model reasonably different? The publisher doesn't
| get paid unless you spend a credit on their book.
| andrewzah wrote:
| 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.
| _joel wrote:
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| "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.
| rchaud wrote:
| I purchase books as well. I have read numerous books on epub,
| but physical is better, easier to take notes on the side of the
| page.
| AS_of wrote:
| 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.
| gtk40 wrote:
| For me, technical stuff is much better in eBooks because of
| the search functionality.
| andrewzah wrote:
| 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.
| moksly wrote:
| 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!
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| 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.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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?
| peter303 wrote:
| 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.
| beambot wrote:
| > 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?
| rmah wrote:
| I think they meant 2.6 mil titles, not copies.
| beambot wrote:
| Ah, I'll bet you're right! Wow, that significantly changes
| the meaning...
| warent wrote:
| 2.6 million different titles sold, not 2.6 million copies
| chanakya wrote:
| 2.6 million different book _titles_. Not total sales of books
| online, which is about 500m, I believe.
| rjp0008 wrote:
| The 2.6 million is the choice of books available. Like baskin
| robins has 31 flavors but only 5 of them sold more than 100k
| scoops.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tksmith151 wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Yes, that is correct. 2.6 million different titles were sold
| (not total copies.)
| AS_of wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > 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
|
| I've approached every creative endeavor in this way. I see no
| reason writing should be any different.
|
| I'm not trying to be overly cynical, I'm just not surprised that
| writing is any different than music, painting, etc.
| moksly wrote:
| 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.
| rikroots wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| tonyp2121 wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| 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.
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Some things at work here:
|
| 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).
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisu...
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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.
| jawns wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hodder wrote:
| Books, stocks, apps, websites, songs...the list goes on. Winner
| takes all is becoming the new normal.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| I disagree that fiction by top publishing houses tend to be
| more lucrative for the author. I wrote an article about that
| one too if you're interested.
| https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| [deleted]
| dovrce wrote:
| Most new books aren't very good, and there's so much noise that
| only reading old books is a perfectly good strategy.
|
| The only recent stuff I buy and read is technology related, if
| I'm going to read a narrative book it's going to be > 1 year old
| dudul wrote:
| > Most new books aren't very good
|
| 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 :)
| ska wrote:
| > 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.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Popularity and taste rarely coincide because most people
| have no taste.
|
| (Me covets a _The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell_
| first edition.)
|
| The other thing is to read books that are important, not
| just ones that are preferred or pleasant for a wider
| perspective:
|
| - Mein Kampf
|
| - Capital (Das Kapital)
|
| - Technological Slavery
|
| - The International Jew
|
| - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
|
| - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
| Vol. 1-6.
|
| - (ones by ideological opposites)
|
| - America: The Farewell Tour
|
| - Sorrows of Empire
|
| Also, people who don't own any books, paper or Kindle...
| that's a big "nope."
| zelienople wrote:
| Most new books are about people. A few good new books are
| about things. Very few great new books are about ideas.
|
| The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost
| every book is a big disappointment these days.
| joebob42 wrote:
| 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.
| dovrce wrote:
| Exactly, anything that has survived 100 or 1000 years is
| most likely worth your time
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Maybe this is the case for books after all. None of our
| television shows or movies will make it this long.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| The Epic of Gilgamesh is roughly 3800-years-old.
|
| One has to wonder though if something has survived as an
| artifact only because there were a zillion copies of the
| then "Steven King's" latest, or if it truly was great and
| preserved with care by those with taste.
|
| You have to wonder if the then Siskel and Ebert gave it
| two thumbs down compared to other contemporary works.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| I think about this all the time when it comes to
| archeological finds. How do we know this wasn't one of
| their worst works?
| naomiajacobs wrote:
| 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?)
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| You could write the novel beforehand and then just release it
| month by month.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _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.
| autarch wrote:
| 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.
| edgartaor wrote:
| >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.
| coliveira wrote:
| > 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| sheikheddy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing
| jtolmar wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| 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?
| runevault wrote:
| 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).
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| runevault wrote:
| 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.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| On the other hand the large retailers can stock huge amounts of
| books. There is no limit anymore.
|
| That said, I tend to pick my books from the top lists. But I'm
| not a frequent reader.
| fencepost wrote:
| 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).
| kpwagner wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| 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".
| snet0 wrote:
| 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?
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| snet0 wrote:
| 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.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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).
| jogjayr wrote:
| 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?
| snet0 wrote:
| 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.
| jogjayr wrote:
| > 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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?
| snet0 wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| No, because second hand markets influence the first hand
| price.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Some countries solve this by paying the authors for each
| lend. Ofc, not nearly similar amount, but over long term
| it's not unreasonable.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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.
| snet0 wrote:
| 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?
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| NFTs are trying to solve for this, but I'm not sure how
| mainstream that will become.
|
| For instance: https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26
| udpISw_raXkoE...
|
| 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.
| lacker wrote:
| _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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Many problems with this analysis, I'll leave it as an
| exercise to the reader to notice what they are.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| when i was young and poor i wouldnt mind being a pirate
|
| but now, being a professional i wouldnt mind paying ... i would
| gladly pay $50 for winds of winter if GRRM could finish the
| book!
|
| look at the expanse saga on primevideo, the books were selling
| ok but now is a hit box world wide
| wccrawford wrote:
| A lot, but it's not just people like you.
|
| 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.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| 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.
| megameter wrote:
| 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.
| Tycho wrote:
| 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.
| setikites wrote:
| 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/
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| > 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.
| dang wrote:
| All: large threads get paginated so to see all the comments you
| need to click More at the bottom, or on links like this:
|
| 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.)
| lurquer wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| How many apps do really well?
|
| How many albums do really well?
|
| How many movies do really well?
|
| 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?
| yoru-sulfur wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!!!
| yoru-sulfur wrote:
| 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
|
| https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4240617 is similar, but with
| more patrons and a lower minimum.
|
| https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow is simply at more than $5000
| per month.
|
| Where did you get those stats you quoted?
| [deleted]
| tarr11 wrote:
| I used to read a lot more books 10-20 years ago. Now, I mostly
| read books on vacation.
|
| I think I have an unspoken budget of "words read daily" that is
| consumed by work and my mobile devices.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I think I have an unspoken budget of "words read daily" that
| is consumed by work and my mobile devices._
|
| I agree. Considering word count, I read more now than ever but
| I read a fraction of the books I used to read 15-20 years ago.
| peter303 wrote:
| 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.
| AS_of wrote:
| As you get older, you should read fewer new books, and revisit
| the ones that have you the most joy. Vacation sounds like a
| great place for that!
|
| Edit: why? Because you believe in the leverage algorithms can
| provide https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-
| Science-Deci...
|
| There are probably a lot of single people here that would
| benefit from that book as well (the stopping problem)
|
| We all "know" the algos. But reading/hearing how they can be
| applied and what effect they can have on your life can be
| enlightening.
| hashkb wrote:
| > should
|
| Why?
| martincmartin wrote:
| _should_
|
| why is that?
| dudul wrote:
| 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.
| sremani wrote:
| If one is reading to apply the acquired knowledge, the above
| is an excellent advice.
|
| Also, do not underestimate the power of re-reading great
| books, new and deeper insights are attained during the second
| and third reads.
| sidibe wrote:
| I'm always surprised when people talk about rereading books.
| I get absolutely nothing out of books I've already read. Do
| you also rewatch TV series?
| leephillips wrote:
| 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?
| macksd wrote:
| 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.
| andreilys wrote:
| 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.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| 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.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| > Do you also rewatch TV series
|
| Good ones, with a lot of depth, absolutely.
|
| 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I always find something I missed the first time around. Or
| I feel differently about the story. There's always
| something different.
| Minor49er wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _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).
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| 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.
| sremani wrote:
| 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).
| arsome wrote:
| 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.
| iNate2000 wrote:
| 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.
| phaemon wrote:
| Well, to your first point, because I value depth over
| novelty. The second time should be better.
|
| To your second point, to quote Prince, "There is joy in
| repetition".
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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.)
| canadianfella wrote:
| Gatekeeper
| teucris wrote:
| 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.
|
| What am I to read in the mean time?
| sremani wrote:
| 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.
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| kpwagner wrote:
| I think this really varies from person to person.
|
| 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.
| crumpled wrote:
| 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.
| ssully wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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".
| runevault wrote:
| 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.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| 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.
| csunbird wrote:
| 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.
| arsome wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but I find marginal joy drops
| exponentially by repetition.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > 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.
| rland wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| 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.
| dale_glass wrote:
| 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.
| dionidium wrote:
| _> 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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?
| gnulinux wrote:
| 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.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Time is an excellent filter of quality.
|
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| trutannus wrote:
| > 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Britling_Sees_It_Through
| trutannus wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I suspect that kind of fun is less fun when they're talking
| about you, especially when it's still a problem today.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But... many movies and TV shows from 30 years are also still
| immensely enjoyable today. Or heck, from 70 years ago.
|
| Why do you think movies and TV somehow age more than books?
| Forricide wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.patreon.com/wildbow [1]
| https://www.patreon.com/imogenedisease [2]
| https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul
| sltkr wrote:
| > 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.
| chokma wrote:
| Some more:
| https://www.patreon.com/user?u=48733767 Casualfarmer 2.8K
| https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth 10K / month
| https://www.patreon.com/C_Mantis c.mantis / 4.2 K
| https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth 5.3K
| https://www.patreon.com/InadvisablyCompelled 2.8K
| https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon 14 K
| https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels 1395 patreons
|
| Some of those are also on Kindle Unlimited & Kindle.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| 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
| Aerroon wrote:
| The author of The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound $5262/month:
| https://www.patreon.com/puddles4263
|
| The author of Azarinth Healer has 3317 patrons at $2 minimum:
| https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL
|
| Basically, you can look through RoyalRoad, Scribblehub,
| WebNovel, and various other places where quite a few people
| seem to find success. And that's not even mentioning the people
| who write novels and publish them on Amazon.
|
| > _None of these are conventionally established authors as far
| as I can tell._
|
| They're not. Or at least were not. They wrote web novels and
| acquired success because people liked their stories.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| These are amazing! Thank you so much for sharing. I will look
| into these as case studies.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| One more thing to consider is that some (many?) of these
| authors are from poorer countries. $1500 a month for them
| might go a lot further.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| clarkevans wrote:
| Ursula Vernon, Author of Harriet the Hamster Princess -
| https://www.patreon.com/ursulav (1,165 patrons, $2,709/mo)
| stakkur wrote:
| "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.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Is it though? I highly doubt many self published authors are
| selling over 100k copies. That's a ton of logistics to deal
| with
| ghaff wrote:
| I'd be skeptical that more than a handful of self-published
| books sold more than 100K copies (if that).
| stakkur wrote:
| I don't agree. Self publishing has not only arrived, in some
| genres it outsells trad pub books.
|
| One discussion: https://mashable.com/article/self-published-
| authors-making-a...
|
| From that article: _" According to Amazon's 2019 review of
| its Kindle sales, there are now thousands of self-published
| authors taking home royalties of over $50,000, while more
| than a thousand hit six-figure salaries from their book sales
| last year."_
|
| And 'self publishing' encompasses more than just Amazon, etc.
| --there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of authors selling
| books directly online.
| NullInvictus wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| dalai wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| True - in order to do this analysis properly you need some idea
| of the distribution of royalties, and publication intervals,
| etc.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Yes, I am basing that off the research I did for this article:
|
| https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
|
| "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!
| munificent wrote:
| _> Did it have a big bump at front, and then decrease over
| time? Or have you seen other bumps later on?_
|
| It had a spike at launch when I announced it on my mailing
| list and then it tapered. It's held pretty steadily since
| then. If you're curious, I wrote a thing about the launch
| here: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/20/how-my-
| book-lau...
|
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| bluGill wrote:
| I have on my bookshelf a book written by a personal friend of
| mine. A fun non-fiction book, but I'm sure he didn't market
| it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| As someone who reads novels continuously, I find it really
| depressing that there might not be new novels to read much
| longer.
| macksd wrote:
| 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.
| ameister14 wrote:
| 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.
| eslaught wrote:
| 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. :-)
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| I would anecdotally counter argue that brand/audience/community
| building drives _far_ more sales than the book quality
| eslaught wrote:
| It's possible that both of these are true.
|
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Agree.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| m1117 wrote:
| Yeah, writing a book is something that you not only do for the
| money, but because you love it.
| mikerg87 wrote:
| Any idea if there is a similar source of sales figures for non-
| fiction/technical ? Is it as bleak or skewed as the fiction side
| ?
| o_nate wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| These stats are total book titles. Not just fiction. So non-
| fiction is somewhere in there!
| Aditya_Garg wrote:
| 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
| ben_w wrote:
| That's more than I was expecting given the 98% selling less than
| 5000 referenced in the opening paragraph.
|
| But then again, that 2.6 million books were sold is also more
| than I expected.
| nullandvoid wrote:
| 2.6 million would mean 1 in 3000 people on earth, bought at
| least 1 book in the last year. That doesn't seem very
| surprising to me?
|
| Although I think you meant to write 27 million (268 * 100k)
|
| edit - ignore, I missed that it was 2.6m unique in the article
| rmah wrote:
| I think the 2.6 mil refers to the # of titles available for
| sale, not the number of copies sold.
| nullandvoid wrote:
| Oops I skimmed the article and missed that - thanks.
| contravariant wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| phillc73 wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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.
| phillc73 wrote:
| 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).
| goopthink wrote:
| 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.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 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.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > 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.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| 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.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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.)
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| How many of these were politically oriented and had sales
| bolstered by political organizations to get them on a best
| seller's list?
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| So the ex-mayor of Baltimore should have had the Maryland
| Democratic Party buy her children's books instead?
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| > 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.
|
| - https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL - 3,317 patrons, my guess is
| they are making well above $5k/mo.
|
| - https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon - $17,297 from 2,403
| patrons. Similar as above. Books showing up on Kindle Unlimited.
|
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Thank you so much! These are excellent case studies. Will look
| into all of these.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > 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.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7
| edu wrote:
| 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.
| lightveil wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba
|
| [1] https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > 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."
| mattkevan wrote:
| Martha Wells does this with her Murderbot Diaries books [1].
|
| The series is fantastic and the latest book was great, but PS8
| for something that I finished in less than an hour felt a bit
| steep. Especially for an ebook with literally 0 marginal cost.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Martha-
| Wells/e/B000APZA1O?ref=sr_nt...
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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.
| DataGata wrote:
| 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.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > 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.
| klelatti wrote:
| 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.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| What if you start a story that already has 400 chapters out
| and you get a new chapter every week? Because that's the
| kind of numbers you can run into.
|
| At that many chapters it's like you're reading multiple
| books.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| klelatti wrote:
| I don't think it's completely impossible:
|
| - 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).
| ghaff wrote:
| >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).
| bluGill wrote:
| I've been told that business books are 7 pages of content,
| and 242 pages of story so to get people to read the content
| pages.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| klelatti wrote:
| 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.
| pochamago wrote:
| Web novels seem to do just fine releasing chapter by chapter in
| Korea and Japan.
| wfleming wrote:
| 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.
| slothtrop wrote:
| 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?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
|
| > 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.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Saturdays wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| scottrogowski wrote:
| 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.
| obviouslynotme wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I can see this going round in another circle.
|
| 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.
| meowkit wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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."
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| 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?
| gpm wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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).
| localhost wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9446/do-33-of-h...
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm a musician. Good luck with the creator economy. As they say
| in music, don't quit your day job.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Ha! I definitely won't...
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Agreed.
| secondcoming wrote:
| This seems to contradict this guy [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27108326
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > 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.
| aj7 wrote:
| This neglects the effect that writing things down has on the
| other media.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I've actually seen a boon in interactive fiction.
|
| Maybe authors can pivot to that. But I fear with the very low
| barrier to entry, most creatives won't be making money.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What boon do you see in it?
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| "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.
|
| [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
| peterarmstrong wrote:
| 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/
| u678u wrote:
| 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.
| sdgasg wrote:
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| 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 :)
| kbenson wrote:
| > 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 $15k+ a month (from
| Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also
| do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat
| esoteric genre fiction at Patreon.
| markwisde wrote:
| Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a
| well-known editor and I'm making 10% per copy (ebook or print).
| The book is priced at more than 50$ 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$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the
| money. I actually made more money selling this self published
| book than with my big editing company.
| la_fayette wrote:
| Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have
| checked prices for printing books, because I am in the
| process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book.
| Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems
| quite cheap to me.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| This is self promotion done well. Provide insight into the
| problem you solve and explain where you fit into this story.
| Nice job.
| [deleted]
| peterarmstrong wrote:
| Thanks :)
|
| Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between
| lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for
| example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has
| never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction.
| We do well in our niche of computer programming / data
| science / business types of books, but we have 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...
| mritchie712 wrote:
| 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!
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| you can publish directly. no need for leanpub.
|
| https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/
| peterarmstrong wrote:
| Agreed! We don't do anything to help with that part of
| the process: you need to use that page either way :)
| watwut wrote:
| Self publishing is easy. Finding audience is hard.
| peterarmstrong wrote:
| 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...)
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| 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.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| > 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.
| armorproof wrote:
| Perhaps they didn't fit a search criteria? Got examples we can
| see?
| dtech wrote:
| Graphtreon records all pledges [1]
|
| [1] https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing
| plorkyeran wrote:
| A few I'm aware of:
|
| https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow $6000/month
|
| https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth $6500/month
|
| https://www.patreon.com/Magic_Smithing $10,000/month
|
| https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon $17,000/month
|
| https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba 4300 patrons with no $
| listed but I've heard it's well over $10,000/month
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| gdubs wrote:
| 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.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| > 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?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > I'm not aware of any major read as much as you want book
| subscription service ...
|
| Kindle Unlimited
|
| > ... that pays dividends to the author.
|
| I'd like to learn whether KU does this, pretends to do this, or
| does nothing at all.
| tobias3 wrote:
| 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?
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Very excited to check this one out. Thank you!
| spookybones wrote:
| Do you happen to know how this author grew her audience? I'm
| curious.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| 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.
| eric_b wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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...
| Siira wrote:
| 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.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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!
| NoOneNew wrote:
| 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.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| 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.
|
| Or in simple words, could you clarify here?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| 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.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchredbull wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Yes, but there's also probably a mass of people who did what
| Dan Brown did and sold < 10k copies.
| spoonjim wrote:
| "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.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Power law distribution.
|
| 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.)
| [deleted]
| synergy20 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| mxcrossb wrote:
| 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?
| hodder wrote:
| It will likely lead to less continuity in the story and far
| more cliffhangers as it jumps through the chapters like Dan
| Brown.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Peter Watts does this too.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Yes! I actually interviewed Andy Weir for another piece for
| this exact reason.
| https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-
| truth
| GCA10 wrote:
| 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
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
|
| (More on that here if you're interested:
| https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Which is why there are page long descriptions of horses and
| carriages in the count of mote cristo.
| kesselvon wrote:
| The second half of Count of Monte Cristo felt like some
| serious word count padding
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 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.
| hluska wrote:
| 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'.
| paulpauper wrote:
| crowdsourcing the edits sounds like a good way to never
| finish
| andrewzah wrote:
| 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.
| bluescrn wrote:
| As with so many TV shows, there'll never be a satisfying
| ending, they'll likely be cancelled on a cliffhanger
| aj7 wrote:
| 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.
| tyrex2017 wrote:
| imho, for most, the biggest advantage of writing a book is to
| upsell consulting after that.
|
| together with that, it is a great learning opportunity for the
| author.
|
| all in all: not for me
| glaberficken wrote:
| 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. 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.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| 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.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I didn't see anyone mention The Long Tail by Chris Anderson so
| figured I would.
|
| Here's a summary: https://fourminutebooks.com/the-long-tail-
| summary/
|
| 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.
| steelframe wrote:
| 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.
| zffr wrote:
| 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
| steelframe wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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).
| asgraham wrote:
| 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.
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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.
| asgraham wrote:
| 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)
| ellegriffin wrote:
| 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!
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| asgraham wrote:
| 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.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Why would anyone consider this shocking, there is a massive
| amount of content out there, and the human race is finite.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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).
| ellegriffin wrote:
| Yes! Exactly! It seems doable....
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-10 23:00 UTC)