# Help me with the economics of writing novels



## Adam G. Katz (Jan 18, 2013)

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around these numbers:

If you make an average of $2 per kindle book sold: You would have to sell 40,000 books a year to make $80,000 dollars.

That's a s***-load of books!

If you have four titles, each book would need to sell 10,000 copies a year. Or: 27 copies a day... per title. Or 108 books a day (all titles, collectively).

Now, I can understand the rock stars (Grisham, Lee Child, etc...) selling that many per day. But can an independent novelist sell that many books, month over month, year after year... if you're not Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking?

Is the market that big?

I've read that the average American reads only one book a year.

- Adam

_Don't try to get around our filters. --Betsy_


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Um, yes.  Plenty of us do without being near Hocking or Howey levels.

27 copies a day puts you in about top 6k-7k books on Amazon, for example. Which means on most given days, at least 6,000 other books sell more than that.


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## dalyamoon2 (Oct 22, 2015)

It's *easy* if you hit #1 in the whole store and sell thousands per day. Hahahah! I highly recommend that approach. Haven't tried it personally, but those numbers are possible. We've all seen indies at #1. Just making the top 100 is really nice daily volume. Or so I hear!


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Here is a strategy I outlined early this year, but it's elastic enough to be applied to just about any genre. You figure out how much money you want to make, how many books you have, and that tells you how many readers you need to convince to buy a book from you. Break that down to a per day thing, and you can start figuring out if that's best reached through social media marketing, paid marketing, blog posts, or regular releases or a mailing list etc.

http://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=207260.0


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## dianapersaud (Sep 26, 2013)

Adam G. Katz said:


> I'm having trouble wrapping my head around these numbers:
> 
> If you make an average of $2 per kindle book sold: You would have to sell 40,000 books a year to make $80,000 dollars.
> 
> ...


I think that's the saddest thing I've read all day.

Where do people get these statistics?

Anyway- it's not true for my family of 4. We have more books than we know what to do with. And we go to the library often. I have tried to cut down on actual purchases (of kids books anyway) because we simply don't have room.

I purchased 6 books this week. And two weeks ago, we came home with a bag full of used books plus two bags of borrowed books from the library.

1 book a year? Do these people not know how to find something worth reading? It boggles my mind.

You picked a specific number of $80k. That's a lot of money in some places, and not nearly enough in others.

I think a better measurement of "selling successfully" would be subjective- can the author live on their writing income? I think more indie authors can answer "yes" to that question than "are you making $80k a year from writing".

A key point you mentioned is that it's easier to reach a higher level of income with a larger backlist.

I don't know of any author who has seen a drop in income with each new release. Usually there is an (overall) increase in income.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

dianapersaud said:


> I don't know of any author who has seen a drop in income with each new release. Usually there is an (overall) increase in income.


Depends on how you promo and how often you release. It's pretty normal to see decrease between releases in income, even with more books out. More books doesn't mean more money automatically.


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## Mark E. Cooper (May 29, 2011)

I have I think 16 products (not books) and each has 3 versions, and each of those 3 versions (audio, paper, ebook) is sold in 5?? different website stores. At Amazon on average I sell 50+ a day of kindle only versions. Thing is, that goes up and down by maybe 10%. I hate fluctuations. Anyway, Amazon is 50% of my income. Audible was selling 40-50 a day and was 19% of my income last month.

So. 

Write more books is STILL the best advice for a career in this writing thing.


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Let's just go with the statistic I had in my head when I started writing. I'm not sure where I got it, but it really doesn't matter, it was what I assumed. The average book published by a publishing house (when? where? I don't know) sells about 200 copies. I remember Patricia Briggs writing that people always told her how much they enjoyed her first novel. Her response? "I didn't know there were so many liars in the world. My first book sold less than 200 copies."

So, my level of expectation was pretty low. Since most of my books have sold more than that, and with free downloads all are far above that, I'm doing ok.


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## Guest (Oct 25, 2015)

brkingsolver said:


> Let's just go with the statistic I had in my head when I started writing. I'm not sure where I got it, but it really doesn't matter, it was what I assumed. The average book published by a publishing house (when? where? I don't know) sells about 200 copies. I remember Patricia Briggs writing that people always told her how much they enjoyed her first novel. Her response? "I didn't know there were so many liars in the world. My first book sold less than 200 copies."
> 
> So, my level of expectation was pretty low. Since most of my books have sold more than that, and with free downloads all are far above that, I'm doing ok.


What she said.


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## Adam G. Katz (Jan 18, 2013)

brkingsolver said:


> So, my level of expectation was pretty low. Since most of my books have sold more than that, and with free downloads all are far above that, I'm doing ok.


?? I don't know what that means?

Are you making enough from your writing that you can quit your job and still fund a retirement account?


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## Mark E. Cooper (May 29, 2011)

Adam G. Katz said:


> ?? I don't know what that means?
> 
> Are you making enough from your writing that you can quit your job and still fund a retirement account?


?? means do I include Oyster anymore, or Scribd, or Tolino? I do I just say Kobo, Google, Apple, Nook, Amazon. I have been full time since mid 2013


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## Not any more (Mar 19, 2012)

Adam G. Katz said:


> ?? I don't know what that means?
> 
> Are you making enough from your writing that you can quit your job and still fund a retirement account?


If I had to live off my fiction, I'd be very, very skinny. On the other hand, I make six figures + writing and editing as a technical consultant, so my retirement account is fine. The fiction hopefully will do well enough by the time I retire that it can fund my travel.


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## YoMama (Jan 27, 2015)

OP, your original post is a little discouraging and demotivating.  This month I will exceed $6700 in gross earnings (averaging out to your 80k a year desired endpoint), but if I had started out with your analysis, I would be terrified to begin.

You don't need to eat the whole chicken at once.  If you listen to the best people here (good covers, pick book topics that people want to buy and read, release often, start an email list/ARC list in the beginning), you will be fine.  Lindsey Brouker has very good advice on starting a new pen name from scratch on her blog


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## Bishoppess (Apr 11, 2015)

/pokes at numbers. 

Boo on numbers. I'm going to have to learn this stuff won't I? Frankly, I'm not aiming at 80k a year. If I could make an amount equal to what I make at my day job, I'd be happier than happy. Best case? My day job let's me transition to working from home (already talking about it), I get to publish, and eventually the two combined equal what my husband makes on his own. My hours would be my own, so long as I put in my eighty for the day job, and I'd get to write the rest of the time. This is all a pipe dream for now, but it's MY pipe dream, and it's what I'm working towards. 

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk


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## David Alastair Hayden (Mar 19, 2011)

Adam G. Katz said:


> I'm having trouble wrapping my head around these numbers:
> 
> If you make an average of $2 per kindle book sold: You would have to sell 40,000 books a year to make $80,000 dollars.
> 
> ...


Let's assume that statistic is accurate.

There are 322 million Americans. That's enough books for 8,000 authors to make $80,000 a year selling books at the $2.99 price point.

1. Scale that up for everyone who's making more by selling at higher price points.

2. America is one part of a large world.

3. Consider other formats like audio that bring in income.

I doubt that statistic is accurate.

Last I saw, Fifty Shades has sold over 100 million copies and less than half of those were sold in the US. I know a third of my sales are from outside the US.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## Kristen Painter (Apr 21, 2010)

To start with, I price my books higher than 2.99, so I'm making more than $2 a book. That helps.


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## Lisa Grace (Jul 3, 2011)

Annie B said:


> Depends on how you promo and how often you release. It's pretty normal to see decrease between releases in income, even with more books out. More books doesn't mean more money automatically.


This. With all the Amazon changes, a slow down on marketing, and on getting new releases out-my income dropped.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

A lot of authors make more than 80k/year, but you'll have a much harder time writing full time if you need an income that high. Self-pubbing is a business, so your income will have peaks and valleys. If you need to clear 80k/year consistently, you'll need to aim for a lot more to get you through the leaner months.

My rough calculations look like this: minimum amount of money I need per month X months to write a novel + expenses for one novel = amount of money my book needs to make over its first year or so. I gave myself a year of writing full time (thanks very much to my husband supporting me) to hit my minimum income level consistently. I set my minimum income level at 3k/month, since that's  comparable to what I'd make at an entry level job.

So--- 3k/month X 2.5 months per book + aprx 1k for cover, editing, advertising, and admin = 8.5k/book. Which means I need to sell about 4k copies of each book over a year if I price at 2.99.

In my experience so far, income doesn't trend up in a linear way. It shoots up with a steep curve. Most books sell almost nothing or quite a bit. There aren't as many in the middle. I went from a year of 100/month or less with one not very commercial three book series to making over $7000 in September with a new, much more commercial series. It was a pretty dramatic jump-- 150 in July, 800 in August, 7000 in September, on my way to five figures in October


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

One thing that helps many better-selling indies is multiple streams of income. I haven't had a new ebook release in 3-1/2 months, which means my books have dipped a lot, and haven't had an audio release in 4-1/2 months, which means audio ditto. But I have a couple German translations that are doing really well right now, which makes up some of the difference. And I'll have new audiobooks out in November, December, and January, and new ebooks out in December & January that I expect to do very well, besides a tradpubbed advance for a new contract. But yes, it certainly does go up & down.

I'm certainly not a household name, but I made six figures in my first year and have done much better in years 2 & 3, so it's definitely possible.


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

dianapersaud said:


> Where do people get these statistics?


In 2013 28% of Americans had spent nothing on books in the previous year
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/07/american-read-book-poll_n_4045937.html

Total percentage of college students who will never read another book after they graduate 42%

http://www.statisticbrain.com/reading-statistics/


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Loads of people never buy, oh, let's see, movie tickets, either. Or beer. Or whatever. But those companies are still in business, because some people buy lots of movie tickets and beer and whatever.


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Mercia McMahon said:


> In 2013 28% of Americans had spent nothing on books in the previous year
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/07/american-read-book-poll_n_4045937.html
> 
> Total percentage of college students who will never read another book after they graduate 42%
> ...


The problem with stats like these though is that they paint a really bad picture when they might not be a sign of anything doom and gloom. For example, each year, a certain percentage of American households DO NOT buy a car. Doesn't mean the car companies aren't making money. Same with televisions. And given income curves, I would expect about 28% to not buy books but borrow them at the library.

Same with the college grad stat. The only source is Read Faster, Reading Statistics. Huh? I'm supposed to believe that more high schoolers will read books after graduation than college grads? Heck, more than 58% of college grads have KIDS I bet and I KNOW they will be reading stories to their kids because it's now required homework in the early grades.


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## Amanda M. Lee (Jun 3, 2014)

I would also point out that you don't get $80,000 to spend if you make that selling books. Don't forget the tax beast. Every three months I have to sit down and write out checks to the IRS, cursing them bitterly as I do, but thanking the Force in the same breath each time because I get to do what I love. Say you make $30,000 a month, you need to take $10,000 of that (at least) and throw it right back at the tax man. It's kind of like getting paid two months and not getting paid the third because you have to hand that over. It can still be done and you can still earn a comfortable living, but I find planning very important.
When I quit my day job, I stayed much longer than necessary because I wanted to be sure sales would sustain at a comfortable level AND I wanted a huge nest egg should the bottom fall out. I could probably have ten more books if I didn't wait so long, but I wanted to be sure and I'm not sorry I waited.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

My quarterly tax & retirement burden can be up to 55% of my income. 
Plus expenses. If you do audio, etc., and/or do your own translations? If you hire people to help you with marketing, formatting, etc.--that can be five figures a month.


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## Nicole M (Nov 1, 2012)

I think it helps to have a more realistic goal in mind. For me, it's making 500 a month. Then 1,000. Then 2k-5k. But honestly, as long as I make enough to save up for a year of budget traveling, I'll be happy. (That should be somewhere around 1k-2k after taxes). That being said, I spend as much time as the next person daydreaming that my books hit the top 10 on amazon and that I'm so rich I don't even know what to do with the money. But you have to be realistic. What's the worst that could happen? If you only earn 200 a month, that's still 200 more than if you didn't write anything. 

I would say set a goal that doesn't have to do with the numbers. Let's say you want to buy that fancy new fridge you saw on Sears. Set the goal for that. Go little by little.

And on the statistics topic, I think it's inaccurate. Another thing to remember that no one has mentioned is that you don't need every American reading because readers tend to read a lot. (This is why writing romance is a good idea). Romance readers love to read.  

Good luck, don't get discouraged!


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

Amazingly some indies do make those numbers. However if you really want to boggle your mind then try figuring out how many books a big 5 author must sell to make the same bank. Because big 5 authors are not getting 70% back from each book.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Just to underline Kristen's point, try to write books you can price higher than $2.99. How about $4.99? Suddenly you're looking at selling 22,900 books, not 40,000, to hit $80,000.

But yeah, the vast majority of very successful writers (maybe ALL of them??) are prolific. I think even Rosalind, who seems to consider herself a "slower" writer, produces about three new books a year. Compared to traditional publishing at the big houses, this is breakneck speed. Then there are people like Amanda and Elle Casey who can publish a full-length novel every month. Produce a lot of work that really strikes a chord with readers, and you can leave $80,000 in the rear-view mirror, coughing in your Aston Martin's dust cloud.

Of course, most people can't do that. If only it were so easy as saying it makes it sound!


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Becca Mills said:


> Of course, most people can't do that. If only it were so easy as saying it makes it sound!


Discipline! That's a big piece of it.  I agree--why make one book do all the work of earning that $80k when you can split the load among 5, 10, 20 books?

That Tesla ain't gonna pay for itself. Keep learning, write good, write a lot, publish a lot, promote smartly.


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## 77071 (May 15, 2014)

Mcoorlim said:


> $80k a year? Man, you don't need nearly that much to be self-sufficient, let alone comfortable. Over half the US gets by on half that, and millions survive on $20k or less.
> 
> If "make a living as a full time author" is your goal, figure out how little it takes for you to survive. If $80k is your minimum acceptable income, there are easier ways to make it than writing.
> 
> ...


All of this! 

If I had to wait till it was viable for me to earn 80,000 a year I'd never write or publish! But I'm working at a level that I can do, and that still pays me $. It's awesome--but I do feel a lot of it was luck and being productive. I'm trying to keep some momentum, and I'll be happy even if I don't ever get to 80k a year.


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

+1 on that.



Mcoorlim said:


> As long as I earn enough to pay the rent and my bills, and I don't need to waste time with a day job, I'm living my dream.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

HSh said:


> If I had to wait till it was viable for me to earn 80,000 a year I'd never write or publish!


Once upon a time (a time several years ago), someone stated here that anything less than $100,000 wasn't enough to live on. I know different areas of the country are more or less expensive, and I know number of dependents makes a difference, but boy, was I indignant. I never made half that working full time, and I lived just fine, paid the bills, and had a pretty expensive hobby (raised and showed horses). It seems "enough to live on" varies as much from person to person as does "good book."

The OP's standard is obviously reachable for an indie, but it's also obviously nothing that can be guaranteed or that the majority of indies do reach.


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

ellenoc said:


> Once upon a time (a time several years ago), someone stated here that anything less than $100,000 wasn't enough to live on. I know different areas of the country are more or less expensive, and I know number of dependents makes a difference, but boy, was I indignant. I never made half that working full time, and I lived just fine, paid the bills, and had a pretty expensive hobby (raised and showed horses). It seems "enough to live on" varies as much from person to person as does "good book."


I remember that! I think it was said at me, even.


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## SasgoraBooks (Aug 27, 2015)

ellenoc said:


> Once upon a time (a time several years ago), someone stated here that anything less than $100,000 wasn't enough to live on. I know different areas of the country are more or less expensive, and I know number of dependents makes a difference, but boy, was I indignant. I never made half that working full time, and I lived just fine, paid the bills, and had a pretty expensive hobby (raised and showed horses). It seems "enough to live on" varies as much from person to person as does "good book."
> 
> The OP's standard is obviously reachable for an indie, but it's also obviously nothing that can be guaranteed or that the majority of indies do reach.


Some people just don't know how good they have it. They have jobs that pay 6 figures, and they start living a life style where they are constantly spending that money instead of saving it. They then develop a mentality that anything less than their current life style must equal poverty because they are living paycheck to paycheck. When the reality is they just have no concept of how to budget and save properly. The average American makes far less than 100,000 and are not living in poverty.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

When I started out, I had a goal of replacing my salary income as an employee with sales from self-published books. That meant $70K a year.

I priced my books at $4.99 a pop and $9.99 for a boxed set of three or four full-length books. I had to sell 20,348 books to replace my salary. That's 56 a day.

The first year I had only 3 books published. I did not make $70K -- more like $9K. The second year, I published 2 more books in a new series. I made $97K. The third year, I released 2 more books, a boxed set and a novella. I made $154K. This year, I have released 3 books and a boxed set so far with two more books to come at the end of the month and in December. This year I will make close to $300,000. 

So I have quadrupled my goal, and have done it by releasing more books in series in a short period of time in genres with oodles of voracious readers (erotic romance / paranormal romance) who buy lots of books, and lots of indie books. 

I am not a big name author either. I have a small audience compared to the real biggies. 

I did it by writing in series, writing in volume, releasing rapidly, pricing higher and picking hot genres. 

It can be done.


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## mojomikey (Apr 9, 2014)

Mcoorlim said:


> $80k a year? Man, you don't need nearly that much to be self-sufficient, let alone comfortable. Over half the US gets by on half that, and millions survive on $20k or less.
> 
> If "make a living as a full time author" is your goal, figure out how little it takes for you to survive. If $80k is your minimum acceptable income, there are easier ways to make it than writing.
> 
> ...


This! If you need 80K/year to survive, yes, there are easier ways to make a living. I make a LOT less writing, but it's my total income. I can tell you a lot of people who make way more are jealous of my lifestyle. But no boats, no Lexus payments, no cable bill, etc. shave a lot of my needed income.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

To me the first thing to do is to stop thinking of a book as a wage-earning job.  Wages are a specific amount for work done, and you're a sucker if you let the world defer your wages as long as most books take to earn out.  Think of it instead as an investment.  In particular it's capital investment -- that is, not something you make to sell, but something you build that gives you income.  Like a bond.

So, let's look at the economics of a book in terms of investment: 

How long does it take you to write a book?  If you did something else instead of write a book, how much money would that give you to invest in, say, bonds?  Or even stocks?

A conservative investment, like a 30-year T-bill, will give you around 3 percent, last I looked.  Stocks over the long haul, might average 10 percent return -- but it will fluctuate a lot, and so that's only over a lifetime.  If you're investing to harvest the return (as your income) you would be better to plan for 5 percent return.

So if the time it takes to write your book would be equivalent to earning, say, $2000 at a part-time job, then you're doing good making $100 a year, averaged over the lifetime of the book.  (That's $2000, take home. Net, not gross, because you can't invest costs incurred in the making of the money.)

It doesn't sound like much, but that's how rich people do it.  You build up a ton of capital, and then you do well by managing that capital.

(However, if that's how you are thinking of doing it, you want to diversify that income.)

Camille


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

"Don't worry about a retirement account"--not really good advice. Most books don't keep selling after a year, let alone 5, 10, 20, whatever. But I agree, there are cheaper places & more expensive places. (I live in Berkeley, CA, and sometimes in New Zealand. Not the cheapest places! But hubby works in San Francisco, so there ya go.) 

The other advantage of a retirement account, though, is that it comes right off your taxes. And you can contribute a LOT. Something to consider. 

In reference to Becca's post above, I write 4+ books a year--about 425,000 words/year at this point. But I don't always bring them out 3 months apart, unfortunately, as they're not all indie. And you don't necessarily go faster through "self-discipline." I work almost every day, probably 360 days a year, and this is the speed I go--it takes a few weeks for a new book to come into my head, and I write long books. I do think people write at different speeds. Fortunately, each book has sold pretty well, so it's worked out. But I think, for an indie, that releasing every 3 months or faster is ideal if you can do it. After 3 months, sales drop off a lot even with promo. I know that many people write shorter books for this reason, and that's certainly one route. If I wrote 50K books, I could probably release 6-8 a year. But oh well!


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

dianapersaud said:


> I think that's the saddest thing I've read all day.
> 
> Where do people get these statistics?


The average 15 to 19 year old reads only six MINUTES per day in the U.S. That is compared with one HOUR for those 75 years and older.

SOURCE: Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey.

http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart10.txt


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## Kehazen (Apr 3, 2014)

DarkarNights said:


> Some people just don't know how good they have it. They have jobs that pay 6 figures, and they start living a life style where they are constantly spending that money instead of saving it. They then develop a mentality that anything less than their current life style must equal poverty because they are living paycheck to paycheck. When the reality is they just have no concept of how to budget and save properly. The average American makes far less than 100,000 and are not living in poverty.


This may be true for some, but for others it is an oversimplification that disregards the extreme cost of living in some cities. I used to live in Michigan and my husband and I (no kids) could live comfortably there for less than half the numbers you are talking. Our company asked us to move to Seattle. Here there is a housing shortage and many people who make 6 figures in the tech industry so rent is extremely high. If we don't want to spend 15-20 hours a week on commute, or rent for housing comparable to what we had in Michigan is easily 3-4 times more expensive than what we had been paying. Add in the increased cost of gas, utilities, food...yeah, what was a comfortable life style for us between 40 and 50k in Michigan now easily costs us 75k+. Could I cut some things out and reduce the cost? Sure. But we're not living an extravagant life style by any means.

On top of this, we know some colleagues in offices in NYC and San Fran who have an even larger cost of living for something similar to what we have.

For those who would say leave and go somewhere cheaper, please remember that is easier said than done. I could if I needed to. Somebody who's barely scraping by in one of these high cost of living cities? Maybe not. It's not cheap to just pack up and move. So maybe take a little more time before deriding someone in a different position than yourself. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances such as place of residence, number of dependents, high health care bills that make the amount they need to get by on a reasonable lifestyle different than your own.


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## kimberlyloth (May 15, 2014)

Just want to give a huge THANK YOU to those who are posting their numbers and advice. I'm on my way to full time (if all goes as planned, I'll be able to quit next year sometime) and it was nice to see all the tips about taxes and retirement. Thank you!!!


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## vlmain (Aug 10, 2011)

I get what many of you are saying about not needing $80K to survive, but there is also nothing wrong with setting a goal of earning something more than a "getting by" income. 

Set your goals for the lifestyle you want, and make a plan. Understand that it may take two years to get there, ten years, or maybe you'll never get there. On the other hand, you may end up blowing right past that goal. 

$80K may sound like a lot, but it really isn't. I don't make anywhere near that in my day job, but if I wanted to write full time, and preserve my modest lifestyle (trust me, I have to watch my pennies), I would have to make $75K, almost double what I earn now. That accounts for the cost of health insurance, which my employer now pays 75% of, which I would have to pay 100% of, taxes, Social Security, etc. Replacing a $40k salary (or whatever your current salary is) cost more than 40K.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

What she said up there. Health insurance alone (just the premiums) for hubby & me is $2,000/month. You pay ALL your Social Security, not just half. You pay self-employment tax. You no longer get paid vacations or sick leave. Working for yourself is pretty different from working for an employer.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Ebook Itch said:


> The average 15 to 19 year old reads only six MINUTES per day in the U.S. That is compared with one HOUR for those 75 years and older.
> 
> SOURCE: Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey.
> 
> http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart10.txt


That means they add up everyone's reading habits and divide by the total number of people. That includes the rare few people who read 350 books a year as well as the vast majority of those who read no books a year. Averages like the one above say nothing about _readers_. It only says something about the average person.

The thing that matters is that readers _read_. Some of them a _lot_.

Authors write for readers. Non-readers are not our market. Averages like those of the BoLS are just that -- averages.

Take my mother, for example. She's late 70s and reads about three books a month. My sister reads about 5 books a week. My ex reads about a dozen a year. My father reads maybe one book a month. My niece reads about two dozen books a year. My son reads about 6 books a year. We're a reading family. If you added up all our books to get the average, it would be pretty high.

Most people do not read books. They read newspapers, magazines, blog posts, etc. They might read bestsellers, when they go on a trip that they buy at the airport bookstore or a Dan Brown-like phenom that everyone talks about. EL James, the favourite whipping girl of book critics, was read by people who never read books. In fact, many people started reading books for the first time or after a long time away, after they read Fifty Shades of Grey.

You can make a living feeding the reading habits of _readers_ -- especially voracious readers.


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## 555aaa (Jan 28, 2014)

The number of books that the average reader reads is irrelevant in the e-book market because the latter market is mainly "voracious" readers. Not the general public, meaning the average person. That's where the money is from what I see on this board and in trade publications. Your market isn't the general public if you want to make money (unless your plan is to sell to a publisher, in which case that is exactly your market).

Frankly this whole concept that writing is first and foremost a business rubs me the wrong way. No one says, well, I'm going to be a sculptor or a painter or a musician or a dancer because it's a great business proposition. Sure, there is a business to it, but it's not like making potato chips.

Sorry if that sounds cynical and I mean no disrespect. I just call it as I see it.

[edit] - what Sela said upthread.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

555aaa said:


> Frankly this whole concept that writing is first and foremost a business rubs me the wrong way. No one says, well, I'm going to be a sculptor or a painter or a musician or a dancer because it's a great business proposition. Sure, there is a business to it, but it's not like making potato chips.
> 
> Sorry if that sounds cynical and I mean no disrespect. I just call it as I see it.
> 
> [edit] - what Sela said upthread.


Most authors I know MUST write. They've been writing all their life or most of it. They would write even if they made no money off it. But if you love to write, why not try to make a living doing what you love? If you can, it's really sweet because even though it's work -- a lot of work -- it is work you would do for free.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Rosalind James said:


> What she said up there. Health insurance alone (just the premiums) for hubby & me is $2,000/month. You pay ALL your Social Security, not just half. You pay self-employment tax. You no longer get paid vacations or sick leave. Working for yourself is pretty different from working for an employer.


Self-employment tax is social security & medicare.

Everyone pays taxes on their salaries.The reality of an 80k/year salary is that at least 20k of that is going to the tax man. With a regular job, you never see that extra money because it's taken straight out of a paycheck. You do pay in taxes more when you're self-employed (but not by as much as people imply) and you don't get any of the perks of a regular job like paid health insurance, 401k matching, retirement plan, etc. So 80k/year is more like a 60-70k/year salary, depending on your job perks.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Sela said:


> Most authors I know MUST write. They've been writing all their life or most of it. They would write even if they made no money off it. But if you love to write, why not try to make a living doing what you love? If you can, it's really sweet because even though it's work -- a lot of work -- it is work you would do for free.


I've always wondered if that's really true. I didn't start writing fiction until I was over 50. I'd say I "must daydream"--I don't really think I "must write." All I did was write down one of the daydreams, and then another one. But you're right, it's way more fun than any other job!

I do wonder, though, if that's true. Hmm. No way to really find out, I guess.


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## JLCarver (Sep 13, 2015)

Deleted.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Crystal_ said:


> Self-employment tax is social security & medicare.
> 
> Everyone pays taxes on their salaries.The reality of an 80k/year salary is that at least 20k of that is going to the tax man. With a regular job, you never see that extra money because it's taken straight out of a paycheck. You do pay in taxes more when you're self-employed (but not by as much as people imply) and you don't get any of the perks of a regular job like paid health insurance, 401k matching, retirement plan, etc. So 80k/year is more like a 60-70k/year salary, depending on your job perks.


The average person makes an additional 30% of their salary in benefits. http://www.bankrate.com/finance/financial-literacy/the-value-of-employer-benefits.aspx
(Source: U.S. Department of Labor) This is of course U.S. only. In other countries with more safety net, you'll have health insurance and so forth as a writer.

So if you make $100K/year self-employed, that's $70K in "real dollars," as compared to somebody's salary. Or with $50K, that's like earning $35K.

And now let's talk about marketing and administrative expenses . . . If you want to do this as a business, you're probably going to have some.

Something to keep in mind as you go forward & plan to quit the day job...


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Writing might not be first and foremost a business, but publishing is.  The moment you say "I want money for this thing I created" you are in business. Pretending otherwise is fine if you are a hobbiest, but odds are, you'll see little return.  The moment you want readership that pays you, you aren't just doing art anymore. And divorcing readership from money earned is pretty silly, in my opinion. The bigger your readership, the more likely you are to earn a living. Satisfying readers with a great product (ie your book, sorry, it's a product the moment you put a price on it) is what generally leads to business success.

If it takes you $2000 worth of hours and expenses to write/publish a book and that book makes only $100 a year? You aren't getting any ROI for 20 years. That's a terrible "investment" that nobody would take if they thought about it...  Now, if the book makes you 2100 the first year, then you are getting a 5% ROI which is a bit better (and will get better if the book keeps selling year after year, which will take more work etc).  There is not return until something has earned back what it cost to make. If you spend 100 and get back 10, you have lost 90%, not gained 10%.  Not rocket surgery.

The way I see it, sure, not every book is going to sell the same, but if you are in this as a serious business, you don't want to do 10x the amount of work for the same return as working smarter would get you (or god forbid, negative return which is what investing 2k and getting 100 is).  That's why working smart as well as hard is pretty much my ideal. I used to just work hard and not smart at all. Then I got smart and with 10% of the amount of work I made 1000% the amount of money.  

I would write if I made no money. I wouldn't publish though. And I'd write a lot less, not bother finishing things if I didn't feel like it, etc. Without the rewards of readership and cash to live on, I feel zero need to go through the negative things in publishing. Why put myself through that?


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Annie B said:


> If it takes you $2000 worth of hours and expenses to write/publish a book and that book makes only $100 a year? You aren't getting any ROI for 20 years. That's a terrible "investment" that nobody would take if they thought about it... Now, if the book makes you 2100 the first year, then you are getting a 5% ROI which is a bit better (and will get better if the book keeps selling year after year, which will take more work etc). There is not return until something has earned back what it cost to make. If you spend 100 and get back 10, you have lost 90%, not gained 10%. Not rocket surgery.


And yet, that's how Warren Buffet does it.

You're thinking like a wage earner, or at the best, a day trader -- which is simply gambling.

A $2000 investment that makes $100 a year is a good investment. Especially if you are actually investing -- and therefore reinvesting the income and building your capital. (The Miracle of Compounding -- look it up.) Of course, yes, you have to consider the lifetime of the work, but if you establish the right backlist, it will be at least renewable if not technically evergreen. (That is, every 10-15 years you bring it out again for the new generation.)

Yes, some people don't want to invest for the future, they just want a job that gives income now. That's fine. Most people who invest get their original stake from wage labor. If what you write is suited to that, there is nothing better than investing a windfall in that slow and steady portfolio. You can play the lottery, or enter dance contests as well. (And I'm not trivializing those who are going for the big score in publishing by saying that -- money doesn't care where you got it from.)

But this isn't a game in which the person who makes the most right now on their title wins. And this particular thread is about the economics of writing novels. Most people retire on 5% return on capital. (And that's not "ROI" -- RIO is about one time immediate returns, it's about buying and selling, and assets vs. liabilities -- it's short term. Income on capital is a very different thing. It's about generations.)

You've got to look at the big picture when you're talking economics. You don't just look at your deductible bills, you look at all of them. You don't just look at your income from books, you look at your income from books, day job, dance contests, investments, everything.

For some people, hitching your whole income to your books is what they want. For others, it's a really splendid part of a bigger plan that allows you complete independence early on. Sometimes both these plans work together, but most of us do better if we work all the angles.

Camille


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## HWaterman (Aug 27, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> And now let's talk about marketing and administrative expenses . . . If you want to do this as a business, you're probably going to have some.


Are US writers able to claim cost of promotions, administration etc as a tax deductions?

In my country, if writing is not your sole income then you can not claim writing related expenses as deductions until your writing earns over a certain amount. And yet - we have to pay tax on the income, always, no matter how much.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Again, I'd suggest looking up some books that weren't huge bestsellers--a year, five years, ten years down the road. Chances are, UNLESS the author is continuing to put out new books on a very regular basis (like at least a couple a year), those books are pretty much dead. I don't think that counting on your backlist continuing to earn you significant (retirement) money, unless you are a major bestselling author, is a very sound plan.

I'm thinking of books like The Far Pavilions, by M. M. Kaye. It was a HUGE bestseller, and they made a miniseries of it. Great book. I don't think it's available in Kindle, and it's out of print--as are all her books. The only place they're still available is Audible. Or books by Eva Ibbotson, one of my very favorite authors, who died a few years ago but was publishing fairly regularly until then. Some of her books (with copyright dates like 2007) are available on Kindle--ranked around 200K. She sold well and wrote just fantastically. But her books weren't blockbuster bestsellers. I don't think anybody could retire on her royalties, even a few years after she published her last book. 

So I think as a retirement plan, that doesn't work so well. What DOES work is saving the money you earn now IN a retirement plan. At least I hope so. 

I confess that I do have an MBA in Finance! But I tend to think about business in more commonsense terms than in "let me whip out my financial calculator" terms. And commonsense-wise, I think the only way to think about your negative-ROI books as an "investment" is if you really believe that in the future, you'll hit big, and you're investing on that basis. Call it a speculative investment, penny stocks, whatever. It's a risky investment plan.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

HWaterman said:


> Are US writers able to claim cost of promotions, administration etc as a tax deductions?
> 
> In my country, if writing is not your sole income then you can not claim writing related expenses as deductions until your writing earns over a certain amount. And yet - we have to pay tax on the income, always, no matter how much.


Yes, US writers can claim their legitimate business expenses as deductions, no matter how much income they make.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Again, I'd suggest looking up some books that weren't huge bestsellers--a year, five years, ten years down the road. Chances are, UNLESS the author is continuing to put out new books on a very regular basis (like at least a couple a year), those books are pretty much dead. I don't think that counting on your backlist continuing to earn you significant (retirement) money, unless you are a major bestselling author, is a very sound plan.
> 
> I'm thinking of books like The Far Pavilions, by M. M. Kaye. It was a HUGE bestseller, and they made a miniseries of it. Great book. I don't think it's available in Kindle, and it's out of print--as are all her books. The only place they're still available is Audible. Or books by Eva Ibbotson, one of my very favorite authors, who died a few years ago but was publishing fairly regularly until then. Some of her books (with copyright dates like 2007) are available on Kindle--ranked around 200K. She sold well and wrote just fantastically. But her books weren't blockbuster bestsellers. I don't think anybody could retire on her royalties, even a few years after she published her last book.
> 
> So I think as a retirement plan, that doesn't work so well. What DOES work is saving the money you earn now IN a retirement plan. At least I hope so.


At the same time, look at most of the titles for Open Road Publishing. They were all midlist books at the start, and are still earning nicely, in spite of the fact that many of the authors are dead and not writing any more. Best sellers tend to crash and disappear. Midlists tend to keep chugging. (Albeit not without some management.)

That said: if you're looking at retirement, especially early retirement, you do have to diversify. Absolutely. Even if you do consider your slow earners to be capital which will earn an average income -- each year will be different. Even if you have a lot of them.

That's why I pointed out, that the economics of capital investment means you don't spend your returns. You reinvest them in more capital -- specifically, you buy things that will make you more money from other sources. (Which for most people is to put it in a Roth IRA and invest in a Vangauard Index fund, or if you're ready for it, in stocks and bonds.)

This isn't for everybody, but generally there are two kinds of people who can retire early: those who hit the jackpot and invested it wisely, and those who ignored the jackpot and invested slowly and wisely. Most are of the latter variety. Not many hit the jackpot in the first place. There are very very few who can keep it up long term.

Camille


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Yes, US writers can claim their legitimate business expenses as deductions, no matter how much income they make.


However, if you take a loss more than three years out of five (or is that two?), you will have to fight the IRS hard any additional loss you take.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Rosalind James said:


> Or books by Eva Ibbotson, one of my very favorite authors, who died a few years ago but was publishing fairly regularly until then. Some of her books (with copyright dates like 2007) are available on Kindle--ranked around 200K. She sold well and wrote just fantastically. But her books weren't blockbuster bestsellers. I don't think anybody could retire on her royalties, even a few years after she published her last book.


Oh, I should point out: My books tend to bounce around from 100,000-200,000, and I am retired on _invested_ income from writing. (Emphasis on the "invested" there.) Yes, most people would want more than I have, but I admit to being incredibly lazy about maintaining my literary property. When I do more, I make more (and it goes into the investment pile.) It has, however, allowed me to take two years and counting off to deal with some stressful family stuff.

(Edit to add: btw, make that ranking 2 million to 200k) Yeah, it's been a while since I looked.)

Camille


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Rosalind James said:


> I've always wondered if that's really true. I didn't start writing fiction until I was over 50. I'd say I "must daydream"--I don't really think I "must write." All I did was write down one of the daydreams, and then another one.


That's exactly it for me too, and I also know I could quit and never write another word if it stopped paying. Stop the daydreaming? Never.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

I highly doubt that Buffet expects to take 20 years to make money on 2000 spent.  ROI is about immediate return, yes. I think ROR probably applies more to books in some ways (rate of return) but still, taking 20 years to show a profit on each "investment" is not a good way to run a business.

I guess I watch too much Shark Tank, haha. Those people are always talking about how they won't invest in something unless they have a reasonable expectation of seeing their money back within a year or two. I figure when billionaires are talking biz, paying attention to what they are willing to take a risk on and when they expect to get money back from it isn't so bad.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Annie B said:


> I highly doubt that Buffet expects to take 20 years to make money on 2000 spent. ROI is about immediate return, yes. I think ROR probably applies more to books in some ways (rate of return) but still, taking 20 years to show a profit on each "investment" is not a good way to run a business.
> 
> I guess I watch too much Shark Tank, haha. Those people are always talking about how they won't invest in something unless they have a reasonable expectation of seeing their money back within a year or two. I figure when billionaires are talking biz, paying attention to what they are willing to take a risk on and when they expect to get money back from it isn't so bad.


I think you should actually study Buffet before you declare what he does.

The thing is, those folks aren't aren't investors: they're dealers, or actually traders. They buy and sell, and though they make money, what they end up with is not nearly as much as they would have simply by investing.

Recently, someone did the math on if Trump had invested his inheritance in standard mutual -- the kind most people have in their retirement accounts -- and never did another thing to make money, he would be worth ten times what he's worth now. This isn't a slam at Trump: his lower returns is typical of people who trade rather than invest. He does well for a trader. Just not as well as an investor, even if that person is your average Joe making a no-brainer investment.

But the slow and steady investment doesn't make for good TV.

Camille


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## vlmain (Aug 10, 2011)

True, but those are very different investment strategies. Investing for retirement is very different than investing in an income producing business. Buying stock, mutual funds, etc. is fine as an investment for the future, but I look at what we are doing, as writers/publishers as an investment in an income producing business venture, where a more immediate return is expected. 

I do want my books to become part of my retirement income, but I also want to produce a short term income. Writing is my retirement plan, but it's also a business and I want to see income coming in along the way. I suspect most of us in this business do.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Right. I also invest in stocks and funds. But not as a business. Business investing is a bit different. I'll pay attention to people who are doing things more like what I'm doing and making money how I want to make it, since I need profit to have anything to invest (much less pay bills and rent etc)... But thanks for the advice. 

The OP was asking about making real money now, so that's what I was speaking to. To run a successful business, you can't afford to take 20+ years to start seeing profit on every dollar you put into the business. You'll fail unless you started with so much capital at the outset that money made doesn't matter (in which case, 20 years of losses probably means you have a kind of expensive hobby, honestly).


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## unkownwriter (Jun 22, 2011)

I don't know a thing about investing, and I've never made anything like the money some here have from their day jobs -- the best I ever did was about 24K for a couple of years, on which I supported three kids, paid a house payment, car payment and all the usual expenses. We weren't rich, but we did okay. What you need to live on is what _you_ need for the lifestyle you want.

If you haven't read it yet, this is a good explanation about how to put your books to work for you:

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/chapter-9-killing-the-sacred-cows-of-publishing-you-cant-make-money-writing-fiction/#more-4983

This is where he explains what he calls his "magic bakery", how he uses his books to make what seems like very little money, but as income streams it adds up.

Of course, you have to be writing the kinds of books people want to read, with a debatable level of quality, publish frequently, and do some level of promotion that gets the books in front of readers.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

To back off from the wrangle a second and answer the OP, I think one answer is: Most people won't end up making a living from writing books. But the economics of self-publishing mean that if you do make a decent success of appealing to a readership, you can do much better than the typical author did in the past. Because you'll take home much more per book ($3.50 or more instead of $1 or so), you don't have artificial limits on the number of books you can bring out in a year, you can respond more immediately to shifts in your market, etc.


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## Nicholas Erik (Sep 22, 2015)

Three points:

1) a book with an upfront cost of $2,000 that pays out a cash stream of $100 every year is an awful investment. I apologize if this is blunt, but newbies should really get into this with their eyes wide open. This hypothetical book is a highly illiquid investment (one could argue completely illiquid) with a pre-tax earnings rate of 5%. You have no control over systemic risks such as KDP/Amazon et al. shutting down over the next 20+ years or the business model completely changing. Inflation destroys a ton of the value, even at a conservative 2% rate. This is all assuming that earning $100 a year off a typical indie book for 20 years is even viable, which it's not, because most indie books will make $0 per year, or something very close to it, over that time frame.

This is not how Warren Buffet invests. Common stock is highly liquid. The majority of Berkshire Hathaway's capital has been generated by a handful of excellent, high-performing investments (e.g. Coca-Cola, Geico), not picking up a couple pennies here and there. An eBook is not analogous to a purchase of common stock.

2) I read DWS and have taken a couple of his courses. I like his craft advice quite a bit. The same cannot be said about the majority of his business advice. I do agree with putting out a lot of work and putting it out at a consistent, quick clip. I followed some of his other business practices for the better part of a year, and I found them to be extremely ineffective. YMMV.

The reality is that you don't have 300 works or whatever each making you like $40 a month each for $12k. You have 290 making you $0, 7 making $10/ea and 2 making you $100/ea, and 1 making you $10k. Obviously this is exaggerated for effect, but the point is it's very top heavy. This is the general experience here. 5 of the books that I publish, out of about 30, make up 95% of the income. No amount of promo coaxing or blurb tweaks will revive the others, and any further time spent with the metaphorical defibrillator is wasted. It just is what it is.

3) To the OP: writing/publishing is a job. If you put in forty hours a week and are a decent writer/marketer, there is essentially no reason why you cannot make 80k. Is success guaranteed? Hell no. But then, if you pay 200k for a college degree, that isn't guaranteed, either. And I think the chances of you making a consistent livable income in the indie game are honestly way, way better, if you treat it like a job. Otherwise I'd go get a job at a bank with my Finance degree and call it a day.

Write 30 novels over the next two years in various series in popular genres, use the tips on Kboards/other sites to continually improve your writing/marketing mix, be willing to CHANGE what isn't working and you'll likely be one of the success stories. But this is not luck. This is a lame refrain and insulting to the people who have worked hard.

Most authors simply do not put in that time, week-in, week-out.* I know that I don't. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from they simply can't - day jobs, kids, life - to won't. This is not a value judgment or being harsh; there is no right or wrong in this equation, only your personal choices. The reason I do not have success that approaches Russell, Annie, Amanda, Rosalind, Konrath, Sela, [insert helpful, well-known indie success story from the boards here - sorry for those I didn't mention] et al. is very simple: they work their butts off. I currently do not.

*caveat - I realize money is a problem for many, too, where even if you write many novels, you can't put up the money to put out professional products. That's definitely true, and a real concern. That being said, you can definitely work around this if you're clever, but it requires an even greater time investment (e.g. make your own covers/format books/trade stuff).

The opportunity is there. You now have almost full control over your destiny as a writer, whereas in the past, you had almost zero control over it. That's powerful, but it's not a fairytale, either. There are plenty of days that are "meh." A lot of the work, as with any job, is BORING. Whether you can deal with these obstacles and keep working pretty much separates the successful in this business from those who fade away.

Nick


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Nick is my hero. Well said.


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## jlstovall4 (Oct 6, 2015)

Nicholas Erik said:


> The opportunity is there. You now have almost full control over your destiny as a writer, whereas in the past, you had almost zero control over it. That's powerful, but it's not a fairytale, either. There are plenty of days that are "meh." A lot of the work, as with any job, is BORING. Whether you can deal with these obstacles and keep working pretty much separates the successful in this business from those who fade away.


Awesome. Well said.


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## 90daysnovel (Apr 30, 2012)

Rosalind James said:


> The average person makes an additional 30% of their salary in benefits. http://www.bankrate.com/finance/financial-literacy/the-value-of-employer-benefits.aspx
> (Source: U.S. Department of Labor) This is of course U.S. only. In other countries with more safety net, you'll have health insurance and so forth as a writer.
> 
> So if you make $100K/year self-employed, that's $70K in "real dollars," as compared to somebody's salary. Or with $50K, that's like earning $35K.
> ...


This is super pedantic but it's 30% extra, not 30% of the total. $70k base + 30% = $91k, not 100k. That makes a fair old difference over the course of a career.


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## jrwilson (Apr 7, 2015)

Nicholas Erik said:


> Three points:
> 
> 1) a book with an upfront cost of $2,000 that pays out a cash stream of $100 every year is an awful investment. I apologize if this is blunt, but newbies should really get into this with their eyes wide open. This hypothetical book is a highly illiquid investment (one could argue completely illiquid) with a pre-tax earnings rate of 5%. You have no control over systemic risks such as KDP/Amazon et al. shutting down over the next 20+ years or the business model completely changing. Inflation destroys a ton of the value, even at a conservative 2% rate. This is all assuming that earning $100 a year off a typical indie book for 20 years is even viable, which it's not, because most indie books will make $0 per year, or something very close to it, over that time frame.
> 
> ...


I agree with all of this. Nicely said.


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## Jana DeLeon (Jan 20, 2011)

daringnovelist said:


> However, if you take a loss more than three years out of five (or is that two?), you will have to fight the IRS hard any additional loss you take.


This is not true. The only thing that changes if you don't make a profit within the five year scope is the "presumption" that you are trying to make a profit. All that means is that if you're audited, you show the auditor that you're spending the time and money to make a profit at writing. The IRS cannot penalize you for being unsuccessful. Many, many business ventures take far longer than five years to show a profit. I started writing and submitting to agents in 2001. I sold my first book to a publisher in 2005, published 2006. I didn't show a profit until 2011, when I started indie publishing. That's far more than five years and I took that loss against my salary at my day job every year. Trust me when I say, the IRS is getting plenty from me now, so that little bit of loss they allowed was a drop in the bucket compared to the future payout.


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## Jana DeLeon (Jan 20, 2011)

I agree with everything Nick said. I don't know of any multi six-figure and above author who is working less than 80 hour weeks - that's with other jobs, with young kids, pregnant, with disabilities, with parents living with them, with ______. The bottom line for people supporting their family with writing is that the time has to be invested. The huge investment of time is why most good authors never make a great living from it. And if that's not what you want out of life, that's fine to. I want it all. I want an empire, and since I have no children and a husband that is on board with my plan 100% (he's my assistant), then that's what I'm going for. 

And for the record, Warren Buffet is one of the problems with the tax system. If someone is rumored to owe over 1 billion in back taxes that they're not paying, and loves to brag about paying in less taxes than his secretary, then I think the man is a pariah. If you want to skate the legal system with questionable choices and ethics, then by all means, don't pay taxes, pocket that money, and get rich a LOT quicker. If I had back the taxes I pay in every year, I could run a small country with that money. And I'm pretty sure I'd be more effective at it than our government.

(former CFO here)


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Jana DeLeon said:


> I agree with everything Nick said. I don't know of any six-figure and above author who is working less than 80 hour weeks - that's with other jobs, with young kids, pregnant, with disabilities, with parents living with them, with ______. The bottom line for people supporting their family with writing is that the time has to be invested. The huge investment of time is why most good authors never make a great living from it. And if that's not what you want out of life, that's fine to. I want it all. I want an empire, and since I have no children and a husband that is on board with my plan 100% (he's my assistant), then that's what I'm going for.
> 
> And for the record, Warren Buffet is one of the problems with the tax system. If someone is rumored to owe over 1 billion in back taxes that they're not paying, and loves to brag about paying in less taxes than his secretary, then I think the man is a pariah. If you want to skate the legal system with questionable choices and ethics, then by all means, don't pay taxes, pocket that money, and get rich a LOT quicker. If I had back the taxes I pay in every year, I could run a small country with that money. And I'm pretty sure I'd be more effective at it than our government.
> 
> (former CFO here)


True that. Also, pretty sure if Buffet invested 2k into something and made only 50 bucks, he'd quit that thing and invest where he could actually make money because no matter how you try to sugarcoat it, a 95% loss is still a 95% loss. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. I'm still not going to run my business at a 95% loss for 20 years though, nor am I going to write 300 books hoping that they average 5 sales a month each. Tried that for years, got the broke idiot bruises to show for it. If you aim for dirt, you tend to hit dirt, not gold. Never again for me. Thanks. 

Back to the OP. Selling 100+ copies of your books a day is totally possible and not even close to what the top indies do. Heck, at this point I'm still solidly mid level indie and I'd panic if my sales dropped below 100 a day across my main series.

If you want to succeed, probably you should start by aiming for success, not subsistence level. There are way easier ways to make 20k a year than writing. However, there aren't a lot of more fun and exciting ways to make mid six or higher figures a year, in my opinion.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2015)

40,000 books isn't as many as you might think. It seems like it is when you're selling less than 100 copies per month. But once you reach a certain level, 40,000 is what you sell in the first quarter or third of the year. For you I think it a matter of perspective. It's hard to wrap your head around the numbers when they appear unattainable. But I personally know at least 50 other writers making it far beyond 40,000 copies.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2015)

Okay. Forgetting for a moment that Warren Buffet considers the sums we are talking about like lunch money, 15-20 year investments (bonds, stocks, gold, whatever) and a career in writing is not the same thing. Good God! If it had taken me 20 years to launch my career, two things would have happened. One: I would have realized that I wasn't cut out to be a professional writer. Two: I would have moved on to something else.
And before someone pops off with the idiotic statement "It's a marathon, not a sprint", stop yourself. It's both. But it only becomes a marathon after you achieve a level of success. And by success I mean money. Yes money. You know that thing that pays bills and allows you to call yourself a professional writer and not be lying. That. When you're making a living as a writer you need to look to your long term security. Until then...you had better be sprinting your a$$ off.


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## J.A. Sutherland (Apr 1, 2014)

This_Way_Down said:


> Okay. Forgetting for a moment that Warren Buffet considers the sums we are talking about like lunch money, 15-20 year investments (bonds, stocks, gold, whatever) and a career in writing is not the same thing. Good God! If it had taken me 20 years to launch my career, two things would have happened. One: I would have realized that I wasn't cut out to be a professional writer. Two: I would have moved on to something else.
> And before someone pops off with the idiotic statement "It's a marathon, not a sprint", stop yourself. It's both. But it only becomes a marathon after you achieve a level of success. And by success I mean money. Yes money. You know that thing that pays bills and allows you to call yourself a professional writer and not be lying. That. When you're making a living as a writer you need to look to your long term security. Until then...you had better be sprinting your a$$ off.


Yes, I don't understand the comparison to stocks either. Books are products, they're something you produce, sell, and market, not something you invest in. They have a cost of development and production, not an "investment".


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## Mark E. Cooper (May 29, 2011)

Annie B said:


> Back to the OP. Selling 100+ copies of your books a day is totally possible and not even close to what the top indies do. Heck, at this point I'm still solidly mid level indie and I'd panic if my sales dropped below 100 a day across my main series.


I panic often when my TOTAL books (not just my best series) at all Amazon stores drops below 50. Thank god I am not exclusive.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Quoting the initial investment for publishing a book is difficult to accertain as an average, because much of it depends on  the circumstances and skills of the individual author. It is the same with income from sales, especially in relation to tax. Not everyone will have a uniform tax position to give an average net income to work out the payback on investment.

For example, if you don't live in a tax treaty country, then all US income is taxed at 30% and the author will likely be accountable for additonal tax on the surplus income in their own country, so they end up double taxed. (I am one of those)

Others will write full time and therefore have an initial allowance that is not taxed.

Some will have a full time occupation and their book profits will be fully taxed.

Some authors will be on benefits and will have to declare their net income to the authorities, which in many instances will reduce benefits by an equal amount and therefore they will derive no benefit in actual income.

For others, a sizeable income could push them into a higher tax bracket.

Estimated costs are meaningless when applied to all as an average and so is net income to arrive at a payback. Only an individual's annual accounts will provide any sort of a factual indication as to profit/loss. I know authors that pay nothing to have a book published, but they still have to invest their time, also in software and hardware and an internet connection. I also know others who budget anywhere upto $3,000 for each publication.

You can make cash flow forecasts, budgets, statistics and estimates on ROI, or whatever, to prove whatever point it is you want to make;for good, or for bad.

I treat my publishing as a business that had an initial investment for my first book which in 4 years I have had returned with a surplus. I have a separate bank account for all income and expenditure and I will only invest in publishing further titles that cash flow allows from sales income. I'm not much of a success as I have 4 full length books that I can't publish yet, because my income doesn't allow me to make a further investment. But that is me and my circumstances which are unique to me. It doesn't stop me writing, but my income only allows me to publish one book per year, based on current net income. Some people will have different circumstances and they will be able to publish all they write, some without regard to immediate profit, but with one optimistic eye on the future. 

Does any of this make me a hobbyist? I don't think so.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Okay, lots of good points here.  I'll just respond to a few that I think are misunderstandings:

1.) I didn't bring this up because I think everybody should do it my way. I brought it up because people are insisting that others do it their way.  I'm pointing out that there are other perfectly valid ways to live off your writing. And you can sneer all you want, but I DO live off my writing.  And because I took this approach, I also live off my not-writing-anymore.  I write what I want, when I want to.  Some people value that.

2.) Yes, Warren Buffet makes a much bigger return than $100 a year -- but he also invests a whole lot more than 2k.  If you note from my original post, a good investor expects 10 percent ($200 whoo hoo!) on strong stock investments -- but only averaged over the very long term, over a diverse portfolio.  That is, each stock is not going to make that much. Some make less, some make more.  I used the 5% figure as the bottom baseline because that's the standard you should harvest from capital as income.  (Ask any investment planner.)  It's a minimum valuation.

(Also, I'm not holding out Buffet as a hero.  I'm holding him out as an example that everyone knows of a successful investor, not a trader.)

The point, in the end, is that there is far more than one way to figure the economics of this thing.  Everybody here brings up good information about their way of dealing with things.  You have to find your own way.  Never be taken in by someone who says their way is the only way.

For instance, one thing you have to do if you want to make that high yield in the first year off each book, you have to write best sellers.  You appeal to a particular audience.  If you are not a member of that audience -- that is, you don't like to read those books -- your odds of being able to write those books is a whole lot lower.  There are a few people who can write books they hate, or even that merely bore them.  Most people can't - not and do it well enough to compete.  And if you don't have to, why do it if it isn't fun?  (I say this not just about writing, but about any job.  Or anything else.)

And there are a lot of other issues that any one writer may have that impacts their ability to approach their career one way or another.  It doesn't mean you can't have a career, or a living. 

Camille


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## Fill in the Blank Author (Jul 12, 2015)

Many good points made in this thread so I'll just toss in a couple of thoughts:

Forget all the Americans who read 0-1 book per year. They aren't our target audience. We're after the readers who devour books, and there are a ton of those out there and always will be.

OP's 40,000 sales a year is very possible if you use best practices and can write engaging stories that people actually want to read and which make the reader clamor for more. My new releases (priced $2.99-$4.99 depending on length) sell between 10,000-15,000 in the first year, sometimes more. (Novels do better than novellas.)

Don't forget backlist. The older books in my two most popular series still sell 3,000-5,000 copies a year. That adds up quickly and means that, over time, you don't have to make so much off of new releases. Obviously, producing new content regularly lifts the backlist while the backlist raises interest in new releases.

It probably won't happen for you right away. I started out in the days when indie publishing meant an overpriced paperback on Lulu. The first year I made enough to take my family out to dinner once a quarter. Over time it became enough to pay the electric bill every month, then utilities, then replacing my income... It was seven years before I quit my day job.

Be realistic. If you sell or give away thousands of your first book and the second isn't selling, you've got a problem that investing thousands of dollars isn't going to solve. Maybe you need to change genre or series, or maybe you need to improve as a writer, but don't pour thousands into a new book if you're ranking in the 100,000s or worse.


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## Talbot (Jul 14, 2015)

I googled 'The Far Pavilions' in a panic and was relieved to see it's actually available on Amazon and several online libraries as well. Priorities.


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## Nathan Elliott (May 29, 2012)

If Warren Buffett had made his money by investing at 5%, then to reach his current wealth at age 85, even if he started as age 0 (he didn't), then he'd have to have been born with over $1,000,000,000.  He wasn't.  Therefore, he did not get where he is via 5% ROI.  Compounding interest is powerful, but not the most powerful force out there.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Nathan Elliott said:


> If Warren Buffett had made his money by investing at 5%, then to reach his current wealth at age 85, even if he started as age 0 (he didn't), then he'd have to have been born with over $1,000,000,000. He wasn't. Therefore, he did not get where he is via 5% ROI. Compounding interest is powerful, but not the most powerful force out there.


As I said, that's the minimum income harvested. The actual expectation of a good stock investment is 10 percent growth in capital averaged over all stocks over the life of a portfolio.

Odds are you will make more, and this is true of a book as well. That is the minimum to be considered a good investment.

And it beats a bond. (Though it is not as safe, so I don't like to use the bond as a direct example.)

Camille


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

daringnovelist, I don't think it's the best idea to think of money spent publishing a novel as an "investment" of the type Warren Buffet makes. IMO, it's better to think of it as money _spent_: you've used that money to buy goods and services (including your own time), and you're in the red. Yeah, you can think of your book as being "worth" $2,000 because that's what it cost you to make it, but if that value isn't liquid, it doesn't really matter.

If I invest $2,000 in stocks or bonds or something else that returns 5% a year, after 21 years, I'll have $5,570 (the initial $2,000 plus the compounded interest). (Handy-dandy compound interest calculator here.)

In contrast, if I spend $2,000 producing a book that earns $100 a year (5% of $2,000), after 21 years, I'll have $100. The first 20 years will have gone to recouping the money I spent: after Year 1, I'll "have" -$1,900; after Year 2, I'll have -$1,800; etc.

Yeah, after Year 20, you'll be in the black and will be earning money, but you'll always be way behind the $2,000 that was truly _invested_. At Year 40, the book will have produced $3,300, whereas the true investment will have grown to $14,000.

This is not to say spending money producing books is a bad idea. I just don't think a percentage-return-on-investment analogy is necessarily the best way to think of it. IMO, it's better to think of yourself as some sort of manufacturer: you have to pay for the raw materials that go into your product (your time, your computer, cover art, editing, etc.) and then sell the product for enough to cover the cost of the raw materials _and_ provide income.


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## Jana DeLeon (Jan 20, 2011)

Backlist sales diminish. Even though my current series is a huge seller, sales on my older books continue to drop and will continue to drop. It is not a long-term investment. If a book makes you good money for five to ten years, then that's great, but it's very rare for a book to still be making money 20 years later because the world changes and popular fiction becomes outdated. Books are not an investment for me. They are a revenue producing product, and that product has a shelf life. 

I have a SEP for investment and real estate.


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## vlmain (Aug 10, 2011)

Jana DeLeon said:


> Backlist sales diminish. Even though my current series is a huge seller, sales on my older books continue to drop and will continue to drop. It is not a long-term investment. If a book makes you good money for five to ten years, then that's great, but it's very rare for a book to still be making money 20 years later because the world changes and popular fiction becomes outdated. Books are not an investment for me. They are a revenue producing product, and that product has a shelf life.
> 
> I have a SEP for investment and real estate.


This. The odds of a book continuing to earn out twenty years later is slim. Some will but most won't.

That said, this is another reason why studying our market before we start writing is so important. Is there a market for what we want to write, and if so, how big is it? Will that market be there in ten years or is it a trend that will be over in two? All those things matter, and if we're in this for the long haul, they should be studied before we start writing.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

vlmain said:


> This. The odds of a book continuing to earn out twenty years later is slim. Some will but most won't.
> 
> That said, this is another reason why studying our market before we start writing is so important. Is there a market for what we want to write, and if so, how big is it? Will that market be there in ten years or is it a trend that will be over in two? All those things matter, and if we're in this for the long haul, they should be studied before we start writing.


Another perspective would be to write what you want rather than chase trends. Create your own trend and watch as others follow along behind the trail you blazed. The genres and subgenres aren't going anywhere, and every time someone says X trend is tapped out, some new fresh take on that trend comes out and blows up the lists.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Rosalind James said:


> I've always wondered if that's really true. I didn't start writing fiction until I was over 50. I'd say I "must daydream"--I don't really think I "must write." All I did was write down one of the daydreams, and then another one. But you're right, it's way more fun than any other job!
> 
> I do wonder, though, if that's true. Hmm. No way to really find out, I guess.


You, Madam, are the outlier of outliers.   I'm sure there are authors who are like you, but I did say it was authors I knew -- not all authors. 

I would edit to say that EVERY author I know _personally_, has written all their life and has imagined being an author. But then again, I met writers via fan fiction and writing groups, and most of them had been writing on and off since they were teens. They finally decided to try to make money off their writing instead of giving it away for free.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Jim Johnson said:


> Another perspective would be to write what you want rather than chase trends. Create your own trend and watch as others follow along behind the trail you blazed. The genres and subgenres aren't going anywhere, and every time someone says X trend is tapped out, some new fresh take on that trend comes out and blows up the lists.


While I agree that it's great to write exactly what you want, if you want to make money _now_, writing to trend will have a higher chance of success than if you write whatever you feel like and hope to _start_ a trend. That's like buying a lottery ticket because you want to pay your dentist bill, and is unlikely to pay off. Once you have an income from publishing that you can use as a cushion, THEN you can write whatever your heart desires and hope it creates its own market and trend. Then, if it fails, you won't be as worried about paying your bills.


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## RC Butler (Sep 17, 2015)

Sela said:


> You, Madam, are the outlier of outliers.   I'm sure there are authors who are like you, but I did say it was authors I knew -- not all authors.
> 
> I would edit to say that EVERY author I know _personally_, has written all their life and has imagined being an author. But then again, I met writers via fan fiction and writing groups, and most of them had been writing on and off since they were teens. They finally decided to try to make money off their writing instead of giving it away for free.


I know a number of authors that did not start actively publishing until late in life but, like you, I know very few that did not write or at least dream of writing for most of their life. In many cases it just took a lifetime of experience to make the dream a priority.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2015)

Jana DeLeon said:


> Backlist sales diminish. Even though my current series is a huge seller, sales on my older books continue to drop and will continue to drop. It is not a long-term investment. If a book makes you good money for five to ten years, then that's great, but it's very rare for a book to still be making money 20 years later because the world changes and popular fiction becomes outdated. Books are not an investment for me. They are a revenue producing product, and that product has a shelf life.
> 
> I have a SEP for investment and real estate.


Okay Jana. Just because you sell millions of books, make millions of dollars, and have proven that you know what you're talking about, doesn't mean you're right. Here's where you're wrong....hmmmmm....I got nothin'.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Sela said:


> While I agree that it's great to write exactly what you want, if you want to make money _now_, writing to trend will have a higher chance of success than if you write whatever you feel like and hope to _start_ a trend. That's like buying a lottery ticket because you want to pay your dentist bill, and is unlikely to pay off. Once you have an income from publishing that you can use as a cushion, THEN you can write whatever your heart desires and hope it creates its own market and trend. Then, if it fails, you won't be as worried about paying your bills.


So we should all write shifter billionaire alpha erotica series until we've got our nut, then go ahead and write our cozy sentient eggplant urban fantasies?


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## Jana DeLeon (Jan 20, 2011)

Jim Johnson said:


> So we should all write shifter billionaire alpha erotica series until we've got our nut, then go ahead and write our cozy sentient eggplant urban fantasies?


No, but you should consider the things you want to write then see where they fit into the marketplace and chose the genre that makes the most business sense. If you're running a business, that is.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Becca Mills said:


> daringnovelist, I don't think it's the best idea to think of money spent publishing a novel as an "investment" of the type Warren Buffet makes. IMO, it's better to think of it as money _spent_: you've used that money to buy goods and services (including your own time), and you're in the red. Yeah, you can think of your book as being "worth" $2,000 because that's what it cost you to make it, but if that value isn't liquid, it doesn't really matter.
> 
> If I invest $2,000 in stocks or bonds or something else that returns 5% a year, after 21 years, I'll have $5,570 (the initial $2,000 plus the compounded interest). (Handy-dandy compound interest calculator here.)
> 
> ...


Becca, I wasn't talking about money spent. I was talking about time spent.

If, instead of writing a book at all, you put that time into, say, a part time job. How much could you earn? If you spent that money on a bond, you'd be earning less than 3 percent, most likely. Five percent is closer to what the standard is for income from an overall investment portfolio, so it's the "standard" minimum. And if you bought an annuity, it would likely be a lot lower in return per buck in. (Which is the price you pay for guarantees.)

Again, thinking about what you can get out of an investment by selling it is a trader's game, which is about buying and selling. And you are right, intellectual property only overlaps with that game when you are selling rights to a book. I'm not talking about treating your book as an asset. I'm talking about treating it as capital - and you don't sell capital.

The point here is not that you should use a particular number in valuation -- if you want, you can say 10 percent, which is what the overall stock market returns. Then, to consider a book a success, you have to make 10 percent on average over the viable life of the property.

The reason I'm emphasizing this is because that fall off you see isn't really a fall off from natural return so much as that bump at the beginning is the result of other activities. Those who want to see that huge early return have to put in twice as much work, and the results of that work is limited -- after a certain point, marketing a book becomes less and less effective. Maintaining an income over a long haul requires different marketing.

Part of the whole science of making a go of this involves figuring out which approach is best for you and your books. And figuring out what you do if you want a quick return but you write slow return books. (If you want long return, and you have quick return books, it's not so hard: you invest the quick return in long return properties and voila, you've got it.)

And whoever said that "most books" aren't earning after 20 years: that's not actually true. The problem is that most of the earnings of books in traditional publishing has been hidden by the fact that publishers take books out of print. But most books continue to sell for decades as used books. Now with ebooks, that used market is folded into the new market.

Some books will require more management to keep them selling than others. Some books have a very short shelf life period. And some sell themselves forever. (Why do you think there is such competition to make money off Public Domain books? So much so that Amazon has to have rules about it?)

Camille


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Jim Johnson said:


> cozy sentient eggplant urban fantasies


I can tell you're just joshing, so dibs on that idea!


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Becca Mills said:


> I can tell you're just joshing, so dibs on that idea!


You're welcome to it, but just remember there's no market for it so don't waste your time.


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## Kristen Painter (Apr 21, 2010)

Find a way to write what you like within the parameters of what's selling or at least, what's marketable. It's doable. I'm proof. 

Once you do that, then figure out your next year. Plan when you'll be writing what book, when you'll be finishing what book, same for editing, getting covers and formatting done, then estimate release dates. (Preferably release dates that are back to back to back OR simultaneous to create the most buzz for your launch.) Make a calendar and understand that you're going to live and die by it for the next year.

THEN work really, really hard. Say no to everything that isn't already on the calendar. Get the books written and edited and formatted and ready to go. Publish them while working on the next book. Rinse and repeat and add in audio (and translations if that appeals).

Look back at your year and see what worked and what didn't. Adjust accordingly, then begin year two with another plan.

And so on and so forth.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Sela said:


> You, Madam, are the outlier of outliers.   I'm sure there are authors who are like you, but I did say it was authors I knew -- not all authors.
> 
> I would edit to say that EVERY author I know _personally_, has written all their life and has imagined being an author. But then again, I met writers via fan fiction and writing groups, and most of them had been writing on and off since they were teens. They finally decided to try to make money off their writing instead of giving it away for free.


Yeah, maybe it's the manner in which one meets writers. I've never belonged to any groups--I'd think by definition, anybody who started writing later on and went ahead and published might not have been in groups. I did write for my work, but I was never primarily a writer, and never wrote any fiction, not even a short story as a kid. I never had any imagination, I didn't think. I didn't connect the elaborate romantic daydreams in my head to "that could be a book," for some reason, until one day when I was over 50. Typically for me, I had the idea, "Maybe I could write a book," asked my husband, "Do you think I could write a book?", made him stop in Te Kuiti (NZ) for a notebook, and the next day, wrote a chapter to see if I could do it. And then I just wrote the book. I discovered I actually did have an imagination! And that I loved to do it. Finished the book in 6 weeks and quit the job, wrote two more books, and published them.

But as I say--I had tons of writing experience and had always been a clear, concise writer. I'd been a marketing writer, among other things, which requires a lot of the same skills as fiction. (Some would say it IS fiction.) Requires a lot of attention to word choice, flow, etc., and rigid discipline about making the point and making it quickly. Requires an engaging voice. And I had a lifelong reading habit and I think had absorbed a lot about the structure of books, story arcs, etc., because I find I do know how to do it, without planning it or whatever. Just tell a story. Beginning, middle, climax, end. The feel of a book is like the feel of a movie. It's just a story. It's not magic.

It is a little disconcerting to be learning out here in the open as I have been. I never expected my first books to sell much. But then, we're all learning out here in the open, no matter how long we've been writing. And I've got a book coming out in 6 weeks or so that I can say without any doubt at all is really good. Is it literature? Maybe not. But it's really good.

Oh, and yeah. I just write what I like--or more accurately, the story that shows up in my head. Fortunately, the daydreams in my head are always romance, so that's convenient. I can't write to order much. I agree that it's probably a better path to study what tropes are selling, etc. But since I'm not a "real writer," I've just done it my way. I do handle my career as a business, but not the writing end of it.

Sorry, that is off the point. If boring--oh well.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

daringnovelist said:


> Becca, I wasn't talking about money spent. I was talking about time spent.
> 
> If, instead of writing a book at all, you put that time into, say, a part time job. How much could you earn? If you spent that money on a bond, you'd be earning less than 3 percent, most likely. Five percent is closer to what the standard is for income from an overall investment portfolio, so it's the "standard" minimum. And if you bought an annuity, it would likely be a lot lower in return per buck in. (Which is the price you pay for guarantees.)
> 
> ...


I think I'm following what you're saying (I'm not very financially minded), but I guess I'm still not seeing how thinking of one's time-investment in a book as _capital _changes things.

I mean, let's say I want to quit my 20 hour/week job to write full time, and let's say that job pays $10/hour. I'm making $200/week, which is $10,400/year. Whatever percentage return we choose to assume on that $10,400, I'm going to get back the $10,400 plus that amount of compounded interest if I liquidate my investment. To make a book property as valuable as the job, wouldn't I need to "get back" the $10/hour I "spent" creating it (because I could've been working the job but was writing instead, so time = money) plus the interest I would earn on that income, compounded over time?

When venture capitalists invest in start ups, they're not hoping to get back 3% or 5% or whatever of their initial outlay every year. They're hoping they'll spend $1 million providing a quarter of the start-up's initial funding and end up own 25% of a $500 million company. If they just got back $30,000 or $50,000 a year forever, without ever being able to sell their share of the company, surely they wouldn't be very happy. Maybe this is just because I'm naive about financial matters, but it seems like a different sort of situation to me.



daringnovelist said:


> The reason I'm emphasizing this is because that fall off you see isn't really a fall off from natural return so much as that bump at the beginning is the result of other activities. Those who want to see that huge early return have to put in twice as much work, and the results of that work is limited -- after a certain point, marketing a book becomes less and less effective. Maintaining an income over a long haul requires different marketing.


Do we really know this? I mean, indie publishing has been truly viable for ... what? Six years? We haven't really had a chance to see what it takes to market a 20- or 30-year-old ebook. Maybe it's not that different from marketing a new book. Maybe a strong initial marketing push is necessary to give a book a big enough footprint to hang on long term. Maybe "quick return" books become "slow return" books as they age, and "slow return" books become "no return" books.

I mean, you may well be right, but it seems to me there's just a lot we don't know about the situation, especially in terms of the long tail our books might (or might not) have.



daringnovelist said:


> Part of the whole science of making a go of this involves figuring out which approach is best for you and your books. And figuring out what you do if you want a quick return but you write slow return books. (If you want long return, and you have quick return books, it's not so hard: you invest the quick return in long return properties and voila, you've got it.)
> 
> And whoever said that "most books" aren't earning after 20 years: that's not actually true. The problem is that most of the earnings of books in traditional publishing has been hidden by the fact that publishers take books out of print. But most books continue to sell for decades as used books. Now with ebooks, that used market is folded into the new market.


I think you're right that we don't know how today's genre fiction will age. It could well be that traditional publishing placed artificial lifespans on books that could've, with updated covers and light editing, continued to be viable products for a long time. I mean, genre fiction from the 1970s and 1980s generally seems very dated, now, but maybe that's because those books were produced as fixed entities that couldn't be changed as time passed. Indie publishing doesn't face those restraints, though the degree to which we'll be able to keep updating our books without triggering some sort of backlash is an open question.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

jessie_talbot said:


> I googled 'The Far Pavilions' in a panic and was relieved to see it's actually available on Amazon and several online libraries as well. Priorities.


Really? It doesn't show as available on Kindle on my Amazon. But maybe because I'm in New Zealand right now. That's good! I know I was looking for Shadow of the Moon, which to me is an even better book, so hubby could read it, and it WASN'T available on Kindle. Which was crushing.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Rosalind James said:


> made him stop in Te Kuiti (NZ) for a notebook


Ah, I love your stuff, Rosalind! The bus tour my wife and I took last year on our honeymoon stopped off in Te Kuiti after our visit to the glowworm caves. We grabbed some pizza at a little place in town. Fun times.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Jim Johnson said:


> So we should all write shifter billionaire alpha erotica series until we've got our nut, then go ahead and write our cozy sentient eggplant urban fantasies?


No, but if you want to write thrillers, check out the best sellers in thrillers and see what people are reading. Then write your thriller with a mind to feeding those readers. Or if you want to write SF, check out the SF best sellers and see what people are buying and reading. Then, write your SF novel with a mind to feeding those readers.

Only write a genre if you understand it and know what pleases its readers. If you don't understand its readers, you will most likely not please those readers and will not sell.

If you don't care a rat's patootie about selling, write whatever the heck you want!


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

Becca Mills said:


> I think you're right that we don't know how today's genre fiction will age. It could well be that traditional publishing placed artificial lifespans on books that could've, with updated covers and light editing, continued to be viable products for a long time. I mean, genre fiction from the 1970s and 1980s generally seems very dated, now, but maybe that's because those books were produced as fixed entities that couldn't be changed as time passed. Indie publishing doesn't face those restraints, though the degree to which we'll be able to keep updating our books without triggering some sort of backlash is an open question.


Interesting thoughts, though I look at the countless cover revisions long-term traditional books have had over their lifespan, such as Stephen King's backlist, and Tolkien, and so forth, and they're still viable products for a new batch of readers. Tradpub can't hope to update every book they publish--they're working a different business model. I haven't looked for it, but I haven't heard a lot of readers complain about the different covers The Lord of the Rings has had over the years--they know it's the same story with a fresh wrapper--they're not getting fooled into thinking they're buying something new and different.

Many indies out there have changed their covers on releases several times, though again I don't know if they've gotten backlash from it. My suspicion is that a smart indie can keep their backlist cycling over time with fresh covers and fresh blurbs and smart advertising, because we don't have to deal with the scale of numbers of publications that an entity like TOR has to deal with. As long as we keep our readers informed, I think we can safely refresh covers and blurbs every few years as the markets adjust and alter over time.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2015)

Write whatever you want. But if you expect to sell books you might think about writing in a popular genre; one with a history of sales. Don't expect to force what you like down a reader's throat. It just won't happen. And if you're thinking, "I write for myself," then why bother publishing? We write for an audience. We are here to entertain. If you want to do so in a genre with a small readership, then you will sell a small number of books, regardless of how well-written.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Rosalind James said:


> Yeah, maybe it's the manner in which one meets writers. I've never belonged to any groups--I'd think by definition, anybody who started writing later on and went ahead and published might not have been in groups. I did write for my work, but I was never primarily a writer, and never wrote any fiction, not even a short story as a kid. I never had any imagination, I didn't think. I didn't connect the elaborate romantic daydreams in my head to "that could be a book," for some reason, until one day when I was over 50. Typically for me, I had the idea, "Maybe I could write a book," asked my husband, "Do you think I could write a book?", made him stop in Te Kuiti (NZ) for a notebook, and the next day, wrote a chapter to see if I could do it. And then I just wrote the book. I discovered I actually did have an imagination! And that I loved to do it. Finished the book in 6 weeks and quit the job, wrote two more books, and published them.
> 
> But as I say--I had tons of writing experience and had always been a clear, concise writer. I'd been a marketing writer, among other things, which requires a lot of the same skills as fiction. (Some would say it IS fiction.) Requires a lot of attention to word choice, flow, etc., and rigid discipline about making the point and making it quickly. Requires an engaging voice. And I had a lifelong reading habit and I think had absorbed a lot about the structure of books, story arcs, etc., because I find I do know how to do it, without planning it or whatever. Just tell a story. Beginning, middle, climax, end. The feel of a book is like the feel of a movie. It's just a story. It's not magic.
> 
> ...


Whoever said you weren't a real writer?

Show them to me -- I'll punch them out!!!



Some people start later in life than others. *shrugs* When you start doesn't define you as a "real writer". Actually writing does. 

I didn't publish professionally until I was 40+. I did a lot of writing before that, though, both fiction and non-fiction. But as with all things, YMMV.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2015)

At the end of the day, I write not because I expect to get rich; not because I want to quit my day job; not because I have delusions of grandeur. _I write because I have a compulsion to tell stories._ That I have platforms that allow me to sell those stories is a bonus. The "economics" of writing novels only matters to me insofar as I recover my expenses. I don't NEED to make $80,000 a year off my books for validation. I don't NEED to be able to quit my job to see the value in what I write. I am compelled to write, and so I do.

If this whole thing ever got to a point where I felt I HAD to write in a certain genre or that I had to publish X number of books a month or I had to make X number of dollars a year, I think a little of my soul would die. I write because I am a writer. If a person can make their dream income writing AND still continue to tell the stories they want to tell without compromising, they are doubly blessed. But if you are only interested in writing if you can make some arbitrary income, then in my never humble opinion you are looking in the wrong place to get rich.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Jim Johnson said:


> Interesting thoughts, though I look at the countless cover revisions long-term traditional books have had over their lifespan, such as Stephen King's backlist, and Tolkien, and so forth, and they're still viable products for a new batch of readers. Tradpub can't hope to update every book they publish--they're working a different business model. I haven't looked for it, but I haven't heard a lot of readers complain about the different covers The Lord of the Rings has had over the years--they know it's the same story with a fresh wrapper--they're not getting fooled into thinking they're buying something new and different.
> 
> Many indies out there have changed their covers on releases several times, though again I don't know if they've gotten backlash from it. My suspicion is that a smart indie can keep their backlist cycling over time with fresh covers and fresh blurbs and smart advertising, because we don't have to deal with the scale of numbers of publications that an entity like TOR has to deal with. As long as we keep our readers informed, I think we can safely refresh covers and blurbs every few years as the markets adjust and alter over time.


In the end, this is a brave new world. None of us knows how long our books will continue to sell. There could be another Carrington Event that wipes out all electronics for 2 years and we will all starve. 

Or, not, and we will cook along with more and more readers going digital and discovering our books in a decade or three and reading them. Only time will tell.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

This_Way_Down said:


> If you want to do so in a genre with a small readership, then you will sell a small number of books, regardless of how well-written.


Sure; that makes perfect sense to me. And if that's someone's business model, bully for them. It may not be someone else's business model, but it's still business. They're not doing it 'wrong', just different.



Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> At the end of the day, I write not because I expect to get rich; not because I want to quit my day job; not because I have delusions of grandeur. _I write because I have a compulsion to tell stories._ That I have platforms that allow me to sell those stories is a bonus. The "economics" of writing novels only matters to me insofar as I recover my expenses. I don't NEED to make $80,000 a year off my books for validation. I don't NEED to be able to quit my job to see the value in what I write. I am compelled to write, and so I do.
> 
> If this whole thing ever got to a point where I felt I HAD to write in a certain genre or that I had to publish X number of books a month or I had to make X number of dollars a year, I think a little of my soul would die. I write because I am a writer. If a person can make their dream income writing AND still continue to tell the stories they want to tell without compromising, they are doubly blessed. But if you are only interested in writing if you can make some arbitrary income, then in my never humble opinion you are looking in the wrong place to get rich.


*bows to the wisdom*



Sela said:


> In the end, this is a brave new world. None of us knows how long our books will continue to sell. There could be another Carrington Event that wipes out all electronics for 2 years and we will all starve.
> 
> Or, not, and we will cook along with more and more readers going digital and discovering our books in a decade or three and reading them. Only time will tell.


Truth! Bezos could wake up one day and decide to pull the plug on Amazon selling books and just transfer all of our funds into his rocketships.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> At the end of the day, I write not because I expect to get rich; not because I want to quit my day job; not because I have delusions of grandeur. _I write because I have a compulsion to tell stories._ That I have platforms that allow me to sell those stories is a bonus. The "economics" of writing novels only matters to me insofar as I recover my expenses. I don't NEED to make $80,000 a year off my books for validation. I don't NEED to be able to quit my job to see the value in what I write. I am compelled to write, and so I do.
> 
> If this whole thing ever got to a point where I felt I HAD to write in a certain genre or that I had to publish X number of books a month or I had to make X number of dollars a year, I think a little of my soul would die. I write because I am a writer. If a person can make their dream income writing AND still continue to tell the stories they want to tell without compromising, they are doubly blessed. But if you are only interested in writing if you can make some arbitrary income, then in my never humble opinion you are looking in the wrong place to get rich.


My question is about this idea that writing to trend or to market is somehow "compromising". Writers write. Period. If they have a job writing for the NYTs or WP, or if they write fan fiction at night after a long day packing spices in a factory, of if they write the latest trend and make a killing, they are doing what they love.

My father was a pilot in the military. He LOVED flying and was lucky to have been able to fly for a living all his life. He flew fighter jets for 28 years in the military and then flew Leer jets for a private company for another decade before retiring. Flying jets was the best, but flying a Leer jet into and out of LAX was sweet. He would have flown a Cessna ferrying hunters into and out of the bush if that was the only work he could get and he would have been happy. He flew, and that was what mattered.

That's the way I look at it. I love to write. I want to write novels. I read in several genres, and if I can make a living writing in those genres, I will be a happy camper indeed. If it is primarily erotic romance or romantic suspense, so be it. If I can break into non-romance, including suspense, thrillers and SF, I will be happy, but the take-home is that I am writing. It is my business. It is my career.

Couldn't be happier. Damn lucky.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Jim Johnson said:


> Truth! Bezos could wake up one day and decide to pull the plug on Amazon selling books and just transfer all of our funds into his rocketships.


EEEKKK!!!


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Jim Johnson said:


> Ah, I love your stuff, Rosalind! The bus tour my wife and I took last year on our honeymoon stopped off in Te Kuiti after our visit to the glowworm caves. We grabbed some pizza at a little place in town. Fun times.


I really like Te Kuiti. I made the hero of that book come from there to say "Thanks" to Paper Plus for the notebook! The Waitomo caves are awesome too.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2015)

Sela said:


> My question is about this idea that writing to trend or to market is somehow "compromising".


Did I say anything about writing to trend or market? If you are writing the stories you want to write I don't see how my comments apply to you or why you might feel the need to be defensive.


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> If this whole thing ever got to a point where I felt I HAD to write in a certain genre or that I had to publish X number of books a month or I had to make X number of dollars a year, I think a little of my soul would die. I write because I am a writer. If a person can make their dream income writing AND still continue to tell the stories they want to tell without compromising, they are doubly blessed. But if you are only interested in writing if you can make some arbitrary income, then in my never humble opinion you are looking in the wrong place to get rich.


Agreed.

I always dreamed of being an author, and now I am one. Getting emails and blog comments from readers has been the best payoff so far, but the money doesn't hurt.

When I found out about KDP, I quit playing Ultima Online and The Sims. I told myself any computer activity I did had to make me money instead of costing money. I'm very glad that I listened!

I still work for others, but now my leisure time feels better spent. More satisfying.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> If this whole thing ever got to a point where I felt I HAD to write in a certain genre or that I had to publish X number of books a month or I had to make X number of dollars a year, I think a little of my soul would die. I write because I am a writer. If a person can make their dream income writing AND still continue to tell the stories they want to tell without compromising, they are doubly blessed. But if you are only interested in writing if you can make some arbitrary income, then in my never humble opinion you are looking in the wrong place to get rich.


I don't know. Compared to some of the other things people who just want to get rich do in order to become rich, being a genre-fiction author seems pretty innocuous. No one is harmed. You give your readers pleasure, and they give you wealth. They need never know you're just in it for the money. Seems like a pretty blameless strategy, if you can pull it off.


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## Mark E. Cooper (May 29, 2011)

Jim Johnson said:


> Truth! Bezos could wake up one day and decide to pull the plug on Amazon selling books and just transfer all of our funds into his rocketships.


Exactly! Now you see why I go wide


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

There's a big difference between writing to market in the sense of "I'm going to write contemporary romance instead of poetry. I love both, but I have to pay the bills" and "Today a bear shifter novel where the bear is a billionaire and a fireman is #1, so I will write a bear shifter where the bear is a billionaire and a fireman." 

A lot of indies assume it means the latter and a lot have made bank doing pretty straight out copycats. Those aren't going to have a lot of legs though.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Speaker-To-Animals said:


> There's a big difference between writing to market in the sense of "I'm going to write contemporary romance instead of poetry. I love both, but I have to pay the bills" and "Today a bear shifter novel where the bear is a billionaire and a fireman is #1, so I will write a bear shifter where the bear is a billionaire and a fireman."
> 
> A lot of indies assume it means the latter and a lot have made bank doing pretty straight out copycats. Those aren't going to have a lot of legs though.


Legs are great, but... legs are the end of things, not the meat of them. Look at it this way maybe?

Hypothetical book A sells enough copies year 1 to earn 200 dollars. Then it sells consistently for the next 20 years, earning 100 a year. That book has legs, right? I mean, still selling in year 20!

Hypothetical book B is a trendy book in a hip now genre. It sells enough copies to earn 5k in the first six months, but the genre trends change and it sells only 200 dollars the second six months and by end of year one isn't selling at all anymore.

Author of book A will have earned 2200 dollars over 21 years.

Author of book B will have earned 5200 dollars over one year (and on that book no more money ever).

I know which author I'd rather be, in the end. Watching careers of various people and watching a lot of rise and fall in books and writers... even in indie publishing the money is in the fireball at the head of things, not in the tail. The tail is nice to have I guess, but unless you made a huge explosion to start odds are that tail will be tiny. Legs are great, but basing a serious business on a tiny tail has real drawbacks.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Did I say anything about writing to trend or market? If you are writing the stories you want to write I don't see how my comments apply to you or why you might feel the need to be defensive.


Not defensive. Just making a general point.

I didn't take your comment personally. I took it to apply to writers in general. As a writer and who likes to think about these questions, I responded because I am interested in the meme of artistic compromise and what it says about writing and publishing. If my post suggested I was defensive rather than trying to make a general point, it was a miscommunication. I did not feel defensive nor did I think your post was directed at me.

I was responding to this:



> If a person can make their dream income writing AND still continue to tell the stories they want to tell without compromising, they are doubly blessed.


There is a sentiment that if an author writes stories that are not what they _want_ to write, they are compromising. Their art, their vision -- they are compromising _something_ in return for income.

Sometimes, writers just want to write for a living period, whatever form that writing may take. It may be writing shifter romance instead of international espionage thrillers. But they may not feel that they are compromising anything. So my comment was not taking offence, or being defensive, but responding to that sentiment. I didn't mean to imply that was your sentiment, but a sentiment in general.

I think a lot of this sentiment about art vs commerce comes from the whole division of labour in the legacy market between art (authors) and commerce (publishers). Artists were supposed to focus on the art and let the publisher worry about filthy lucre.  Now, indie authors have to think about both if they want to make a living at it.

Is that compromising? Or is it just reality?

Some authors can write EXACTLY what they want and make a killing. Other authors write something marketable instead of the alien vampire steampunk noir mystery that's been brewing in their head for years. 

And that's okay.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Annie B said:


> Legs are great, but... legs are the end of things, not the meat of them. Look at it this way maybe?
> 
> Hypothetical book A sells enough copies year 1 to earn 200 dollars. Then it sells consistently for the next 20 years, earning 100 a year. That book has legs, right? I mean, still selling in year 20!
> 
> ...


I guess it depends on what you mean by "huge" and "fireball." I've never been a mega bestseller, but I've had a few books in the top 100 at full price, and most of them in the top 100 via sales. And they've definitely had legs due to not being super-trendy, and that's definitely helped.

I'm not advising people, "Don't write to trend!" I think you make a good point. I guess I'm just saying--I don't write to trend, and that hasn't been catastrophic.

(Well, ONE book was to trend. My worst seller. I enjoyed writing it. It was an experiment, and it was fun. But it hasn't sold as well as my books usually do. Maybe when I release more in the series, and maybe not. But I did think it was funny. "Hey! I finally wrote a commercial book! Oh. Whoops.")


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Well, I think "trend" is over-used, too. I mean, often times people use it to mean "writing in a genre with large readership numbers" which isn't exactly the same thing as writing to trend. 

By fireball, I mean selling near or above the level the OP seems to think is reserved for the top sellers.  Odds are, if you don't sell many copies of a book, at first, it won't magically start to sell more copies later or even continue selling at all. Not that a book that doesn't sell out of the gate is dead in the water, there are plenty of things to try before calling ToD on it (sequels, pricing, bundles, ads etc).  But if you release a book and it sells five copies a month, I'd take the bet that the same book (without a lot of experimenting and push and help at some point and honestly, maybe even with all those things most of the time) is going to sell five copies a year by year 2 or 3, and nothing at all by year 20.  If you release and sell 500 copies, there's a much better chance (based on a huge number of factors) that the book will still be selling a year from now.  (Plus, you know, that whole if you sell 500 copies in a month vs 500 copies over 20 years, you will have made money to pay bills ASAP, heh, and keep your business going.)


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Gotcha. Agreed. 

I know somebody made the point above that "writing to trend" can mean "writing contemporary romance" or "writing stepbrother billionaire romance." Different degrees of trend.


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## vlmain (Aug 10, 2011)

Rosalind James said:


> Gotcha. Agreed.
> 
> I know somebody made the point above that "writing to trend" can mean "writing contemporary romance" or "writing stepbrother billionaire romance." Different degrees of trend.


I suppose this is one of those things we define differently. To me, contemporary romance is a category within the romance genre that will likely be around a long time. I would not consider that a trend. Shapeshifter romance, erotica involving anything with tentacles (I had to be very careful typing that) would be a trend.

But that's just me.


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## CoraBuhlert (Aug 7, 2011)

Sela said:


> No, but if you want to write thrillers, check out the best sellers in thrillers and see what people are reading. Then write your thriller with a mind to feeding those readers. Or if you want to write SF, check out the SF best sellers and see what people are buying and reading. Then, write your SF novel with a mind to feeding those readers.
> 
> Only write a genre if you understand it and know what pleases its readers. If you don't understand its readers, you will most likely not please those readers and will not sell.
> 
> If you don't care a rat's patootie about selling, write whatever the heck you want!


If you want to write in a genre you've never read or at least haven't read recently, then you should definitely read a couple of recent and popular books in the genre to see what readers are looking for.

However, I suspect that most of us already read the genre we're writing or planning to write. We know what's currently popular, because there is a pretty good chance we see those books every time we log into Amazon or another online store or go into a physical bookstore to buy something to read. And maybe we like whatever's currently popular in our genre and can write something similar.

But it's also possible that we don't much care for whatever the hottest trend in our genre is. For example, the space opera bestseller lists at Amazon are currently full of manly space marines doing manly things in space. Now I love space opera. However, I happen to find manly space marines doing manly things in space boring. However, since I'm a fan of the genre and plugged into the genre conversation, I also know that I'm far from the only person bored by space marines. So I also know that if I write a space opera without manly space marines, I know there are people who might want to read it.

You don't always have to chase the hottest trend in your genre, if you happen not to like that trend. Even smaller niches can be profitable, especially if they are underserved and hungry for content. However, you have to know the genre and its readership.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

vlmain said:


> I suppose this is one of those things we define differently. To me, contemporary romance is a category within the romance genre that will likely be around a long time. I would not consider that a trend. Shapeshifter romance, erotica involving anything with tentacles (I had to be very careful typing that) would be a trend.
> 
> But that's just me.


Yep. That's what I mean, and I agree. I write sorta mainstream stuff (more the kind of stuff that's still tradpubbed) in a popular genre. I don't write to many of the trends that indies are quick to pick up on. That's partly because I don't tend to like them--my mind runs on much more realistic lines in terms of stories--but also because I do think that something that's less "flavor of the moment" might stick around longer.

But I can see the argument for making hay while the sun shines. Whatever.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Rosalind James said:


> Yep. That's what I mean, and I agree. I write sorta mainstream stuff (more the kind of stuff that's still tradpubbed) in a popular genre. I don't write to many of the trends that indies are quick to pick up on. That's partly because I don't tend to like them--my mind runs on much more realistic lines in terms of stories--but also because I do think that something that's less "flavor of the moment" might stick around longer.
> 
> But I can see the argument for making hay while the sun shines. Whatever.


You never know -- maybe were bears will be the vampires of the next few decades. This industry is still too young to know anything about longevity. Maybe in the legacy system, trends were shorter because the shelf life of print books was so short. With eBooks and virtual shelf space, a book can stick around for a long time. My best seller is still my best seller. When I run a Bookbub, I give away another 40K books and sell another 20K sequels. The audience is at least 10M readers and I have only reached <5% of that market. If I can keep reaching people in the audience who haven't heard of my book before, maybe my books will keep selling for a decade. That would be sweet.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> I know which author I'd rather be, in the end. Watching careers of various people and watching a lot of rise and fall in books and writers... even in indie publishing the money is in the fireball at the head of things, not in the tail. The tail is nice to have I guess, but unless you made a huge explosion to start odds are that tail will be tiny. Legs are great, but basing a serious business on a tiny tail has real drawbacks.


I'm a little confused here because you seem to be trying to refute me, but I would put you as writing to general trend, not chasing specific quick cash in trends.

Unless there's some billionaire stepbrothers who are werebears in triads in your catalog that I'm missing  Which I think goes back to varying definitions of what writing to trend can mean.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

True. I am not chasing quick cash. I'm chasing lots of cash now AND later (funny how when you build an actual readership in real numbers, the financial side of things tends to take care of itself, ha. I don't think you can really divorce financial success from satisfying your readership). I tried the "write a lot of things and have small drips of money that will add up to a river" method where you try to think of each thing in your catalog as some kind of long term investing thingy, but it didn't work. It was a terrible and ineffective way of going about things.  Tiny streams don't turn into rivers, they turn into dry old stream beds, in my experience.

So while I don't exactly write to trend in that I don't chase what is hot, I do make sure that I am nailing every bit of what readers in my genre expect from their books and marketing/pricing such that I am always working to grow that readership.  So in that way, I do write to market, because I publish for a market, as a business that delivers a product.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Jana DeLeon said:


> Backlist sales diminish. Even though my current series is a huge seller, sales on my older books continue to drop and will continue to drop. It is not a long-term investment. If a book makes you good money for five to ten years, then that's great, but it's very rare for a book to still be making money 20 years later because the world changes and popular fiction becomes outdated. Books are not an investment for me. They are a revenue producing product, and that product has a shelf life.
> 
> I have a SEP for investment and real estate.


I'll agree with that if everything is left to the will of the market in the medium term and not nececerily glancing ahead 20 years. I just wonder if it isn't more a case of honing marketing efforts on newer titles that causes the drop off, because of time restraints and the need to write more books.

My first book published in 2011 languished after a couple of years, but had already earned its costs back. I think I paid $75 for the cover and $400 for the edit. I marketed it one day early this year and the following day it made over $100 royalties.

The same happened with my short story compilation, published the same year. For some reason the compilation took off in the UK in 2011 and earned out costs in 3 months and produced a decent profit for the rest of the year, then it tanked. I designed my own crap cover for that one (go figure)and editing costs were $450 Neither sell many now, but a few sales still drip in every month around the world. I later published the shorts as individuals and translated a few of them, which sort of perpetuated things for a while, with the Portuguese translations starting to make the bank monthly. For the English shorts, there was no need for editing as it was already done, and I did a deal recently for the covers at just under $20 each.

Getting a return quickly is all about keeping costs to a minimum and marketing the hell out of it at release. I wish I knew the answer to long shelf life.


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## IndieP (Oct 23, 2015)

I have a really good day job.  I'd love to make money off of this, but I'm still at a stage where I'm amazed people have read my work (and I just started publishing a month ago).  For years, I read about "slush piles" and begging agents to rep you and it discouraged me so much that I stopped writing altogether.  Now I stumbled upon what you good people are doing and it's a life-changing deal.  That said, I'd be pumped if my love of writing somehow offset my $230 monthly car payment.  

Another note on OP's stats: The average American may only buy 1 book per year but there are enough hardcore readers to more than offset the rest.  Some people buy a couple dozen books per month.


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## Guest (Oct 27, 2015)

Sela said:


> I didn't take your comment personally. I took it to apply to writers in general. As a writer and who likes to think about these questions, I responded because I am interested in the meme of artistic compromise and what it says about writing and publishing. If my post suggested I was defensive rather than trying to make a general point, it was a miscommunication. I did not feel defensive nor did I think your post was directed at me.


Maybe we are just talking around each other. 

I'm not one of those "starving artist" folks who thinks all artists should live in poverty for the sake of their art. I like money.  But I do think there is an unhealthy fixation on money. Indies have, in some ways, become the thing they rebelled against; money-focused publishers not willing to experiment of unproven works and locked into a very limited methodology of promotion. Businesses that ignore smaller, niche markets that aren't as profitable and pushing out massive amounts of content for the most money. The OP's initial post is evidence of that. Essentially, if he can't make $80,000, writing is pointless to him. Everyone is arguing with him how easy it is to make $80,000, but few are actually challenging the notion that making big money is the primary purpose of publishing.

Genre is a tool of storytelling, not a story unto itself. You start with your idea, and then you chose the genre based on what you are trying to say. Maybe you decide to write a romantic suspense novel instead of a political thriller because you feel the market for romantic suspense is wider, but you are still following the same basic story idea. Just using a different tool. If an artist wants to paint a picture of a flower, the picture isn't less an artistic endeavor simply because he used watercolor instead of oils. I don't consider tool selection "compromising". You can tell great stories in any genre.

_Compromising is when the story doesn't even matter_. Compromising is when someone who doesn't even have a story idea is asking "Which sells better, shifter erotica or billionaire erotica?" Compromising is when you don't write the story you want to tell and instead churn out what you think will be the most marketable on a production-line schedule. Compromise is saying "Stand alone novels don't sell, so I'm only going to write serials even though my heart really wants to tell this stand-alone story." Compromise is saying "I'm really proud of this novel and it sells a handful of copies a month, but I'm going to pull it from Amazon because it is hurting my Author Rank." That is compromising. Some people are comfortable with it. I'm not.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

> Compromising is when the story doesn't even matter. Compromising is when someone who doesn't even have a story idea is asking "Which sells better, shifter erotica or billionaire erotica?"


Q: How do I write a romance novel?
A: Well what romances have you read?
Q: I hate them. They're all crap, but what sells?

That's a level of writing to the market that's not really part of the mainstream literary establishment. It was part of some of the paperback original market and it's part of the indie market, but it's very different than writing contemporary rather than historical because the market is hotter.

(I agree with Julie? Really?)


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## dalyamoon2 (Oct 22, 2015)

You can write for love or money, but rarely both at once. That's where the pain happens, when people try to have their cake and eat it.

For the sake of public relations, successful authors should tell their fans that of course they write exactly what they love with zero compromises. That's just good P.R. 

If you choose between love or money, things get easier. There's absolutely nothing wrong with money. In fact, it's very easy to be all zen and minimal and act like money isn't everything... once you have your house paid off.


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## Mylius Fox (Jun 2, 2014)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> The OP's initial post is evidence of that. Essentially, if he can't make $80,000, writing is pointless to him.


Sounds more like assumption than essence to me.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> _Compromising is when the story doesn't even matter_. Compromising is when someone who doesn't even have a story idea is asking "Which sells better, shifter erotica or billionaire erotica?"





Speaker-To-Animals said:


> Q: How do I write a romance novel?
> A: Well what romances have you read?
> Q: I hate them. They're all crap, but what sells?


I think both those examples go way beyond the level of compromise most people here are talking about. If you have no principles, you can't compromise them.


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## vlmain (Aug 10, 2011)

To me, if you feel like you're compromising, you are. Otherwise, no. What I would consider a compromise would not be to someone else. This is another of those areas that will be different for everyone.


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## Avis Black (Jun 12, 2012)

dalyamoon2 said:


> You can write for love or money, but rarely both at once. That's where the pain happens, when people try to have their cake and eat it.


Did Louis L'Amour dislike Westerns? Did Agatha Christie dislike mysteries? Did Tolkien dislike fantasy? Does Stephen King dislike horror? Does Nora Roberts dislike romance?

It looks an awful lot to me like these authors who happened to be very financially successful at their genre just picked a genre they genuinely liked, and then they worked long, hard, and deeply within that genre. They created their own audience as they build their careers. They lured in readers and made those readers follow them in the direction they were going. It looks like they were writing for both love and money, and that it's quite possible to do so. Nor do you have to be the most successful author in your genre to make a living at it, either.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

I'm a writer. I earn my living writing novels.

I have a dozen plots and many characters -- enough to keep me busy for the next few years. I have several books in several genres that I would like to write at some time or other. Is it compromising for me to check out the bestsellers lists and see what is selling and choosing a genre and moulding my category to fulfill a hunger on the part of readers for stepbrother romances? I have a plot that I could tailor to that particular storyline. If I made a shed-load of money doing it, would I be compromising? (not saying I do -- that is just an example)

Or would I be compromising my ability to pay my bills if I refused to write _that_ book and instead, wrote a book very close to my heart with a very small niche audience that is hard to reach and might not make back the cost of editing and cover art?

Compromise can go both ways.


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

Sela said:


> You can make a living feeding the reading habits of _readers_ -- especially voracious readers.


For sure.


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

Annie B said:


> ...I do make sure that I am nailing every bit of what readers in my genre expect from their books and marketing/pricing such that I am always working to grow that readership.


This is key. Great advice. Sounds a lot like the customer-centric Amazon model. 

The "treadmill" approach to self-publishing does exist, but it's hard to keep up the pace. Once you find your 1,000 True Fans as a writer, the rest does sort of fall into place.


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

IndieP said:


> I have a really good day job. I'd love to make money off of this, but I'm still at a stage where I'm amazed people have read my work (and I just started publishing a month ago). For years, I read about "slush piles" and begging agents to rep you and it discouraged me so much that I stopped writing altogether. Now I stumbled upon what you good people are doing and it's a life-changing deal. That said, I'd be pumped if my love of writing somehow offset my $230 monthly car payment.


Consistent quality releases are the way to go. If you're not doing it yet, start getting subscribers on a mailing list. The money is in the list. Amazon (basically) has monetized the "slush pile" and doing-so allowed a lot of people to become full time writers.

If anyone hasn't read them, we recommend Fiction Factory and Secrets of the World's Best Selling Writer.

We're in a Golden Age for writers with direct access to a huge audience of voracious and casual readers. Erle Stanley Gardner's career would have been different today with the ebook market, but his story offers a lot of good lessons for self-publishers. Anyway, this is a great thread, and we wanted to chime in.


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## Writer&#039;s Block (Oct 29, 2014)

Rosalind James said:


> Yeah, maybe it's the manner in which one meets writers. I've never belonged to any groups--I'd think by definition, anybody who started writing later on and went ahead and published might not have been in groups. I did write for my work, but I was never primarily a writer, and never wrote any fiction, not even a short story as a kid. I never had any imagination, I didn't think. I didn't connect the elaborate romantic daydreams in my head to "that could be a book," for some reason, until one day when I was over 50.


You are not alone. This is me. The day dream came out in a conversation with friends. They said, 'what not try and write it'. So wrote a chapter and found out that I could. I'm over 50. I'm very proud of my first book, very. The next is more about getting better at the craft. The ones after that will focus on the business.


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## dalyamoon2 (Oct 22, 2015)

Avis Black said:


> Did Louis L'Amour dislike Westerns? Did Agatha Christie dislike mysteries? Did Tolkien dislike fantasy? Does Stephen King dislike horror? Does Nora Roberts dislike romance?
> 
> It looks an awful lot to me like these authors who happened to be very financially successful at their genre just picked a genre they genuinely liked, and then they worked long, hard, and deeply within that genre. They created their own audience as they build their careers. They lured in readers and made those readers follow them in the direction they were going. It looks like they were writing for both love and money, and that it's quite possible to do so. Nor do you have to be the most successful author in your genre to make a living at it, either.


The choices aren't to write for love vs write something you dislike for money.

There's no magical payout scale where the more pain you feel the more cash shoots out of Amazon at you. Suffering is optional! And some intrepid souls are able to write a variety of things and find the joy in loving what they write, which is just a neat inversion of writing what you love.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

dalyamoon2 said:


> You can write for love or money, but rarely both at once. That's where the pain happens, when people try to have their cake and eat it.
> 
> For the sake of public relations, successful authors should tell their fans that of course they write exactly what they love with zero compromises. That's just good P.R.
> 
> If you choose between love or money, things get easier. There's absolutely nothing wrong with money. In fact, it's very easy to be all zen and minimal and act like money isn't everything... once you have your house paid off.


Oh, I dunno. I write for both at once, always, just because I don't have another mode available. I suspect lots of authors do. I guess I'd say, I write the stories I enjoy, but I'm also thinking as I write them about whether others will enjoy this particular thing too. Writing is communication, so I'm trying to draw the reader into this world I've created. In that sense, I'm always writing for money--because I'm intending to publish that story that I'm writing for love.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

dalyamoon2 said:


> The choices aren't to write for love vs write something you dislike for money.
> 
> There's no magical payout scale where the more pain you feel the more cash shoots out of Amazon at you. Suffering is optional! And some intrepid souls are able to write a variety of things and find the joy in loving what they write, which is just a neat inversion of writing what you love.


My son turns his nose up at my erotic romance novels, but he appreciates the fact that I am doing very well financially at this time. It's easy to love my books, at least to me, because they are successful and make me a good income. If they sat there like dead ducks and never sold, I might hate them, no matter how much I was able to fulfil my artistic integrity. I'm writing not just to express myself artistically, but to gain an audience and to make money. One can do all three. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Luckily.


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## dalyamoon2 (Oct 22, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> Oh, I dunno. I write for both at once, always, just because I don't have another mode available. I suspect lots of authors do. I guess I'd say, I write the stories I enjoy, but I'm also thinking as I write them about whether others will enjoy this particular thing too. Writing is communication, so I'm trying to draw the reader into this world I've created. In that sense, I'm always writing for money--because I'm intending to publish that story that I'm writing for love.


I find that tough choices pop up for me often enough that I have to set my mind to one way or the other. For example, if I'm writing in a clean genre and a scene is going in a direction that lends itself to a particularly bawdy joke that makes me LOL, I can either put the joke in because it amuses me and will delight a percentage of readers, or I go the safer route and don't put the bawdy joke in there.

Being commercial-minded can just mean meeting genre expectations. You can't avoid offending everyone, of course. I once had a lady email me in an outrage because a book character made a joke about gluten.

My eyes were opened when I had an author pen name account on Facebook and had readers friending my account. I saw the things these folks posted, and it was like another universe, very different from the universe in which I lived as my regular name. I won't go into details, because the eclectic mix of folks on here will lose their minds, but you can imagine.

If you're writing for an audience who is more aligned with you, the author, in their politics and personal taste, you can trust your instincts a lot more and go with what you like, because they're likely to like it. But if I'm writing a little outside of my universe, that's where research and going with genre norms kicks in for me.

Also, I sense that we don't disagree. I didn't use many words in my previous post.

Edited to add: I've never published something I didn't love, but they didn't all start out as love babies.


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## PJ_Cherubino (Oct 23, 2015)

Wow. Mind = blown

"monetized the slush pile", he said. This is the most apt description I've heard of the KDP market yet.

The first challenge when publishing in KDP is simply to get noticed. Live and learn. My next novel is going wide - B&N and Zon sans select and maybe Kobo (which I just learned about).

Anyway, good luck all.

The insights I'm gaining here are invaluable. Thanks all.



Ebook Itch said:


> Consistent quality releases are the way to go. If you're not doing it yet, start getting subscribers on a mailing list. The money is in the list. Amazon (basically) has monetized the "slush pile" and doing-so allowed a lot of people to become full time writers.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Ebook Itch said:


> Consistent quality releases are the way to go. If you're not doing it yet, start getting subscribers on a mailing list. The money is in the list. Amazon (basically) has monetized the "slush pile" and doing-so allowed a lot of people to become full time writers.
> 
> If anyone hasn't read them, we recommend Fiction Factory and Secrets of the World's Best Selling Writer.
> 
> We're in a Golden Age for writers with direct access to a huge audience of voracious and casual readers. Erle Stanley Gardner's career would have been different today with the ebook market, but his story offers a lot of good lessons for self-publishers. Anyway, this is a great thread, and we wanted to chime in.


Monetized the slush pile? I'm not quite sure what that means. Most books didn't get accepted by publishers, true, and of those that did, only 10-15% or so earned out for the authors. (Meaning they made the authors more than the $5K of their advance--or sold over $50K worth for the publisher.) Now, true, anybody can publish . . . but most books still don't earn much. I read a statistic three years or so ago that said that, what was it? 80%? 90%? of authors earn less than $10K a year at writing? Or maybe it was $1K a year. It was small.

The barriers to entry are down, which means that more authors have a chance at selling. That doesn't mean that everything sells, if that's what "monetized the slush pile" means.


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## James R Wells (May 21, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> The barriers to entry are down, which means that more authors have a chance at selling. That doesn't mean that everything sells, if that's what "monetized the slush pile" means.


I think it means monetizing for Amazon's purposes, not the author's. Consider a novel that from the author's point of view is not a huge success, such as 100 or 200 copies sold. Author loses a bunch of money on the net. But Amazon gets their cut of every sale. Then multiply that by endless thousands and thousands of titles.


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## Adam G. Katz (Jan 18, 2013)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Essentially, if he can't make $80,000, writing is pointless to him. Everyone is arguing with him how easy it is to make $80,000, but few are actually challenging the notion that making big money is the primary purpose of publishing.


You're correct: It is pointless to me if I can't at least have a chance of making $80,000+/year. And I see nothing wrong with that.

If I have the freedom to choose from five different hobby-like activities that I enjoy equally-- then why shouldn't I choose the one that has the best chance of making the most profit for me?


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

James R Wells said:


> I think it means monetizing for Amazon's purposes, not the author's. Consider a novel that from the author's point of view is not a huge success, such as 100 or 200 copies sold. Author loses a bunch of money on the net. But Amazon gets their cut of every sale. Then multiply that by endless thousands and thousands of titles.


Yeah, I think that's right. There was this thing the traditional system looked at with eye-rolling scorn and couldn't shovel into the recycling bin fast enough (the slush pile). Amazon thought, _Hmm, looks like "product" to us. We can make money from that_. And they have.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

James R Wells said:


> I think it means monetizing for Amazon's purposes, not the author's. Consider a novel that from the author's point of view is not a huge success, such as 100 or 200 copies sold. Author loses a bunch of money on the net. But Amazon gets their cut of every sale. Then multiply that by endless thousands and thousands of titles.


For a lot of writers, though, those 100-200 sales are awesome compared to the nothing they sold while sending the manuscripts around the query-go-round. That's 100-200 people who took a risk on that writer's work when no agent or publisher would touch them. I'll take reader opinion over gatekeepers any day.

I think it's brilliant of Amazon to have figured out how to monetize the slush pile.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

80K per year? Possible, definitely. Easy? No, but there are not that many jobs where this sort of income is either guaranteed or without hard work, especially not when running a non-salaried business, which is what you're doing as writer.

I'm a quarter of the way there. Since I have roughly doubled my income each year since starting, I expect to be there within 2-3 years.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Monetizing the slush pile -- such a good description of what Amazon does!

Under the legacy system, very few books -- fewer than might actually sell -- could be published each year due to the physical limitations of existing shelf space and the economics of the print distribution system. There were probably quite a few books that could earn a few tens,  hundred or thousand bucks, if they had a chance on the shelves. But the publishers couldn't take those risks due to the economics. The digital system makes taking that risk very inexpensive. As a result, the books that sell a few copies a month still result in cha-ching and it all adds up.


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## JeanetteRaleigh (Jan 1, 2013)

I was ecstatic when I made minimum wage on one of my books.  The economics seem to indicate that the first five years are lean.  The hard work comes up front with the rewards following.  I started looking at Best Sellers at the library and discovered that the authors who 'made it' had AT LEAST 10 novels to their name.  I decided I wouldn't give up until I had at least that many books out.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

I want to make a decent living so I can write full time.

But, mostly, I care about getting lots of sales because it means lots of people are reading my book. Sure, not everyone who buys reads, but the more people who buy, the more people who read it. I write so I can share my work with other people. If that means tailoring my work to fit the mainstream, that's okay with me. I still love all my books. I'm just cognizant of hitting the tropes of my subgenre or niche.

Seeing people buy or borrow my books, leave reviews, sign up for my mailing list, post on my Facebook page that they loved it-- it's freaking awesome.


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## Guest (Oct 28, 2015)

Isn't it peculiar that those who are not earning a living writing are the first to say that they will not sacrifice their "art" for profit? As if it's an option. They spout the virtues of staying true to themselves as a writer, ignoring the fact that the point of publishing it to make money. If money doesn't matter, post it on your blog for free. But if you are asking people to pay to read your work, you cannot say it doesn't matter.
And I will also note that if you are writing genre fiction, its unlikely you are producing art. It's entertainment. It stories meant to be read for pleasure. No one is reading a mystery novel or a romance in order to find the meaning of their existence. They just want to enjoy the story and relax.


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## Jennifer Lewis (Dec 12, 2013)

Adam G. Katz said:


> You're correct: It is pointless to me if I can't at least have a chance of making $80,000+/year. And I see nothing wrong with that.
> 
> If I have the freedom to choose from five different hobby-like activities that I enjoy equally-- then why shouldn't I choose the one that has the best chance of making the most profit for me?


You certainly can make 80K in a year and plenty of people do. It helps if you have a keen eye for the market and what is selling RIGHT NOW, you write in a popular genre with voracious readers who read multiple books per week (this is the main reason why romance is a great genre), you write a series so readers keep wanting/buying your books, and you figure out how to market effectively to your audience. Obviously readers need to love the books. And you have to write fast. 4 books a year at a bare minimum, more is better. 27 copies each a day of four books really isn't all that much to aim for if you can pull off those things.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it's usually boom and bust for most people. You might have an amazing year when your series catches fire and you make $400K. Then your next series bombs and you make 20K (in residual sales from series 1. The new series makes $382  ) Only a very few people will make a lot of money consistently year after year for more than 5 years.

Is it likely that you'll make 80K a year? No. On the other hand, it's a great lifestyle even if you don't make 80K


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## Jana DeLeon (Jan 20, 2011)

This_Way_Down said:


> They spout the virtues of staying true to themselves as a writer, ignoring the fact that the point of publishing it to make money.


See, I don't get that assessment at all. I was traditionally published. I went indie because I wanted to write what I wanted to write with no one telling me how to do it and that their way was better. I have never compromised what I wanted to write to be an indie writer. I compromised when I was traditionally published. Now that I'm in control, that's not going to happen ever again. The fact that I make more money than I ever thought possible on a series that NY deemed "over the top" and "too outrageous" for readers to love tells me that I was right. But if this series stops making money, then I will stop writing it and will write something else, because writing is my family's support. And I would rather dig ditches than return to corporate America.


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## BeachB (Sep 3, 2013)

What a great thread!  Thank you all for so much inspiration and information.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

This_Way_Down said:


> They spout the virtues of staying true to themselves as a writer, ignoring the fact that the point of publishing it to make money. If money doesn't matter, post it on your blog for free. But if you are asking people to pay to read your work, you cannot say it doesn't matter.


This is true to a point. If someone is offering their material for sale, they obviously want to make a buck.

Having said that, the pursuit of coin is different for everyone.

Some authors, like vendors at a flea market, might relish their craft and celebrate every sale - not just for the income, but for the validation that others like their stuff. Other authors focus on self-publishing as a business. Every book they produce is a product in search of customers. They're constantly looking for ways to extend their reach and scale their ventures. To them, profit is paramount.

Different strokes for different folks.


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

Rosalind James said:


> Monetized the slush pile? I'm not quite sure what that means. Most books didn't get accepted by publishers, true, and of those that did, only 10-15% or so earned out for the authors. (Meaning they made the authors more than the $5K of their advance--or sold over $50K worth for the publisher.) Now, true, anybody can publish . . . but most books still don't earn much. I read a statistic three years or so ago that said that, what was it? 80%? 90%? of authors earn less than $10K a year at writing? Or maybe it was $1K a year. It was small.
> 
> The barriers to entry are down, which means that more authors have a chance at selling. That doesn't mean that everything sells, if that's what "monetized the slush pile" means.


A lot of what is published on KDP is "slush pile" quality material. No, not all of it is selling, but some will sell a little while others break through, find their audience, and sell a lot. In the olden days, if you didn't get through the gatekeepers, you would make NOTHING at all for your work. Now, Amazon has made it possible to make a little (or lot) depending on the quality of the work and other factors.

I mean, honestly, a LOT of ebooks being published would have never made it past the "slush pile" stage of publishing ten or twenty years ago. Amazon is making money (a little here and there adds up) by allowing people to take slush-pile quality work and sell it directly to consumers, and they either buy it or don't.


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

James R Wells said:


> I think it means monetizing for Amazon's purposes, not the author's. Consider a novel that from the author's point of view is not a huge success, such as 100 or 200 copies sold. Author loses a bunch of money on the net. But Amazon gets their cut of every sale. Then multiply that by endless thousands and thousands of titles.


You got it. We could have explained it better, perhaps.


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## Mark E. Cooper (May 29, 2011)

Sela said:


> If they sat there like dead ducks and never sold, I might hate them,


No you wouldn't hate them. Like kids they can disappoint you, but you'll always love them. I should know, I have books like that. I write what I like to read, but apparently half of the books I like to read suck  (according to other readers anyway) Sometimes I think I must be the ONLY one who like some books/genres.


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## Ebook Itch (Mar 3, 2015)

Mark E. Cooper said:


> No you wouldn't hate them. Like kids they can disappoint you, but you'll always love them. I should know, I have books like that. I write what I like to read, but apparently half of the books I like to read suck  (according to other readers anyway) Sometimes I think I must be the ONLY one who like some books/genres.


Anyone find that the books/stories they don't really like sell better than the ones you're in love with as a writer?


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## G.L. Snodgrass (Aug 12, 2014)

> Anyone find that the books/stories they don't really like sell better than the ones you're in love with as a writer?


Yes, My favorite book is my worse seller and my least favorite is one of my best sellers.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Mark E. Cooper said:


> No you wouldn't hate them. Like kids they can disappoint you, but you'll always love them. I should know, I have books like that. I write what I like to read, but apparently half of the books I like to read suck  (according to other readers anyway) Sometimes I think I must be the ONLY one who like some books/genres.


When an author says that their books aren't selling, I wonder what they have done to help them sell. A book might be a great read but if no one knows it exists, it won't be read and its greatness will forever be unknown. Even Amazon's vaunted discoverability engine needs some stimulation before it works in the author's favour. I guess I believe that since this market is so huge, many more books have an audience of some size than before digital publishing / self-publishing, but not everyone will be able to reach that audience (discoverability problems) and not every audience will afford an author a living (niche audience).

Personally, I love my bestseller. Because of it, I went from cubicle land to self-employed six figures. It's validating to see sales when you put something up for sale. It's a bit crushing to put something up for sale and not see any.

Maybe I'm just weird like that...


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## Guest (Oct 28, 2015)

G.L. Snodgrass said:


> Yes, My favorite book is my worse seller and my least favorite is one of my best sellers.


My bestseller is my lowest rated book. Which brings up the whole "quality" argument... 

It's a book I love because it was a fun, spur of the moment thing that I wrote as a mental holiday after I finished my main series. I almost didn't publish it, as I thought it was too weird and too big a departure from the rest of my catalogue. But that little book had legs, sold thousands in its first month and readers seem to either love it, or loathe it, there's not much middle ground.


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## sela (Nov 2, 2014)

Tilly said:


> My bestseller is my lowest rated book. Which brings up the whole "quality" argument...
> 
> It's a book I love because it was a fun, spur of the moment thing that I wrote as a mental holiday after I finished my main series. I almost didn't publish it, as I thought it was too weird and too big a departure from the rest of my catalogue. But that little book had legs, sold thousands in its first month and readers seem to either love it, or loathe it, there's not much middle ground.


I've found that my best sellers have my lower ratings that my low sellers. I suspect that is because with more sales comes more reviews and eventually, more 1 and 2 stars. Books that have lower sales tend to not be as representative of a wide readership. You may only get the people who really loved your book writing a review but once you get a lot of sales, say a hundred thousand, you're bound to have more people who don't like your book. Not everyone likes and book and some of the greatest literary works have lots of 1 and 2 stars. In other words, sheer volume leads to a different distribution of stars.


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## Joseph Turkot (Nov 9, 2012)

I know it can be overwhelming if you think about the horrible statistics. I know for me, seeing a few hundred of my books go out for free, before I'd even sold one, was super stimulating. And after that, getting a single sale, or two in a day was just as stimulating. Each step of the way is an exciting journey I think.


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## Patty Jansen (Apr 5, 2011)

Sela said:


> I've found that my best sellers have my lower ratings that my low sellers. I suspect that is because with more sales comes more reviews and eventually, more 1 and 2 stars. Books that have lower sales tend to not be as representative of a wide readership. You may only get the people who really loved your book writing a review but once you get a lot of sales, say a hundred thousand, you're bound to have more people who don't like your book. Not everyone likes and book and some of the greatest literary works have lots of 1 and 2 stars. In other words, sheer volume leads to a different distribution of stars.


When a book is read very widely and by lots and lots of people, the rating tends to settle somewhere between 3 and 4. Because Amazon does only half stars, that may show up as 3.5 or 4.

A book that's got over 1000 reviews and a rating greater than 4 tends to be really clearly defined in terms of genre. It's obviously hitting the genre tropes hard, and doing it in a satisfying way, so that not as many people are surprised about content they weren't expecting. Not all of the bestsellers are like that, and indeed if a book has somewhat "controversial" or "edgy" content, that's going to be reflected in the rating.


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## Guest (Oct 29, 2015)

Sela said:


> I've found that my best sellers have my lower ratings that my low sellers. I suspect that is because with more sales comes more reviews and eventually, more 1 and 2 stars. Books that have lower sales tend to not be as representative of a wide readership.


Oh, absolutely agree. I know one author who has over 100, 4 & 5 star reviews on her book (and nothing under) and it is ranked 1m+ and she hasn't even sold 100 copies yet. I have learned that reviews and averages aren't always representative of sales, and that often the books with only high reviews have very low sales.

With my little bestseller, I never had a book sell that many copies in such a short period of time before. It hit 100 reviews in a matter of weeks (all organic). What I find fascinating is that I obviously struck a cord with people (whether good or bad!) and the reviews are either 4/5 or 1/2 with barely any 3s. People either thought the romance too slow or too fast. The pacing was either fantastic or ploddy. Characters either life like and 3-dimensional or cardboard flat. It's a wee book of polar opposites


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## MMacLeod (Sep 21, 2015)

Adam G. Katz said:


> You're correct: It is pointless to me if I can't at least have a chance of making $80,000+/year. And I see nothing wrong with that.
> 
> If I have the freedom to choose from five different hobby-like activities that I enjoy equally-- then why shouldn't I choose the one that has the best chance of making the most profit for me?


True, all things being equal where you have several choices and need to narrow it down, why not go with the one that will be most profitable? I find that most of my "hobbies" cost me money, though. Travel, for example, is pretty expensive. And pretty much any hobby that requires the purchase of equipment is a major money pit. On the other hand, I have stories floating around all the time in my head, absolutely free for the taking. If I write them down and publish them, they could end up producing money, which could be spent on plane tickets or new dance shoes. So, win-win. Otherwise, I will waste time on the internet and watch TV, which pays nothing and isn't nearly so enjoyable.


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## antares (Feb 13, 2011)

Adam G. Katz said:


> I'm having trouble wrapping my head around these numbers:
> 
> If you make an average of $2 per kindle book sold: You would have to sell 40,000 books a year to make $80,000 dollars.
> 
> ...


You know, I wanted to ignore this thread, but it haunted me.

Then I wanted to dig in and throw some serious numbers at the OP, because I know he is looking at the situation from the wrong perspective and, thus, will find the right answer to the wrong question; that will not help him even a smidgen. (I used to do stats for a living. I love that stuff.)

See, the last figure he quoted is misleading. I can throw a carload of good numbers at him, but will I persuade him that my numbers are right and his are wrong? He already believes that 'one book a year' figure, and he does not know me from Cicero. Why should he believe me?

So I decided to use the figures he believes: 1) the average American buys 1 book a year and 2) 40,000 books sold a year yields $80,000 a year. Why Adam chose these numbers I don't know, but they are his numbers and he likes them. I will work with those numbers.

I want to use one more number: 321,368,864. That is the total population of the USA when I checked http://www.census.gov/popclock/ . (It has increased by the time you read this.)

Dividing 321,368,864 Americans by 40,000 books sold/year yields 8,034 years. That is, you can sell books at the rate that makes you happy for eight thousand thirty-four years.

Do you still have a problem? If you do, quit. Better yet: Quit anyway. And quit haunting me will gobbledy-**** numbers that you read in some article written by a reporter with no better grasp of statistics than a two-year old has of crayons.

(You want a frightening statistic? The _average_ American buys zero books a year.)


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## BWFoster78 (Jun 18, 2015)

antares said:


> [size=14pt]You know, I wanted to ignore this thread, but it haunted me.




I felt the same way, not with the numbers though, but about the perspective.

The OP seems to think that, looking at the numbers, it's improbable to make a living at writing. After reading testimonials on this board, what I've come away with is, "Whatever your numbers or theory or speculation might be, authors are making really good money self publishing. Period. If they can do it, I can do it if I work both hard enough and smart enough."


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

It's always been hard to make a living as an author and, honestly, it's hard to make a living at anything today. Nevertheless, people are making a living and many more of us are substantially enhancing our incomes. I'm not even close to "making a living," but there's a new roof going on our house in a few weeks and it was entirely paid for by writing.

I don't begrudge the OP wanting to make $80k at all. It seems like a reasonable goal to try to live as a self employed person and be part of the middle class. I would write no matter what, but how I approach it would change drastically if I wasn't viewing it as a job. I have three ideas right now for books. Two of them are vastly more commercially advantageous than the third. If I wasn't viewing this as a job, I'd probably peck away over the next couple of months on the third idea. Because I view this as a business, I will write one of the two more commercially viable ones and I'll do so in the next month to six weeks aiming for publication by Kindlemas.


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## Deke (May 18, 2013)

Bottom line: there is no economic sense. Write because you enjoy writing and cross your fingers that others will like your work. If you're in this for money, then there are frankly many other endeavors that offer a more reliable guarantee of return on your investment of time and effort.


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## Mjcaan (Aug 22, 2013)

Sela said:


> When I started out, I had a goal of replacing my salary income as an employee with sales from self-published books. That meant $70K a year.
> 
> I priced my books at $4.99 a pop and $9.99 for a boxed set of three or four full-length books. I had to sell 20,348 books to replace my salary. That's 56 a day.
> 
> ...


Thank you for sharing that breakdown. What did you do to market your books? Or was it that the more you published, the more that word spread among your fan base?
Thanks,
MJ


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## Max Zsol (Jan 27, 2016)

YoMama said:


> Lindsey Brouker has very good advice on starting a new pen name from scratch on her blog


I'm now reading and digesting this thread, getting myself deeper into the rabbit hole. Just wanted to call out that your note on Lindsey is a gold mine.

Here are the link for anybody curious: 
Pen Name Launch: First Month Earnings $3043 (what worked and didn't for marketing)
Pen Name Update: 10 Weeks In (Earnings: $12,824)


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## Ann H (Jan 9, 2016)

antares said:


> [size=14pt]You know, I wanted to ignore this thread, but it haunted me.
> So I decided to use the figures he believes: 1) the average American buys 1 book a year and 2) 40,000 books sold a year yields $80,000 a year. Why Adam chose these numbers I don't know, but they are his numbers and he likes them. I will work with those numbers.




 Surely this analysis ignores the fact that there are more authors, and therefore more books, than just the OP?

The question of whether someone can make $80k per year selling books is like asking if someone born in the US can become President of the USA. The answer is "yes, but..."

If your risk level, commitment and skill matches market expectations, the chances are you can make $80k per year.

(Incidentally, apparently about as many people have sold a million copies of books on Amazon as have managed to get themselves elected to the White House....&#128512


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## Steve Vernon (Feb 18, 2011)

Okay - so since I am currently re-watching BREAKING BAD - think about it in terms of being a drug addict.

Out of the 8 pages worth of thread (so far) how many of you participating authors bought crack this year?

None of you? One of you? ALL of you?

And yet the average drug cartel is STILL making a whole crack-whack of money!

Ask yourself this question.

When you write a book are you REALLY trying to market your work to the AVERAGE American?

Is your Great Aunt Thelma - who spends her days watching back to back marathons of Hoarders - REALLY going to want to read your latest novella detail the inner working dynamics of the average tribe of post-apocalyptic orcs?

Is your Uncle Melvin - who would rather curl up with the sports page - REALLY going to want to read that big fat billionaire romance novel you just wrote?

The thing to remember about statistics is that when they talk about the AVERAGE American they are talking about something that is totally freaking nonexistent. There is NO SUCH THING as an "average" American. We all tick differently. That's what makes us unique. 

Joe Average isn't buying your book.

Write for the crackheads!


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