One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.)
Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and earn $80,000. This is the royalty rate on Leanpub (disclosure: cofounder), but with Gumroad or blog + Stripe approaches you'd earn an even better percentage (if you want to run your own store).
For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that. If you can get a few thousand people to subscribe for a few bucks a month, you could do well. The people at the top are doing really, really well: https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/
Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax).
Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much.
Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the money. I actually made more money selling this self published book than with my big editing company.
I have had a 300 page, trade sized (6x9)soft cover book in publication since late 2012. Lightning Source/Ingram Spark handles the printing and distribution. It is a very niche title that has sold about 1500 copies with the only advertising a max $1 daily limit google ad that runs only a few days/hours of the week.
Ingram allows publishers (I wear both hats) to set the wholesale cut and whether or not to take returns. Bricks and mortar book stores require you take take returns and give them at least a 50% cut. I never wanted to go there so do not take returns and give a 26% cut, 1% over the Amazon minimum.
My print cost is roughly $5.25 and I clear a little over $6 a copy. I also have a kindle e-book edition available directly through Amazon at a list of $9.99 that nets me $6.70 a copy. I sell print copies about 3:1 over the e-book.
Unless the title is a tome, it can be printed as b&w with a print cost in the $4-8 range. Everything after that depends on your competition (for retail price) and your wholesale discount.
At the end of the day I don't see anyone getting rich on any book sales, print or electronic, that are not best sellers from known authors/celebrities. However, as supplemental income you can definitely make some coin with little post authorship effort whether print or e-book.
Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.
It's hard to tell based on the material available on the website, but it looks like their book isn't physical. If you go through the checkout process, it doesn't gather shipping information. I assume the <$1 figure was just the Stripe transaction costs.
Can I ask how you went about self-publishing and selling via a website? I'm considering this with a couple of short guidebooks I've written for learning a specific language, among other things, and am very curious how you got started and set it up with Stripe checkout and manage delivery, etc.
- Create a landing page via Github and use Github pages or Cloudflare pages to automatically update your domain when you push to your repo
- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)
- simply send the book by email when you get a customer
This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!
This model assumes the publisher does nothing. At least if you buy a OReilly or Wiley book you know it will be a decent standard. Many ebooks are junk and its not always obvious which ones.
Yup, having been burnt by a few bad e-book purchases (both, fiction and non-fiction), now I stick with big name publishers. Unless books are recommended by trusted Twitter or hn accounts.
Ironically, I've been talking about the relationship between lean publishing and serial fiction for a long time (for example, this video from a conference talk I did in 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA), but Leanpub has never hit anything close to product-market fit for fiction. We do well in our niche of computer programming / data science / business types of books, but we have essentially no traction in fiction for a number of reasons.
If an author was going to use Leanpub for fiction, the right thing to do would be to use our toolchain to generate the ebook and print-ready PDF, but then to also publish it on Amazon KDP and Wattpad for the exposure. For example, my teenage son did this with his debut sci-fi novel: he wrote it in Word (since he didn't want to write in Markdown, despite my best efforts to convince him that Markdown was superior), did a git push to his book repo on GitHub, generated the ebook on Leanpub (our Word support is an unofficial hidden feature; we just use pandoc to turn the .docx into Markdown first), and then uploaded it to Amazon. Ironically, the worst thing about this whole process was at the end: he also had to copy and paste the chapters into Wattpad when he did an update, and Wattpad wants small chapters for page views, so the copying and pasting was a very slow manual process...
My wife has toyed with the idea of writing romance novels. Do you have many romance writers on Leanpub? Her thinking is to keep the "trashiness" of most romance but improve on the story and writing. She keeps saying "I need a publisher", but I was thinking there must be a simple way to publish straight to Amazon, looks like that's Leanpub!
DIY publishing through Amazon is dead easy. Source: I once packed up my blog into a Word doc and had it published on Amazon in a couple of hours one night.
Naturally, I did it to win a bet. But the bet was designed to teach a friend of mine a lesson, that he was using the unknown difficulty of self-publishing as an excuse to not work on his book. He finally stopped procrastinating and finished his manuscript within a few months.
The hard part of selling books is the selling part. I similarly goaded my own wife into writing a series of sci-fi novels and we (pre-pandemic) had been going to book fairs to sell them. We maybe did two a year, mostly just for fun. We usually sell enough to cover our expenses (printing fees, booth fees, gas to travel, food while we're out). But along the way, she's earned a handful of loyal readers.
We've never put a lot of effort into it, but she sells a few hundred copies a year of her three books. It's not bad, especially for a vanity project. There is a clear line pointing from "effort in selling" to "books sold".
Most publishers these days won't even look at you unless you already have an active readership. We've met a lot of other authors at the book fairs, seeing the same people every year. The ones who have publishing deals are having to do all their own selling, just like us, but didn't get to choose their own cover and are giving up a huge chunk of cash to the publisher. For what? So they can say they're "published"? Meh.
I've seen a lot of people approach their projects as, "If you build it, they will come". I'm sorry, but that's just not a thing. The movie from which that quote comes from (Field of Dreams) is about a literal miracle. You have to sell the book. You have to get out and beat pavement, whether you get a publishing deal or not. So if you have to do the work, you might as well keep the money.
Regardless of what type of book your wife is writing, if she uses Leanpub she needs to do the upload to KDP herself: Leanpub doesn't currently do anything here.
There are other companies like BookBaby which do the "publish to Amazon for you" type of thing; Leanpub currently does not do that. We are just a toolchain to make ebooks plus an optional storefront to sell them. You can sell the ebooks you produce using Leanpub on any storefront such as KDP; you own your work. We do not have many romance writers on Leanpub, and a simple look at our homepage will explain why: our storefront looks like a place for computer programming books, not romance novels.
Also, most romance novels are written in Word, not Markdown, and our Word support is a hidden feature, kind of like the secret menu at In-N-Out burger. The way our Word support works is that you write in a Dropbox folder (or using GitHub or Bitbucket), and you make your Book.txt file list one or more Word files (instead of Markdown files) as the manuscript content. Then when you click the button to preview or publish the ebook, we generate the PDF, EPUB and MOBI based on those Word files, and you can do whatever you want with them. It's actually pretty smooth once you set it up, but it sounds really complicated, and we don't market it at all: hence another reason we don't have many romance writers on Leanpub!
Anyway, if that sounds like a useful thing then we may be worth a shot. Leanpub book landing pages look nice and professional, but in terms of attracting an audience of readers for a romance novel, we are not going to be much help. This is why places like Wattpad do well in this regard. (Leanpub does help attract an audience for our computer programming books and similar types of books, of course, primarily through our weekly and monthly sale newsletters.)
Frankly, my recommendation for any aspiring first-time novelist with a small social media following would be to publish in-progress on Wattpad first to see if they get traction, and then to consider Substack and Amazon KDP for places to monetize if they do. Then once they've gotten to that point, if they're looking for tools to produce a nice ebook to sell on KDP, Leanpub is one of the options they can use as a toolchain.
(On the other hand, if they have a reasonable social media following, they could skip Wattpad and go directly to Substack, KDP or even Leanpub and point their followers at the appropriate landing page for their book...)
There are smaller similar sites to wattpad that are easier to get viewers for new novels. I like tapas, but probably several more worth exploring (unsure if woopread is only translations or supports self publishing). I'd likely submit chapters to several sites at once as a new author just to increase chance of building an initial following.
Vanity Publishers (and variants like poetry "competitions") are a huge stain on the publishing industry. SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) maintains the Writer Beware website, a set of resources documenting, naming and publicizing such predators and their practices:
> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions
As someone who likes to write fiction myself, the idea of publishing in-progress feels incredibly alien. Typically, if I finish writing something, it's a first draft that I would revisit a few months later and rework. How are authors handling this aspect of wanting to re-edit if they're publishing chapters on the go? I seem to recall Stephen King describing locking his manuscripts away for six months before revisiting them. The in-progress model seems to work against this type of workflow, or are there ways of dealing with that?
This was incredibly common back in the early 1900s. Whole books were at first published in one-page installations in newspapers. Including the most famous Czech novel, Good soldier Švejk.
Prior to the advent of radio and TV, this was the best way how to hit a huge audience at once. And for the newspaper, it was a way to entice people to buy the next issue.
Right, so it's basically serialisation. Interesting, I always saw serialisation as releasing an already finished novel bit by bit, but just reading about the history of serialisation, it seems that was not always the case. Thanks for giving me the pointer.
> the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions
If you are into Chinese webnovels you'll be familiar with the subscription predatory practices that big companies like Qidian have, where the real cost of a whole 1500-chapter novel (inflated because of the perverse incentives of subscription-based revenue) ends up being close to 500USD
It is sad watching the transition from fan translations' funding trough donation pooling into predatory big-novel subscriptons/per chapter "tokens"
> For fiction, however, the dream combination is probably publishing in-progress with subscriptions. Currently it seems that Substack is the best for that.
Depending on audience and how you advertise to them, I've seen people be really successful on Patreon. I outlined some of that in a different comment here earlier, but $15k+ a month (from Patreon alone, not including other publishing that you can also do) is achievable and I've seen it more than once on somewhat esoteric genre fiction at Patreon.
totally. I basically do blog + stripe, selling 1.5k copies with an ASP of $90, and I keep 97% of it. it was a pretty productive use of 2 months (altho i do spend about 2-3 hours a week continuing to market it and to serve the book community)
would have loved to use leanpub but it had issues, as already reported to leanpub support :)
We treat all author support issues to [email protected] as confidential, of course. For author support issues which are fine to discuss in public, you can see our author forum at https://community.leanpub.com/c/authors ... If you look there, you can see a representative sample of the issues people have had recently. (I don't want to turn this HN thread into a Leanpub author support forum thread, of course! However, our authors typically seem pretty happy with our service...)
i dont wanna air their dirty laundry but go try them out and if you like them then great. they certainly seem to work for most people. they struggled greatly with my 500 page book and after about 6 hours of wrestling with it i just gave up.
It would be interesting to have a timeseries plot of this sort of information. Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author? Presumably there was some point at which the ease of making a living as an author peaked. This article suggests that time is in the past, but how far in the past? Has the absolute number of people who can make it as an author decreased, or just the relative fraction of the human population? So many questions.
I do also think that the expectation/standard of a $100k/year salary is a bit high. That's almost double the US median household income, for a job that can be done (some would argue is best done) from a house in the woods. I also know that some authors are turning to Patreon. N.K. Jemisen famously started a Patreon that allowed her to quit her job and begin writing full-time. I personally have donated >$100 directly to favorite midlist authors who have made a big impact on my reading life.
FWIW, I used to read more, but I still buy at least three or four full-priced books a year.
> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author?
One of the dominant subjective experiences of living today is the sensation that any possible amazing kind of life is right there and it is only up to us to reach out to pluck it. You go on Instagram and see people living blissful lives of travel in gorgeous locales while talking about how affordable it is. That random dude who wrote a series of posts on some story-telling Reddit ends up getting it optioned by Hollywood and is now a major screenwriter. The sea shanty Tik-Tok'er is a major label recording artist.
Our culture's positive values of egalitarianism and opportunity say that whatever you want your life to be can be, if only you work hard enough to get it.
The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author. It was a rarefied activity done by people who went to college and moved to New York City. For more, authors felt like an Other. It's not that their personal dreams of authorship were crushed by the lack of opportunity, it's like they never thought to dream it in the first place, any more than people dream of being howler monkeys or velour sofas.
But today, media is more than happy to show us all possible dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all of the lives you're likely to lead and show you only the best ones.
So I think today many many more people consider and try to become authors than ever before. But the total amount of time spent reading isn't growing enough to accommodate that. While some will find success (for however they choose to define that), the end result is probably a much greater number of dreams thwarted than attained.
"It is probably as unlikely nowadays that you would become as rich and famous as Bill Gates as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would exceed to the ranks of the French aristocracy. But the point is it doesn't feel that way. It's made to feel by the media and other outlets that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage, you too could start a major thing."
In the past, the big hurdle to becoming an author (or a musician, or a model, etc) was getting past the gatekeepers. You had to convince a publisher, or a label, or a modeling company that you were worthy and then you were in.
This seemed like an impossible task to most people, and many people gave up without even trying. But for those who did persist and attempt to get past the gatekeepers, there was a very clear goal, and the gatekeepers were very clear to you when you didn't make it.
The traditional gatekeepers to a lot of professions are being bypassed these days, so at first it seems like it should be easier now. You don't have to have any connections or convince a single person your stuff is worthy.
However, in reality that game is even harder now. The demand for the content hasn't changed much, and it is still just as rare to succeed in these fields as before. However, people never get the clear 'pass/fail' response from a gatekeeper, so people who will never make it are likely to pursue the career longer than they might have with a more clear rejection.
> A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author.
The following is a bit tangential, but I keep thinking about it:
I was watching this video on the Barnum effect recently, which basically says that people are likely to believe in the accuracy of vague descriptions of their personality (think horoscopes; "Libras need security").
The super-vague personality assessment, which was tailored to describe as many people as possible, included the wish for writing a novel (at 4m23s). That's how common this desire is/was? I wonder if the modern version of it would say "you have considered opening up on YouTube".
It's a little different. I think there has long been a thing were many people dreamed of spending a fraction of their retirement writing their memoirs, or something along those lines. It was a dream in roughly the same category as owning a sailboat or moving to the islands. Kind of a "one of these days" leisure aspiration.
Today—because we are all so intensely culturally obsessed with financial success—"being a writer" means writing stuff right now and doing it well enough to make a living off of. Where before, many dreamed of writing as a thing to do after they've earned most of their wealth, now it is a means to it.
> Today—because we are all so intensely culturally obsessed with financial success—"being a writer" means writing stuff right now and doing it well enough to make a living off of.
This is something I've thought about a lot lately. It seems like if you show any hint of artistic talent or skill in some craft, everyone around you starts encouraging you to monetize it. You draw so well, you should have a patreon. You made some nice soap, you should sell that at the farmer's market. You picked up enough leatherworking to make a wallet, when are you opening the etsy store? I don't think that's right.
edit: nobody tells the person who changes their own oil "oh wow you should be a mechanic!", but god forbid you write a short story without submitting it to The New Yorker :)
>The dark side of this is that many of us won't. And, in particular, in many areas, the total number of brass rings is relatively fixed and we can't all get them. A hundred years ago, most people didn't even think of becoming an author.
It's worse: a hundred years ago (say 1921) there were less people (in the US for example), and more succesful authors.
Now it's more people (350 million vs 100 million in 2021) AND less absolute people reading books (perhaps as today they also compete with tv, the web, youtube, netflix, social media, videogames, and so on as everyday entertainment options).
So it's much much harder to make a living as an author today than in 1921.
It’s older books not Netflix that’s the real competition. Amazon’s unlimited bookshelf holds a lot more than just Lord of the Rings. That said, residuals are also much easier to capture now days than back when book stores had extremely limited shelf space so it’s not all bad. There is a real trade off of fewer sales in year one but more sales in year 2-20.
On the numbers side people have a lot more disposable income, capturing a larger share of revenue per person can completely flip the equation. Patreon, etc don’t have to individually provide enough to live off of as long as all revenue streams add up to a living wage.
I suspect if the objective threshold is say 50k USD inflation adjusted, today is relatively speaking a much better time to be an author than most people here are assuming.
Of course that’s ignoring all the vanity books being published. Simply having an ISBN number doesn’t really mean anything in today’s world.
When agriculture was invented, it put a bunch of hunter gatherers out of business. They weren't happy about it, they liked being hunters and gatherers.
But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing. Can't have Post-mates without workers and restaurants. Can't have restaurants without more workers and food distribution. Can't have food distribution without more workers and food processors... etc.
Ivy league english majors get jobs writing TV and movie scripts. Mass electronic distribution means that many many people get to watch the creative output of a small number of people. All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yep, the transition is difficult, and they'll complain about it, but society as a whole benefits.
>When agriculture was invented, it put a bunch of hunter gatherers out of business. They weren't happy about it, they liked being hunters and gatherers. But that surplus workforce found jobs in other areas, creating whole industries where there had been nothing.
For many it remains still not that wise a decision.
>All the other people who used to write are available to fill new niches in the economy.
Yeah, I hear burger-flipping is still in demand.
I appreciate the ELI5, but it's not that I don't know history, or I don't understand that some jobs die and others replace them.
It is that I consider some jobs dying a problem, whether they are replaced by something else or not, and doubly so in the way that that transition happens (and some people in each generation get the short end of the stick).
> it's not that I don't know history, or I don't understand that some jobs die and others replace them.
ok, but it's not that some jobs die and others replace them, it's that efficiency gains allow less effort to satiate demand and thereby create a labor/ingenuity supply for new endeavors.
the job of writing (or performing music, etc.) did not die, it's that the demand for satisfying arts consumption can be met by a smaller sector of the economy.
1921 is shortly after copyright became effectively infinite, and falls in the gulf of books that were lost because they were snatched away from entering the public domain.
I really don't see any good argument why copyright should last longer than, say, 20 years.
Would any potential authors decide it's not worth it to write books if copyright only lasted 20 years? What benefit to society does ~100 years of copyright provide?
How do you solve the Mickey Mouse problem? E.g., you have a character that has created an "empire" that an organization has the means (cultural/monetary) to prevent their creation from entering the public domain. You have to figure out what to do about those rare situations because they're the driving force for extending copyrights.
My ideal is like the old system (initial registration plus fixed term renewals). That actually worked well to balance interests and we should go back to it. Just make the renewals an increasing cost so that your 'Mickey Mouse' hits can continue to have effectively infinite protection while most won't renew and drop into the public domain.
I think Disney's control over copyright law has been greatly overstated because it makes a better story. Yes, they lobby in favour of longer copyright. But they're spending a measly ~$4 million per year on lobbying (total, not specifically on copyright) [1].
The boring truth is politicians in Congress were in favor of copyright extension (at least in 1998). Two reasons given were: 1) copyright industries give the US one of its most significant trade surpluses, and 2) the European Union had recently extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions.
I fully expect the copyright on the first Mickey Mouse cartoon will expire in 2024.
I don't think that sounds like the "boring truth". The Sonny Bono Act had wide support from the copyright industry [1]. Supporters also said that since perpetual copyright is constitutionally forbidden, that it should be "forever less one day".
That the extension was done under the guise of harmonization only shows that the lobbying was done one country at a time. That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
Isn't it kind of a given that the copyright industry supports pro-copyright legislation?
> That there is "only" $4 million/year doesn't show that Disney has a small effect, but rather how unbelievably cheap it is to buy a congressional vote.
It doesn't show that. You're speculating that Congress supported copyright due to Disney's lobbying and dismissing the possibility that members of Congress who supported it actually supported it for the reasons they stated. The tricky thing with this kind of speculation is it's impossible to prove or disprove. Maybe it was Disney that convinced them. But you don't seem to have any evidence.
If it's so cheap to buy Congressional votes, why hasn't Disney been able to extend copyright again in the past 20 years? They've been lobbying every year since Sonny Bono. The copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.
If votes are so cheap, why can't we just buy votes to shorten copyright? Or at least prevent extensions?
The point I was more making is how do you handle successful things that are long term viable. Such as Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, etc. Though, yes, it's overstated the impact. The 1976 act was more impactful than the Sonny Bono Act.
Everything having a lifetime copyright has it's own problems, but cutting everything to 20 years creates it own.
If something has long-term public appeal, fantastic. Then the creators should be glad to have contributed something that lasted so long. But when you say "viable", I hear an implication of "commercial viability". I think that's a poor framework in which to understand copyright duration.
The public domain isn't meant to be a dumping ground for forgotten properties. Rather, the public domain is a wellspring from which new writers can draw upon. Just as I may name a character "Sherlock" (1887), "Romeo" (1597), or "Odysseus" (~700 BC) in order to bring in specific character traits, I may also want to name a character "Superman" (1938), "Gandalf" (1954), or "Skywalker" (1977). These are all part of our shared cultural heritage from previous generations, and we have a right to build upon that heritage to create something even better for the next generation.
That is why I think roughly one generation, 30 years or so, is an appropriate maximum copyright duration. As adults, every generation has the right to retell and remix stories and characters from their childhood. The current duration of copyright is a gross abuse of that right.
Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright. It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work. We've carved out tons of exceptions for copyright for things like parody, educational purposes, etc., but at it's core it's a distribution right and nothing else. Instead of working in an existing property, it's better to create something new, even if you're inspired by the other thing. The entirety of the music industry for how this works in practice in our current framework. The games industry also has lots of good examples of creating new works using existing ideas without violating copyright.
To respond to this specific point, though "...we have a right to build upon that heritage to create something even better for the next generation". We already do this, we create tropes and then write new stories using those tropes. Creating new is better than just rehashing existing properties and longer copyright terms actually encourage new works because you can't rely on older properties for your material. I think they're too long for virtually all works because most works are commercial failures. They could find new audiences if their distribution rights weren't locked up. MST3K is a great example of doing something new with an existing property that is only possible with term limits.
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
I strongly disagree with this statement. The point of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". The commercial viability is the means through which that point is achieved. If at any time copyright isn't functioning to promote the arts, and instead hinders, then it isn't fulfilling the point.
While I do agree that the tropes are the stronger part, part of the reason why shared characters are so powerful is because they can immediately stand in to represent the trope. If I am writing a Robin Hood story, I don't need to spend time explaining who Robin Hood is, I can just start telling the story. If I am writing a story about "What if Superman were evil?" (e.g. [0][1]), then I need to first spend time explaining who the character is, describing powers, and then drawing just enough parallels so that the audience knows who I'm talking about without drawing so many that I get sued. It's a really boring way to start a story.
You should really read up on the history of copyright, because it's the genuinely the exact opposite of what you're saying. Copyright initially enforced restrictions on printing press operators and was used as part of the censorship mechanism. There's an argument that copyright actually slowed progress and countries with weak copyright advanced faster. It logically follows because allowing unlimited copies of works to be made regardless of ownership allows for dissemination of information quicker.
Progress of knowledge is covered differently and it's why the US has carved exceptions for facts (they're exempt from copyright) and we use a patent system for inventions. Think of current problems with companies like Elsiver that use copyright as a cudgel to keep academic papers from the masses.
Thank you for the link, and that is some very good background that I had been unaware of. There are some other interesting examples, such as Hollywood becoming the motion picture capital of the US by virtue of being farther away from Thomas Edison, and therefore harder to sue.
I definitely agree that copyright can, and frequently does hinder progress. My statement is perhaps limited to the US, where patents and copyrights are given an explicit goal in Article 1 of the Constitution, stating "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The "to promote the progress" wording is important, as it tells a goal, and not just a legal capability.
A thought experiment I like is to consider the best way to promote progress in the arts and sciences. Suppose there were a magic box, which could instantly tell the full value of any invention or artwork or writing. You put something in, and it tells you how much it benefits society. Then there could be a program set up to reward authors and inventors for making things. They come up to the box, put the work in, and get paid the amount that the magic box tells you. In exchange for contributing to society, there is some compensation for doing so.
Of course, no such magic box exists, nor can it. We could have some sort of a poll to determine the overall worth of a new book or a better can opener, but that would have a lot of overhead. So instead, for a limited time, we reward authors and inventors by giving them a temporary monopoly over making copies of what they wrote, and that can become a monetary reward by selling those copies. Because we don't have an objective measure of a book's worth, we fall back to subjective measures. But this is still fundamentally a restriction on society as a whole, not to reproduce something that they have purchased, and that restriction requires some ongoing basis. It cannot be forever, and it must always be in service of promoting the arts and sciences, because that is the only reason why the offer of a legal monopoly in exchange for open publication exists.
(As a tangent, I don't understand any basis for legal protections of trade secrets, beyond civil penalties for breaking a contract. Companies using trade secrets have decided not to accept the bargain offered by patents, and therefore should also not have the benefits of legal protections.)
(And a second tangent, I don't think that computer programs released without source code should be eligible for copyright protection. The authors have not fulfilled their side of the bargain by releasing a work in a form that can be built upon and expanded by society once their limited-time monopoly has expired, and so they should not receive the legal monopoly offered in that bargain.)
> Fair enough, but commercial viability is the point of copyright.
Yes, and that point is that it's not for ever.
> It's an exclusive distribution right of a creative work.
Exactly. For a limited time.
Most of us only live for a single lifetime, so anything longer than that is effectively forever: If something is locked away by copyright when you're born, and still is when you die, then you don't ever get it free of copyright.
> The games industry also has lots of good examples of creating new works using existing ideas without violating copyright.
Games are interesting because games copy each other incessantly but almost never sue over copyright.
The actual source code and art would clearly fall under copyright, but not the gameplay. So when PUBG discovered the popular battle royale genre, everyone rushed to copy it and now we have Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty Battle Royale, etc. When Dota was popular, it spawned tons of clones. Minecraft spawned tons of clones. In some cases where the clones are too similar, the original creator may have legal grounds for suing, but they seldom do so.
Short of blatantly stealing assets from another game, it's hard to get in trouble over another game's copyright.
Yep, ideas vs execution. You see it in books and music pretty frequently as well. Twilight is a great example because it spawned a ton of clones. Music was pretty insulated until fairly recently with some lawsuits over similarities being a bit... questionable.
Side note, this has been a really good thread to read and respond to.
Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, and as far as I know, it's been fine. That might be why there have been so many movies and shows based on the character recently.
Imagine it's 2024 and the original Mickey Mouse cartoon just entered the public domain. How does this impact Disney?
-Anyone could watch Steamboat Willie for free (assuming it's online somewhere). I don't see this harming Disney.
-Another big studio like Warner could make a cartoon with the original Mickey. I doubt any of the big studios are even interested in doing so, but if they do, I don't think it will affect Disney's revenue.
-Small studios and independent artists could use the original Mickey character. I think if anyone does this, it's more likely to help than hurt Disney, by boosting Mickey's profile.
-Other manufacturers could make Mickey Mouse merchandise. This is probably the biggest direct harm to Disney, but I don't think it'll make much impact on their revenue.
Some things people couldn't do:
-Use the Mickey Mouse logo. It's protected by trademark.
-Make a sequel or spin off of a modern Mickey Mouse product. Another studio couldn't just make Epic Mickey 2 since Epic Mickey (2010) is still protected.
I'm not sure Disney makes much money off of Mickey compared to other properties like Star Wars, Marvel, Frozen, etc. Mickey's popularity seems to be waning. Apart from a few video games, he hasn't been in much recently. He has a TV show that did fine but isn't particularly popular.
Okay, but what about other popular properties? The first Harry Potter book was published 24 years ago. What if it were in the public domain?
-J. K. Rowling's net worth is estimated to be over a billion USD. She'll be okay.
-People would still buy new books written by J. K. Rowling.
-Only her earliest books would be in the public domain.
In most jobs, you can't expect to work for a few years and be set for life. I'm not sure why it should be different for authors (and it usually isn't). If your book won't make enough money for you to retire after 20 years of sales, you'd either have to write another book, or get another job. That's already the case for the vast majority of authors.
The trick to dealing with a 20 year copyright term is to keep making new works. Which is exactly what copyright was supposed to encourage.
Sherlock Holmes is not in the public domain in full. Most of the things we think of as 'Sherlock Holmes' are from stories still in copyright. It's why you see Elementary as a property and Sherlock as modern day. Counterintuitively they had to come up with new ideas because the existing ideas are locked up with copyright.
Couple of other issues.
"Small studios and independent artists could use the original Mickey character"
"Other manufacturers could make Mickey Mouse merchandise. This is probably the biggest direct harm to Disney, but I don't think it'll make much impact on their revenue."
The reason you've seen them make Steamboat Willie LEGO and the current "old-style" Mickey Mouse cartoons is because they're setting up a copyright argument if someone tried. They're also setting up the same arguments that Sherlock Holmes uses which is that the elements of Mickey in Steamboat Willie have been used recently and are thus still locked up by copyright. You can distribute Steamboat Willie, but can not otherwise use the property. The Sherlock Holmes case is here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163248743572192...
"Which is exactly what copyright was supposed to encourage."
No, copyright is an exclusive distribution right. It's a government granted monopoly to provide protection to creative works. The history of copyright is pretty interesting in an of itself and starts with the printing press in the 1500s. Long story short, though, it's always been about commercial exploitation of a creative work.
Yeah, not all Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain. As it says in the case you linked only 10 stories out of 56 plus 4 novels were still under copyright (now down to 6).
The Doyle estate lost the case you're referring to and Klinger was allowed to publish his derivative stories.
Disney could try to sue, but I don't think their case is any stronger than the Sherlock Holmes case if the defendant is only deriving material from the original Mickey cartoon.
Klinger was seeking declaratory judgement that he could use the non-protected elements. Doyle estate was saying he couldn't. It was agreed by both parties that he couldn't use elements contained in the 10 stories.
From the case listed "And the claim is correct, for he acknowledges that those copyrights are valid and that the only copying he wants to include in his book is copying of the Holmes and Watson characters as they appear in the earlier stories and in the novels."
Mickey Mouse will most certainly not be in the public domain anymore than he is now. Disney can also fall back on trademark law to take care of Disney's use as well.
I think we have the same understanding of the case then. We seem to have a different conclusion on derivative works based on the original Mickey Mouse once it enters the public domain. I agree with you that modern Mickey would still be under copyright.
It's a bit of a moot point in my opinion, because I don't think anyone outside of Disney would even want to make more of 1928 Mickey. It's old. It's not popular. Maybe they'd use him for a cameo or for parody, but shows already do that anyway, regardless of the copyright [1].
> How do you solve the Mickey Mouse problem? E.g., you have a character that has created an "empire" that an organization has the means (cultural/monetary) to prevent their creation from entering the public domain. You have to figure out what to do about those rare situations because they're the driving force for extending copyrights.
We have a mechanism for solving the problem of Derivative works that purport to be creations of the "empire": trademarks.
BTW, everyone focuses on Steamboat Willie (entering the public domain in 2024), but there are already several Mickey Mouse cartoons in the public domain: The Mad Doctor, Minnie's Yoo-Hoo, and Mickey's Surprise Party.
So, it is possible to create derivative Mickey Mouse works, just make sure that they can't be confused for works or products created or licensed by Disney.
I don't really have a good solution. My gut reaction is that having a system that rewards the same companies that pushed for infinite copyright duration, rather than removing their hold over our shared culture, isn't a good solution. That isn't the most pragmatic of me, but I'd rather not reward Disney for breaking the public domain.
The renewal system you propose seems like a pretty good idea. Not sure you even need the increasing cost. Just making it a small fee would probably mean 98% of works would never get renewed after the first term. Perhaps add a rule that the author can renew for free if he's still alive.
It's basically how the US system worked prior to 1976, though the terms were 28 + 28 renewal. Most didn't renew because they didn't make enough money to make the renewal worth it.
We won't know for a hundred years how many of the books that will be published in 2021 will be notable enough in 2121 to be on the 2021_in_literature wikipedia page.
One of the scenes I enjoyed in "Patton" was when Patton defeats Rommel through knowledge of Rommel's tactics. He yells, seemingly across the field to Rommel, "I read your book". (The movie actually makes it seem like Patton could read unpublished manuscripts of his opponent [1]) This exemplifies that famous people wrote books. They wrote memoirs and they wrote manuals. I couldn't say how the gatekeepers dealt with such books, nor how the potential readership found or regarded such books.
> But today, media is more than happy to show us all possible dreams. Our social media aggregators filter out all of the lives you're likely to lead and show you only the best ones
Ironically it's those same social media aggregators that make the stars these days.
You can literally be an overnight success if you get lucky.
It’s funny to me how you think the reading amount hasn’t increased. I agree, yet what is the point of all those college degrees afforded - presumably as correlative of more literacy? I think this speaks further to your point about what people’s aspirations have turned into: mere fantasies.
Don’t get me wrong, I fantasize too, but I manage in eating a balanced breakfast. I think the obsessive component is completely disregarded in the realization of most “self-actualizing” aspirants. I can think of a recent read of Angus Black of AC/DC and how he turned his first guitar’s fretboard rotten from all the sweat. Focusing more on finding that obsession rather than fantasizing about becoming something you likely are not tooled for - say an author - will lead to a more satisfactory course through life. Otherwise, one is simply blindly and madly stabbing in the dark to achieve what someone like Bukowski will starve to do. It must come from within, not from without.
Vonnegut I remember writing somewhere that radio and especially TV had killed the market for short stories in magazines, which were a great way for authors to get started.
Note that he got paid $750 for his first short story in 1949! I don't know how many places are paying first time authors that much today, and then you remember to calculate inflation.
In the US, for scifi, the SFWA requires a market to offer 8 cents a word or more, I believe, to be considered a "professional market" for the sake of counting towards membership criteria. That means most of the bigger scifi magazines are exactly at 8c (a very few above)
Very few genre magazines will accept more than 10k words. A handful will accept 20k-25k (Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld for example, last I checked). Many will prefer much shorter works.
And of course that is before taking into account the competition - the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.
I've submitted a couple of stories, but decided that effort vs. relatively low potential payoff was so low that since I wouldn't really be profitable when factoring in time spent anyway it was better to just put my stories on my website and pay to promote them to relevant twitter followers to pull in readers for my novel and increase my following at the same time.
The few short stories I've published so far has as a result reached a much wider audience than most of the main scifi magazines reach. E.g. even Analog was reportedly down to 27k readers by 2011.
But of course being able to afford to do that is a pretty privileged position to be in.
> the editor of a relatively minor scifi magazine mention on Twitter that their typical slush pile per issue was 1400-1500 stories.
That's surprising; I subscribed to Asimov's for about 6 months back in 2015 and based on what I was reading, I assumed they must be publishing everything that comes in the door.
I can imagine they get a lot of submissions that are just absolutely wrong for their editorial purpose. There's a lot of hobbyist authors online who would love to get paid, and I bet a lot of them are submitting their fanfiction (or narrowly reworked fanfiction) to a magazine with no interest in it.
Also probably many people probably submit the same pieces over and over.
Btw if you find an outlet that seems to have no standards but also pays, the right thing to do is to stop being a subscriber and start being an author.
That makes sense... I suppose if I was trying to pick a dozen stories out of 1500, I'd start by looking for people I've published before, and even if their current submission isn't very good it beats wading through the dross. After that it's probably a matter of rolling up your sleeves, throwing out everything that's obviously unhinged or unusable, and slogging through the rest.
For sure. My guess is that the slush pile count is exclusively of unsolicited, unfamiliar authors. Someone they've published before probably skips the pile.
I think they might be publishing stuff their core audience really likes, btw. It's just that audience is probably a niche.
I think this is an ongoing challenge. You see it with comics as well, where Marvel and DC have gotten really good at knowing what sells to their niche audience. But their audience has been in lengthy decline, in part because they've focused on selling to their niche audience rather than figuring out how to broaden their base.
lol no, I wish. Good luck getting into any of the magazines mentioned in the grandparent post. The relative quality is debatable, but what you see is genuinely the best of thousands of submissions
Vonnegut had to convince at least two gatekeepers: his own agent and the editor at Colliers.
I spent a large chunk of time a few years back looking into the questions OP is asking, and the ultimate truth I came to is this: whether you're self publishing or going the traditional route, you're going to need some established gatekeepers to support you if you're going to make it.
In 1949, those gatekeepers were traditional publishers. In 2021, we still have traditional publishers, but we also have content curation algorithms, social media influencers, podcast hosts, and platforms like Substack and Patreon. If you can get any of them to put resources into promoting you, you'll have a real opportunity of making it - that is, if what you're offering is any good.
If you can't or don't want to get the attention of those gatekeepers, it doesn't matter how good your content is, no one will ever find you.
Yep, in almost every industry it was always been 50% how good you are and 50% who you know. Over time, who you need to know to be successful has changed, and new artists need to adapt, as they always have. Getting an audience is easier than ever in history. That is amazing for hobbyists who just want some readers and recognition, and not great for those who want to earn a living while writing.
You can hustle up who you know. Late night talk shows are looking for anyone who is willing to be interviewed at 2am. And once in a while some big name will happen to have insomnia and notice you. However you have to do 2am shows with no idea if anyone will notice for a long time. While of course writing the next edition.
And, as in many other creative endeavors, all the hobbyists who just want some readers (or viewers or whatever) end up competing with people trying to put food on the table. Even if individually many do not have much of an effect, in the aggregate they do.
I assume even in radio and TV, not all segments are created equal. Maybe live, ad-libbed shows had a more detrimental effect, in the sense that at least scripted shows employ more writers?
Also, would it not make sense to look at writing even from a more indirect point? For example, millions of people enjoyed the creativity of the /Friends/ writers, without actually reading a single word. Should they be counted as successful as a book writer with millions of readers?
I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak in the 1990's and I remember his saying something along the lines of "I am one of the 100 people that are able to make a decent living writing fiction"
100k is not that unreasonable of an expectation as the necessary base for a freelancer. Keep in mind that you will need to cover additional taxes that your employer would normally cover, and you will need to plan on variability so you need more cushion than a salaried employee. Add in the fact that an author would need to be in the top 10% of a competitive field and you need to start considering the opportunity cost of not getting an office job.
And no benefits, including insurance. That $100K for a fairly to very successful author starts to look a lot like a pretty middling $60K or so income in an office job.
You two make excellent points. Although the author seems greedy for wanting a 100k salary, that 100k is going to feel closer to 50k for reasons outside of their control.
I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k salary would be possible. I've made that as a writer and editor throughout my career, why not hope for it as a novelist? (or at least try for it!). It might not turn out that way in the end, but better to reach high than low!
> I don't think I'm greedy for trying to see if a 100k salary
I don't think it's greedy either, but it's also obviously past the point of "can I make a living doing this". After all, median individual income is less than half of that.
"a living" and "the kind of living I want" are different things, obviously.
I disagree with the GP's characterization that it's greedy and you should definitely try for it, but I'm going to rephrase your statement thus:
> I've made that as a pitching coach and umpire throughout my career, why not hope for it as a pitcher?
Writer/editor are fundamentally different roles than novelist. In the former, the people with the up front capital already know what they want, at least in a more concrete sense than "something that makes us more money than we put in." The focus is on selling whatever makes them money, whether it's a product or a trade publication or ad space. They don't really need the best, they just want to avoid the worst so that the writing/editing doesn't bring down the rest of the product, magazine, marketing, etc. That's where most of that $100k comes from: the value writing/editing brings to the rest of the operation that is actually generating the cash.
As a novelist, you are the product. Your story & marketability, the quality of your prose, how closely you follow the cultural zeitgeist, and so on become the dominant factors. Instead of derisking the money making part of the operation, you the risky money making operation. Such roles are almost universally on a bimodal income distribution. Major league pitchers get paid anywhere from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions but the next run down is the AAA leagues, which pay at most $50k a year. There are far more people making $100k/year supporting the pitchers than there are pitchers making $100k.
Think of it from an economics perspective (rough math here): according to [1] "only 690 million print books were sold in 2019 in the U.S. in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction." Lets assume physical to e-book sales are 1:1 (they're not) so a total of 1.4 billion books sold. Let's assume the average price per book is $20 (a tad high). There were 17.1 million new cars sold that year, lets assume at an average of $30k each (a tad low). That's a total market of $28 billion vs $513 billion dollars. Assuming 30% cost of goods sold for the former and 70% COGS for the latter that's $21 billion left over for the novelists or $153 billion gross profit from selling the cars.
Now there's certainly lots of room for you to make $100k/year as a novelist in that $28 billion but that is for all novelists in the US and - I suspect - academic textbook authors are probably making a disproportionate chunk of that money while inflating the average price per book. My assumption is very little of that $153 billion goes to writers but that number includes over 16,000 dealerships, all of whom need their copy for sales and marketing. The average dealership in the US sells 500-1000 cars a year with upwards of $10-20 million per year revenue so $100k/year for a writer would be a drop in the bucket for them, especially with freelancers. Multiply that by all the other industries and the numbers grow to overwhelming amounts: if 0.01% of $21+ trillion in general industry spending (going by GDP) goes to writers in a gaussian distribution, there's going to be a lot more $100k/year authors in that group than among novelists.
This is certainly valid, but it also assumes the current publishing model (as in, how could I, one writer, make $100,000 of the $28 billion pie). Which also assumes that I would need to reach mass appeal (re: sell lots of copies) as an author to be successful in that paradigm.
What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already has a niche audience for my writing, to have those followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough value to that small audience, that they want to pay to subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100/year? Or 2,000 people pay $50/year?
This is different from selling books. It's selling a platform.
It STILL might not work. And I STILL might never reach that income. But it's an entirely new way to think about books and publishing and I'm curious to see if there's still a path for fiction writers in there somewhere....
> What I am asking is, is it possible for me, who already has a niche audience for my writing, to have those followers support me as a writer? Can I add enough value to that small audience, that they want to pay to subscribe to my work? Would 1,000 people pay $100/year? Or 2,000 people pay $50/year?
That's a completely different concept that a novelist so data from the classic publishing industry are likely useless. You'll have to find out for yourself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know of some niches that certainly are supporting multiple independent authors at that amount per year or more, but they're all unique markets in their own right and I'd hesitate to extrapolate one from the other. In truth, I'd call most of those people analysts who write well and the few who work in fiction have semi-formulaic/restricted niches like writing material for GMs of hardcore D&D groups. Hardly work that allows one to flourish artistically.
tldr: Short answer: no. Long answer: ...is left as an exercise for the reader.
The value propositions creators bring to their markets are changing drastically. An artist whose content I follow across YouTube and Instagram is a vlogger and does a ton of design work outside of the scope of her more traditional "here is a painting, would you like to buy it or a print of it" offerings. She also engages socially with her fans. The whole thing works out to selling an experience/brand of a kind that didn't really exist in the past. I think it's fair to say that it's probably not possible to follow this path "as a writer" in the sense that "a writer" has meant in the past -- but that doesn't mean that this is a situation where "Short answer: no." is an accurate (or indeed respectful) answer to a question that she is asking by attempting the thing.
This is commonish in translation community. There are sites like wuxia world and woopread that have a lot of translations of east asian web novels that you can pay to see chapters earlier. Some do it as pay per chapter others as a subscription model for early access. I do also see a few self published fantasies/romances that do this on tapas but would guess few do well enough. Normal model here is short chapters of about 5ish pages sold for l0-20ish cents per chapter. This leads to many series having massive chapter counts. 1000 chapter stories are pretty common here and longest popularish one I know is like close to 4k chapters.
To be clear, I never said that it was greedy to want a $100k salary. It's a perfectly rational and ordinary thing to want. I wondered about how reasonable to was to expect to attain that level of financial success in writing.
Recently in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, I noticed the passage
He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of the Rambler, the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them'. I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it:
Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque in faucibus orci,
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas,
Terribiles visu formae; Lethumque, Laborque.
[Footnote: Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell,
Revengeful cares, and sullen sorrows dwell;
And pale diseases, and repining age;
Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage;
Here toils and death, and death's half-brother, sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep. DRYDEN.]
'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an authour; all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.' I proposed to him to dictate an essay on it, and offered to write it. He said, he would not do it then, but perhaps would write one at some future period.
If you have a scalable product there is usually no middle ground. Either you are getting rich or just getting by, or even not getting by (last one the most likely one)
Is it? Can you elaborate? I think if you have a SaaS with happy 100 customers paying 10$ each per month it is easier to scale up to 10k customers than if you only have 2 customers to get to 200.
I'm not sure if these are outliers, and my "random" sampling is just picking out highly visible apps. But I've made good money off an app built in a month, and I've made relatively little from a book written in 3 months.
Software has a lot more variety. You can make say, a communist themed productivity app vs a forest themed one and these will appeal to different people.
I often suspect we haven't noticed the inflationary effects on this as a "high" salary as much as we otherwise would because of the psychological effect of the change from five to six figures. Yeah, the median salary is low, but that's been well-covered elsewhere about how it hasn't risen in line with costs or upper-percentile income - so think of this as just another example of "here's a field where you can't make a comfortable income anymore."
>Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author?
My assumption is almost certainly yes--provided you made it through the big publisher gatekeepers. (And were able to parlay that into shelf space at the store.)
- People probably read more books. There were fewer other demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I used to.
- There was less competition once you got through the aforementioned gatekeepers.
- There was less discounting. Books used to be sold at list price. And, subsequently, maybe at a small discount in some places.
- Publishers often provided support with marketing activities.
You're right, from everything I've read, but there are two other interesting data points:
(1) The idea of the "midlist novel" or "paperback original" basically disappeared for a couple decades -- these are the old mass market paperbacks that you used to see all the time, about 4.25" by 7", that you almost never see anymore. (So, there was a kind of discounting: softcover books were a lot cheaper, even when adjusted for inflation.) There were authors who made a good living pumping out these midlist books at the rate of one or even two a year. The self-publishing boom has brought this back to a degree as ebook originals, although I've talked to more than a few ebook-first indie authors who insist they need to get out four or more books a year to make a living, so it's arguably harder for most. And of course that "most" is "most of those who manage to make a living that way," which is, well, not actually most!
(2) Short story rates used to be much, much higher than they are now when adjusted for inflation, to the point where there were people who made a successful living selling primarily -- or even exclusively! -- short fiction. I've never been able to get a good read, pun intended, on what happened here, other than a nebulous sense that readers' tastes just changed over the years (the "fewer other demands on attention" you mention was likely a big part of that), and those markets became less viable.
Short fiction was being bought by magazines with large reader bases. Magazines have essentially died as a medium over the last twenty years, and fiction magazines were on their way out well before then.
If you've got a larger reader base and lots of competition, you can pay a lot for content. If you don't, you can't. The various TV subscription services are playing the same game that the sci-fi magazines used to; they pay a huge amount to produce content for recurring revenue, in fairly tight competition with the other streaming services to have the best stuff. (Think the expanse vs the mandalorian vs unbounded quantities of star trek.) The primary medium for consuming sci-fi changed as it went more mainstream, but also magazines died generally.
In SF, at least, the magazine ecosystem associated with short stories has taken a pretty big hit which means new authors tend to not get into the genre that way. Of course, that's a bit self-referential because "Why did that ecosystem largely go away?" and the answer is that I'm not sure. Though I'll note that a fair bit is online these days so maybe new authors felt that was a better way to build their name.
I'd also note that some of the better SF short story writers these days tend to write in a mix of genres and often publish in places like The New Yorker.
For fiction publishers were small houses with semi-amateur owners. They had an interest in what they were publishing, and if they liked an author they'd provide opportunities and invest in a career.
For example Penguin, which was launched in the 30s to provide cheap literary paperbacks for the mass market - a kind of cultural levelling up instead of dumbing down.
Now publishing houses are relatively small departments in unimaginably huge media corporations. Penguin is now part of Penguin Random House which is part of Bertelsmann, which also owns BMG (Bertelsmann Music), RTL TV/Radio in Europe, and Arvato, which is a general purpose corporate offering logistics, finance, IT.
So it's not a family-owned business any more. And it is much more business than family, with the usual MBA culture of targets, ROI, and the rest.
>People probably read more books. There were fewer other demands on attention, whether YouTube, social media, online content generally, etc. I certainly read books far less than I used to.
I'd imagine the number of books sold per year is strictly increasing.
If it's increasing because of a growing number of readers, then that's a winner take all scenario where Harry Potter sells more and more copies as each new reader hasn't read it yet.
If it's growing because of one extremely voracious reader buying up every book they can get their hands on, that's a scenario that favours more obscure authors.
Closer to the later for most authors. Though every few dozen years there is another Harry Potter that everyone in the world buys and reads. For most you need to target those voracious readers and what they are willing to pay for - but be ever on the lookout as to how you can jump to the Harry Potter world where everyone buys your books.
Harry Potter was good (in the first few anyway), but if you like that type of thing there are ton of much better books that never made it.
If you particularly wanted books that "didn't make it", I don't know anything about that. But maybe you just wanted books that are like HP but better than HP.
I read the first few HP, and thought they were dreadful, and thus never read the later ones, so maybe I'm not the person you want advice from, but here are some recommendations of novels/novelists in the same genre (fantasy novels, written for children, that hold up for adults):
Nearly anything by Dianna Wynne Jones, but I particularly enjoyed The Lives of Christopher Chant, Archer's Goon, and of course Howl's Moving Castle.
Susan Cooper's famous Dark is Rising series. Half the series is more normal-kid (starting with Greenwitch), half is more special-magic-kid (starting with The Dark is Rising).
Garth Nix's Old Kingdom, starting with Sabriel.
While China Mieville is very much not a children's author (really! don't buy a random mieville book for your young niece/nephew, really don't!), Un-Lun-Dun is an amazing book in this genre.
This suggests otherwise. (Although this is obviously not a complete set of data. I'd actually probably have expected a bigger falloff but maybe ease of acquisition leads to more people buying books they don't end up reading.)
I used to work in the industry. At least when it comes to fiction, it has always been hard to make a living as an author. A very large number of first-time authors never earn out their advance and therefore aren't able to get another book published. A reasonable portion of a publisher's authors are "mid-list", which consistently turn out books that earn out the advance plus a decent amount on top, and each new book also gives a slight boost to that author's back catalog. Long-term, this is how the average author earns a decent living: Output is maybe 3 books every two years. Early on, the advance might only be $15k to $30k per book, though once they earn out the advance they begin getting royalties. Once they have 6-8 books published, they have an audience and enough of a back catalog that they may earn up to $50k/book with royalties from the back catalog adding on a healthy bit on top. However "mid-list" encompasses a wide range, so this can also be lower or higher, especially because a mid-list author with 20+ books, turning out 3 books every two years, may still only get $40k advances based on new book sales, but with so many books in their back catalog even selling only 1000 copies of each book each year can add another $30k on their annual earnings. More if they're popular enough to get audiobook deals as well.
These are the authors that basically keep the lights on for the publisher. Overall though, profitable publishing is a business of breakout hits, the authors that sell 50,000+ copies and hit the best seller lists. Failed first-time authors and mid-list authors may mostly cancel each other out on profit, and it's those few hits that push publishers into the black.
There's an interesting book [1] that talks about how media changes over time. In short, new media forms replace older forms, pushing the older forms into niches. An obvious example is TV replacing radio, where radio used to be full of story-based content, but when that content moved to TV, radio became largely a niche form of media, focusing on music (and talk shows and weather etc).
This paints a picture of media forms along some continuum, which describes what you're looking for.
> Did it used to be easier to make a living as an author?
I suspect there is now a middle ground that didn't exist before: In the 1970s you were either selling >10,000 copies, or you weren't a published author. 'Self-publishing' had a reputation as a scam to extract money from naive would-be authors. (I'm not sure what the academic book market was like at the time)
It's only with the rise of ebooks and print-on-demand that niche, low-selling authors have become a thing.
Academic presses are also mostly very low volume. But academics don't expect to make a living from selling books (at least not directly - books help to establish reputations which can help you in the academic job market).
Vanity presses have indeed existed for a long time, but 50 years ago they were widely seen as a scam, rather than a realistic route to a writing career.
Vanity publishers would tell every author their work had great sales potential, then charge them $2000 for $500 worth of editing, printing and marketing - so authors would not only fail to make money, they would actually make a large loss.
And they would generally sell the authors hundreds of copies of their printed book (because it wasn't economically feasible to do print-on-demand like today), which the author was expected to find buyers for. Most didn't, and many people clearing out the houses of dead relatives found dusty boxes of unsold books which cost the relative a lot of money.
I don't think that's a huge difference. It will still cost you money to get your Word doc into publishable shape (cover and interior design, editing, etc.) And you're still unlikely to make a significant profit on that upfront cost as a self-published author of PoD or eBooks.
As to whether either form of self-publishing 'scam' or not, that depends on the expectations of the author. I think it's always been common to publish just to be published with no expectation of making money, hence the 'vanity'. But I have no data to back that up.
The difference is with print on demand you can actually control your losses. When print was a printing press, the effort to setup the press meant that nobody sane would print just one book, it cost a few thousand to setup to print, and then each book was a few pennies. Inflation has raised the latter cost, while print on demand as lowered the previous to near zero.
Today you can decide how much your editor is worth. If your grammar and spelling is good you can pay less, or if you know it is bad (like me) you can pay extra until the quality is where you want it. You might even have a friend who will do the early editing for free (a trained editor shouldn't be wasted on spell check duties, but they are probably worth it once you think the book is done for final tweaks) Whatever this investment is, you can limit the costs.
"Vanity Press" means you spend money to get published. Modern self-publishing means that you're attempting to make an income, however meager, from your writing.
I talked elsewhere about Louis Masterson - the Morgan Kane series sold 20m+ copies in his lifetime, but each individual edition of each book sold mostly on the order of thousands over multiple printings over a period of decades.
Low selling authors have been a big thing since always, because there are a huge number of markets that are small enough that it was (and is) not unusual for publishers in smaller markets to print on the order of a few hundred books per run for unknown authors.
E.g. in Norway (where Kjell Hallbing/Louis Masterson is from), 10k sold used to mean you were a big deal, and high up on the bestseller lists.
I know offhandedly that at one point it was possible to live on one's short fiction but now that's been entirely squeezed out. (Unless you're Ted Chiang.)
That is sad. :( In happier news, I wonder if you can look at things in terms of "creators of entertainment" rather than just authors and get a happier picture.
Like, for example, let's just consider authors and video game creators. Let's suppose that in the fifties, before video games, there were, say, 100,000 full-time fiction authors in the US. (That number sounds awfully high to me, but maybe.) Today, according to this article, there can only be at most about 7,000 full time fiction authors in the US. But according to this page[1], there are 260,000 people working in the videogaming industry. So if we only consider these two industries, that's 160,000 more people getting paid full time wages to create entertainment.
That's sad if you want to be an author, but if you're concerned about the overall creation mix of society, then maybe it's not so sad.
People “working in the videogaming industry” aren’t comparable to “fiction authors” but to “people working in the slice of the publishing industry involved in publishing fiction”.
And the slice of the videogaming industry that is analogous to authors is probably a vastly smaller proportion than of print fiction publishing because there is so much more non-authorial stuff to do.
That's a good point! From what I can find about 750k people are working in the publishing industry overall. It's hard to find statistics just for fiction publishing.
I have to admit I'm a little surprised. I would have thought by now the videogame industry would be bigger than books, but maybe it's not.
Don't forget the population difference. There are a lot more people now than back then. (I intentional didn't specify world population of some subset - interesting to think about each)
Does Ted Chiang live off his writing though? AFAIK he makes his living as a technical writer! (this might have changed in the last couple of years though...)
Someone at Microsoft could probably check to see if he's still an employee, but I highly doubt he's still working a day job. Though maybe he is. He's surprisingly not that prolific for someone who's so successful with his writing.
From TFA: "There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month".
$1000 * 12 < $100,000
But I get that HN isn't a place for usefully discussing this sort of issue, because it's packed with the people who are absolutely certain they'll be one of those 25.
The numbers the author gives for patreon are blatantly false though. There's a few posts down in the thread of people like me who are wondering where those numbers come from.
Yes. Needs comparison to past years to be useful. Would also be helpful to compare books that came out in past year or few years to see how their sales trends. We also need to know what those books that are tracked are. Are they just in print titles? Or does it count 60 year old used biology textbooks for sale on Amazon no one wants? Or dated romance novels long past their prime? Because if those are included I'm not surprised they are struggling to sell 1000 copies. Even new books in niche academic fields can struggle to sell 1000 copies as the audience is so small.
I did mention Alexandre Dumas as a case study in a previous article. Here's a snippet:
"But there used to be another way. When Alexandre Dumas debuted The Count of Monte Cristo it was published as a feuilleton—a portion of the weekly newspaper devoted to fiction. From August 1844 to January 1846 his chapters were published in 18 installments for The Journal des Débats, a newspaper that went out to 9,000 to 10,000 paying subscribers in France—and readers were rapt by it.
In the forward to a 2004 translation of the book, the writer Luc Sante wrote: “The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled… is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else.”
It was basically “Game of Thrones.” Readers could not wait to get their hands on the next chapter and that bode very well for the writer who was not only paid by the newspaper in real-time for his work (by the word), but also grew the popularity of his work over the entirety of the time it was being published.
“The ‘Presse’ pays nearly 300 francs per day for feuilletons to Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, De Balzac, Frederic Soulé, Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau,” Littell’s Little Age, Volume 10 wrote in 1846. “But what will the result be in 1848? That each of these personnages will have made from 32,000 to 64,000 francs per annum for two or three years for writing profitable trash of the color of the foulest mud in Paris?”
That “profitable trash” earned those writers an annual salary of between $202,107 to $404,213 in today’s dollars—and the obvious disdain of that Littell writer who, even then preferred the merits of a bound and published book. The same volume goes on to say that Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845."
A comparison to the recent past and not the most successful French authors of the 19th century. For every Dumas making $200,000-$400,000 there was probably a hundred authors you've never heard of making $2000. And the market has changed so much since the mid-19th century as there is way more alternatives for people's time like movies, TV shows, video games, etc. with completely different distribution methods because of things like the internet enabling people to get content out for free.
You need to look back at the recent past and not just the most successful authors to see what the trends are. Is a random sampling of 100 authors from 2000 making more than those in 2019? Has the total number of books sold sharply declined?
Ever read Boswell's life of Samuel Johnson? Samuel Johnson was a poet, which was about as close as you could be to a rock star in terms of popular culture fame in the 18th century.
I would call it more of a hope than an expectation. Really what I'm trying to figure out is if it's possible to monetize a niche audience (with fiction content) and make a living from it. I guess we'll find out...
And thanks for the luck!
The funny thing about writing is that writers mostly hate writing. Writers like being writers. They also like having written books. But the process, they despise.
This is very different from other arts. Musicians enjoy playing music a lot. Performers, in general, love to perform. Even painters, I think, like to paint.
Goals are very important to acknowledge. If you're only interested in income and are writing fiction, the numbers are against you. In general, as the author shows, writing isn't a great source of direct income.
If, however, you've accumulated a lot of research on a personal topic and want to gather the threads together and reach some personal conclusions, long-form non-fiction is probably the only tool that's going to work, whether you publish or not.
There are many more indirect benefits for various niche genres. If you reduce it all to money, you're not going to be happy. Everybody can publish now and as a result of that, most books are not that great. One wag said that the great majority of books published today shouldn't be published at all. I tend to agree, at least in terms of publishing for a wide audience. It's just that book publishing doesn't have to be like that.
I'm starting on another book this year. Each of my previous books has had less than 1,000 readers and I'm happy as a clam. In fact, I really don't want to start publishing to a mass audience. In my opinion, looking at writing only in terms of a mass audience is the best way to start writing a lot of highly-targeted trash. Everybody is already trying to write the next version of serialized pulp fiction. That's why, in my opinion, no matter how well you write for any sized audience at all it's only going to end up being mediocre (by comparison). If, however, you write reasonably well on a laser-focused extremely small niche that you have great passion for? You win even if you get only seven readers.
Beat the game by not playing by the rules they give you.
Related is also to choose to work in the appropriate medium. There are many things called books, but not all of them are defined by numbered chapters, carefully outlined paragraphs and artful prose - and it's the obligation of such that tends to act as a barrier.
A 8-page zine can usually get the essence of an idea out of your head, and the format lends itself to thinking about the overall aesthetic as part of the message.
> There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).
I think she missed a few authors in other categories. Examples:
- https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow (over $6,000/month)
- https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3814558 ($8,203 per chapter, roughly 1 chapter/month)
- https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba (no dollar amount, but 4,345 patrons and a $1/month minimum tier should translate to roughly $8000/month)
etc. None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.
Basically, you can look through RoyalRoad, Scribblehub, WebNovel, and various other places where quite a few people seem to find success. And that's not even mentioning the people who write novels and publish them on Amazon.
>None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.
They're not. Or at least were not. They wrote web novels and acquired success because people liked their stories.
There's also the path of the "Kindle Unlimited" after-the-fact self-publisher.
I've seen several times now where an author does this:
1. Publish their novel serially on a site like Royal Road. Build up a subscriber base, get on the leaderboards, try to grow.
2. Publish it to Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited requires that no other copies be available online, so remove it all from the original site.
3. Continue writing new content as "book 2" on the original sites to try and stay discoverable and on top of the leaderboards. Hope new readers will read the first few books on Amazon, thereby finally earning some money.
These are great, thank you! They didn't show up in the fiction category, but makes sense since they are using other terminology. I'll definitely look into these as case studies!
Wildbow is amazing. Her "Worm" series is literally 20 full novels sized, and works like this are (or was? read it many years ago) free competition to any would-be writer who would want to require - as the article suggests - $5 per chapter of an unfinished novel. I mean, all these Patreon examples illustrate that it definitely can work, but IMHO it's more accurate to treat it as "patron" sponsorship/charity/support out of goodwill, instead of as actual economic sales of scarce product.
I love that Wildbow writes the female point of view that you assumed he was a she (assuming that wasn't a typo). He's still going strong--current work is Pale (https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/) which I can highly recommend.
Proud patron of Wildbow here, I admire his work ethic so much, he has been writing 10000+ words per week for at least 7(?) years without interruption and the stuff is high quality too, great world building all around.
https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/ is what he has been writing for the past year and I still look forward to the chapters on Tuesday and Saturday every week. There is also a whole community of readers who gathers in the comments section or the subreddit to theorize and speculate, it is a lot of fun.
Yes, I was wondering where the author got those numbers, There's also https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul who probably gets more than 5k a month since the minimum tier is $2.5/month
Harriet is a great kids' series (as is Dragonbreath). Just to include it here, most of Vernon's writing for adults (which is what her Patreon focuses on) is under the pen name T. Kingfisher. "Jackalope Wives"; Clockwork Boys (fantasy novel); Swordheart; The Twisted Ones; A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking... fun, quirky, interesting stories! (Her grown-up webcomic Digger was under her own name, though.)
Unlike movies/TV shows, books tend to 'age' relatively slowly. Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today. Not only that, but there are a literal ton of books out there that have been read by hundreds of thousands of people and reviewed extensively.
I have found my personal enjoyment of a book to be loosely correlated with the goodreads / B&N scores. This gives me at least some signal with which to choose a new book. So why should I, as a reader, try out a new author / book that hasn't been read by anyone else? I'm sure there are a few jewels out there, but I'm sure there are even more duds. Reading a book takes time, and I don't want to waste my time / money on random selections of books.
It depends a lot on what books. Many technical books age extremely quickly. You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose.
But even in literature there is timing, themes, references and fashion. You'd have a hard time writing Don Quixote today, because hardly anyone reads chivalric romances anymore, so the vast majority of people wouldn't know what you're even parodying. And I suspect most modern readers of Don Quixote don't really get it, excluding those with an education in european medieval literature.
Even without going that far, there are fads and fashions. If you want to write about wizards or vampires there probably are better and worse times to do it.
Even playing your cards right, how likely are you to get a hit? Because there's really no lack of good books on most any subject at this point, and it takes a very dedicated reader to exhaust the existing catalog, and the easiest way for a reader is to find out what's popular and try that, rather than giving a new author a chance.
> You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose.
I think even here it depends on what you're trying to get out of it. I wouldn't read K&R to get the latest information about how to write modern C, but I read that book once every 5 years or so because there are timeless aspects at its core. This is even more true of a book like SICP.
Yeah, but doesn't that make the point? Don Quijote has outlived the works it's parodying and people still want to read it, even if they need a lot of footnotes to get all the references.
> Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today
I'd argue that there's a large amount of books that don't age out of their value. There's a lot of good material out there written over a hundred years ago that's more enjoyable that the average modern book. Even books which are tightly coupled to their time period are all still relevant and valuable today.
A funny example, I was reading an author yesterday who discussed a social issue at a local university, and quoted a professor who shares the exact name of a well known professor today who comments on similar issues.
Most of what I read is well over 30 years old, if not older. And very much of it still reflects the world today.
> Even books which are tightly coupled to their time period are all still relevant and valuable today
As an example of this I would cite "Mr Britling Sees It Through" [0] which was written by HG Wells during World War 1. It was published in 1916 and describes in a novel the public reaction to the early stages of the war - and Wells had no idea how the war was actually going to pan out when he wrote it. I read it in April last year, one month into the first COVID lockdown. Some of the reactions Wells describes (from fear to to panic buying to concerns about the economy) were exactly what was happening in the pandemic. I found it amazingly relevant even given the massive changes in society over the last century because in many ways basic human nature is just the same now as then.
Similar to The Plague by Camus. The progression basically goes:
1. Everyone ignores it since it's "not serious"
2. People play it down for political reasons
3. People start dying
4. People lock down
5. Alcohol sells out
At least where I am, this is exactly what happened.
When I read books, I enjoy it a lot more when I read a "known great" book. It's easier to just pick up a Dostoyevksy, Kafka, Saramago, or Murakami or whatever. Chances are I'm gonna like it, or it'll be entertaining enough.
When I try to explore my own likes, it ends up being frustrating because it takes a lot of trial and error. Consequently, I have no insensitive to read books that are recently published. It makes a lot more sense to wait for people to read books for me and tell me what are the great ones every decade. Meh, it works for me. Yes, I end up reading mostly 19th and 20th century stuff, but it feels sufficient.
Back when I was a kid my mom had a box of 7" vinyl records she gave me. For every Elton John or Hendrix she had, there were dozens of absolute garbage records. People often make the claim that music was better back then. No, it has just been filtered for you.
For books I tend to do the same as you. I have a finite amount of time on this planet and so little time to read in the first place. I usually reach for something older than 20 years.
It is interesting to note that even with these there are fashions. Abe Kobo was once casually referred to as Japan's most famous writer and now the name will get you a lot of blank stares, while Murakami was unavoidable for a while but is probably on his way out (I get the sense someone ten years younger than me is far less likely to be a fan).
ME TOO. I pretty much only read classics. They are just so philosophically complex! I wish that we read now, like we read then. But I suppose television and video content are an art in their own way, and I could adapt my writing preferences to the screen. But I just have no interest there. Perhaps I'm just stuck in another century!
This is so relatable. I hunt out obscure books, but that's because I love really old surreal things and that is not the norm. And that's why only a few books get all the sales. Because they are the ones that turn up on Goodreads/etc. It's not bad that it works out that way. It's just, how do those other authors turn up on goodreads?
Your comment, in addition to that of some of the sibling comments to this one, is why I take such in incredibly dismissive attitude to the argument that piracy will mean that no new music, movies, or books will be produced. Even if it were true in an absolute sense—not a single wealthy failson made a passion project, bored teenager wrote better-than-the-original fanfiction, or freepunks made stuff for the joy of creation—there are already multiple lifetimes of music to hear, books to read, and movies to watch. Why should I care that they are not new? If you do have a genuine preference for contemporary works with modern themes, I understand why you would disagree with me. However, either of us trying to argue further in this hypothetical discussion would be less effective than agreeing that we disagree.
Sometimes they even improve, recently I was reading an old Stephen King where he spends a couple of paragraphs describing the rotary dialing process. When I first tried to read this book 30 years ago that was the sort of mundane detail that made the book such a slog, now it feels more like the attention to detail you appreciate in a period piece.
I think a lot of TV shows have reached the point where they're aging a lot slower too. If you launch a new sci-fi show today for instance, you're competing for eyeballs against Star Trek: TNG which hold up well in the modern day. When TNG came out old shows hadn't aged as well and the were unavailable to most people. DVD's and now streaming have given TV the equivalent of used book stores and creators now have to compete against the back catalogues.
That indeed does seem to be something of a challenge. I don't really find the Goodreads/other ratings that likely to predict whether I'll enjoy something, but there are countless famous works of fiction I mean to read which I know are, even if not necessarily to my taste, proven worthwhile to many people for a long time. Then there's a giant grab-bag of stuff of unknown quality with little way for me to sort through it. Unless I read a review of it that stirs me I'm unlikely to pick it up.
Not the OP, but the first two reasons why TV & movies from 70 years ago age worse are:
1. Quality of special effects
2. Specifically for TV, it was often treated as the medium where you dump scripts that weren’t good enough to be made into a movie.
The vast, vast majority of content from 70 years ago doesn't have special effects at all.
And I'm sorry but that's not how scripts work. Episodic television and one-off movies have entirely different dramatic structures and aren't even remotely interchangeable. You can't just turn a movie into TV.
One of the greatest TV shows of all time, I Love Lucy, is from 70 years ago. And in terms of enjoyment, it hasn't aged at all. Nor did it require special effects. ;)
Above all, the 1950's was called the "Golden Age of Television" for a reason! [1]
Sometimes those old books are fun in a quaint way. Talk about "negros" where you are expected to understand why the person isn't bad per se, but automatically unable to be anything other than a basic servant. We can laugh at it now, yet it was so common and wasn't even mentioned.
And then of course look at ourselves and wonder what the next generation will laugh at.
> Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today.
That is definitely survivorship bias. Do you have any idea how many books are created in a year, even before eCommerce? The vast majority of them are crap.
Correct, but also beside the point. OP was saying that it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest one's time and money into new works when there are so many older, vetted works that remain to be read.
In the month it will take me to finish reading Storm of Swords, I will watch ~10 movies. Plus, I'm reading Storm of Swords, which needs no additional support from readers to be discovered or validated--though I still want to read it. Plus, I digitally loaned it from my local library.
I own a number of books (~200) and have probably owned x4 that total in my lifetime. Maybe 1/3 of those I paid full price for new. The rest I sourced either cheap on Ebay or about free from second-hand stores. I've spent probably less than $4,000 total on books, not counting textbooks, while being in the minority of people who buy and read books.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, but the question that comes to mind is something like this: how many people like me does it take to support one professional writer?
Non-fiction writers are way more likely to have other income sources than fiction writers. For example, I'm reading Marketing Made Simple (Donald Miller), which was free with Amazon Prime. I'm quite sure Donald Miller and his company are not sweating how much money they get from a Prime reader: getting anyone to read their book strengthens their overall sales funnel.
I've been an Audible paid subscriber for 10 years. I have 138 audiobooks in my library. At $10/month, that means I've paid Audible $1200 for ~2000 hours of "reading". Using the 25% royalties mentioned in a child comment (no idea if that's accurate) I've paid authors only $300 for all of that. That seems super low! And I imagine I'm in the top quintile in terms of paying for "books".
how many people like me does it take to support one professional writer?
Back of the envelope, I would estimate authors get 1/4 of book sales as royalties, so you've sent $1000 to authors in your lifetime. I don't know how old you are, maybe that's $100/year since you were at book-buying age. If an author gets by on $30k/year then it takes 300 people like you to support a professional writer.
That's not bad, really. If you watch 120 movies a year then you're probably supporting the movie industry more than the book industry but it sounds like you prefer movies to books anyway so that's fair.
I buy quite a few books. Almost all digital now. I probably buy a book every other month now. It'd be more, except that...
I also subscribe to Amazon Unlimited and read a lot of books on it.
I never buy movies now. If the theatres were open, I'd see 2, maybe 3 movies in a year with my wife. The rest I watch on Netflix/etc when they come out for free. I watch maybe 6 movies a month, and 4 of those are because we have a virtual movie night with a lot of friends every week since Covid started.
We watch a lot of TV, but again, Netflix/etc. We don't even pay for cable. We never buy TV series unless it's something really special.
While there are some that make meaningful amounts of money, all my experience suggests that writing non-fiction tech books for example, is overwhelmingly reputational.
I certainly still own--though I've gotten rid of a fair number--a lot of books but, no, I don't read a lot any longer. Maybe about 10 a year which is probably 20% of what I once did.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that buying second-hand books gives no money to the author.
I don't know, morally speaking if this should be the case. It does feel wrong for people to get the experience without paying the price of admission. Can this be solved logistically, though? And do publishers factor this into their RRP?
Once you go down that path, it starts getting kind of dystopian. Should it be illegal for me to lend or give a book to a friend without paying a fee, because then they are "getting the experience without paying the price of admission"? I'm reading a book to three kids, should I have to pay more than reading the book to one kid? That's three times as many kids "getting the experience", same "price of admission"! Taking the book to my brothers house to read to his kids -- nope, that's illegal unless you buy another copy?
I absolutely agree, I don't think solving this problem is something that can really be considered. I do think it's a problem, though.
I think you're taking my analogy of tickets too far, though. It was simply to highlight the fact that, by reading the book without paying the author a dime, you are getting permanent access to the materials without the author being paid, which I think is an issue.
I think the only feasible solution is a kind of royalty fee on resales, but I can easily imagine this becoming a logistical nightmare. As I said, I'm not sure this problem has a workable solution.
In fact, I think maybe in Europe second-hand bookstores do pay some kind of royalties? Maybe libraries do too?
In the US, the "first sale doctrine" has legally preserved the right to give, rent, or sell an object legally in your possession, without the permission of the copyright holder.
For 100 years (I believe the first sale doctrine was first established in 1908), it did not imperil the business of writing and selling books.
In 2021, that market does seem imperiled, as the OP is about... but I don't think the 100-year-old first-sale doctrine is to blame, or eliminating it would fundamentally change the market forces. I mean, if it was the issue, then the market for books would be fundamentally different (and better for copyright holders) in Europe than the US, but is it?
That same logic presumably applies to libraries. Books are physical objects at the end of the day just like a piece of pottery someone made. First sale doctrine explicitly allows the owner to lend or resell it to someone else.
Yes! Exactly! Right now the ebook library model is based off the physical book library model where the library purchases a certain number of ebooks (say 10) and the author only gets a portion of the royalties on those ten copies, and then the library loans those copies out to an unlimited number of people.
It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties every time someone reads their book. (Similar to how an artist gets paid everytime their song is streamed). I might actually write about this for a future post.
This is what I think the best course looks like. I know there are issues with Spotify's model (at least, I have heard people make this claim), but given that music had to transition to a streaming-based model (and considering that written text looks to be slowly going this way, too) the per-consumption royalty looks good to me.
Of course, instantiating this in the real world is another question. For ebook libraries, it certainly seems plausible, but for regular libraries?
Right, exactly. And we could learn from spotify (pay the creators more). But the ebook library is huge now and could easily be transformed. The only problem is that they aren't charging a monthly subscription fee (like Spotify) and so they would have to use donation dollars to fund that. And yet, I have to wait 15 weeks to get a book on my kindle because other people are reading it first, which seems very outdated.
> Books are physical objects at the end of the day
Disagree with this. There has been a very short period in human history (roughly from the invention of the printing press till the rise of ebooks/audiobooks) where books were primarily physical objects. Stories were told and preserved orally for thousands of years, and who knows where the future of the medium is.
Stories aren't books though, there's a reason we differentiate between the two. It's like saying a vinyl equals a song; it's merely the container that holds a song in a static form. It's not the song itself.
Buying a house from a homeowner gives no money to the original builder, or the first human being to inhabit that piece of land. Do you feel guilty about getting shelter without paying the price of admission?
I think this is a disingenuous comparison. Builders get paid to build houses. Authors, to my knowledge, do not frequently get paid to write books, they get paid when they sell books.
When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything. When you resell a book, you are (possibly) denying the author a sale.
> When you resell a house, you are not denying the builders anything
You're denying the builder a sale of a new house.
Re-selling books is already legal. You bought a physical item, not the right to use the item. Ownership implies the right to dispose of the item as one wishes. You asked whether it was morally correct. I was showing you that many other things are frequently resold with no moral implications.
In this case, Emily crowdfunded her novel using the cryptocurrency ETH. People "invested" in her book buy purchasing the NFT, so that they can later sell their investment again (and the writer will get royalties if they do).
I think this might be a little too out there to become mainstream. HOWEVER, I do think the library model could be tweaked to favor the author.
Right now the ebook library model is based off the physical book library model where the library purchases a certain number of ebooks (say 10) and the author only gets a portion of the royalties on those ten copies, and then the library loans those copies out to an unlimited number of people.
It should be managed more like Spotify- where books can be read unlimitedly, but the author gets paid royalties every time someone reads their book. (Similar to how an artist gets paid everytime their song is streamed). I might actually write about this for a future post.
But things I cannot resell I would pay less for. For certain items the amount I'm willing to pay is a function also including what I can sell it for when I'm done with it.
Yes, I absolutely agree. When you buy something you imagine yourself reselling, you can factor the resale price into the total cost.
I don't think this is a counter to my argument, though. I'm not saying it is wrong to be able to resell books, I am just pointing out that reselling books without the author receiving any money strikes me as morally improper. As I mentioned in another comment, I'm not convinced that there exists a decent solution to this problem, and I imagine that it's at least in part factored into RRPs, but I just thought it was something to consider.
Well technology is solving this problem, e-books are not transferable so there is no secondhand market. Problem solved! (but don't expect to ever inherit a book collection that has titles you'd never heard of, that opens your eyes to different things).
> Not to mention, an author would have to come out with one book a year to maintain that salary.
Your math looks odd to me. You look at the amount a book earns in a single year and extrapolate that to the author's annual salary, but seem to assume that once the first year is up, the book stops earning. Does books earning passive over multiple years affect the numbers?
For what its worth, my single non-fiction book has generated passive income for about seven years now.
I fully agree with your larger point that earning a living off fiction is exceedingly difficult these days. I hope fiction authors can find new revenue models like you're exploring that are successful. But I fear that fiction will go the way of poetry and theatre where it becomes a niche art beloved by some but rarely lucrative enough to devote yourself full time to it.
"Most books peak in the first 10 weeks after their debut, then exit the market."
This is "most" so of course there are exceptions. And it sounds like you are one of them. That is amazing! Did it have a big bump at front, and then decrease over time? Or have you seen other bumps later on?
I do wonder if serial content might be better. Because you get a bump every time you have a release, vs. only every three years when you have a whole book release.
Either way, I'm fairly certain that it's like you say, and that fiction will go the way of poetry and become to niche to make a living from it. But I'm going to at least give it a go and see what happens!
I think that is largely because most writers don't know how to or don't care about marketing.
I published a novel in late november, and it's sales are low but steady to slowly increasing. A key aspect is that to "survive" past the initial bump you need to invest effort into building word of mouth and getting reviews, and that is a slow process. The people I got to help with marketing even actively advised against doing much marketing before we had a base of reviews, because they apparently find it almost impossible to get positive ROI on Amazon ads until there's a reasonable number of reviews.
I intentionally started writing a series, and everything I've seen and heard suggests series rarely even start selling decently until at least the 3rd volume, because people hold off to see if it's worth investing time in.
I'd advise against considering what happens to "most" books, because most books gets no marketing, no proper cover design, no effort in writing blurbs, no effort to push the books over time.
Oh I've heard that. The classic "third book" being the one that goes viral. (Gillian Flynn, Dan Brown, etc.)
I agree with you on considering most books (most books don't market), but even trying to learn from the successful books isn't entirely encouraging. Even the best ones don't see a lot of reads.
But the industry is rapidly changing. We don't all watch the same three television channels anymore. Niche content is more the norm than mass marketed content.
I think the whole "creator economy" is still in its infancy, and we have yet to see whether it will actually allow creators to monetize in a meaningful way. But it's worth engaging with it as an experiment to see what happens!
It's not just that the third book is what takes off, but that sales of book 1 and 2 rarely takes off before book 3 is out because people hold off and might sign up to your mailing list etc. but won't read until they know there's more coming.
I do certainly think the market is massively geared towards a tiny number of best-sellers, but there are a number of people who still have success with modest sales of individual books simply by focusing more on building a back catalogue and marketing to a fan base more likely to want to buy "everything". You can afford to spend quite a lot more on ads if a single sale might lead to 20 more than if one book is all you have.
But that require you to think about it as a business, and a lot of writers don't want to deal with that bit.
I know at least a few that will not buy any book in a series until it is completed, due to the number of book series that simply have petered out part-way though.
But it's a technical book on programming, so the whole economic and time model are just totally different compared to fiction. My model was to serially publish it online for free. There's a link to the mailing list at the top of each chapter. When I finished a chapter, I'd put it online and tell people about it. That did a good job of building up the mailing list. Then when the print edition was done, I could use that to tell people about it.
I had absolutely no expectation of this, but somehow having it online for free has been really good for actually selling copies too. I don't know if it's because it raises the book's profile, or because people can try before they buy, or maybe that just feel grateful that they don't have to buy? Either way, it worked out way better than I expected.
> I'm fairly certain that it's like you say, and that fiction will go the way of poetry and become to niche to make a living from it. But I'm going to at least give it a go and see what happens!
I really hope you're successful. Even if the money is falling out of it, fiction is the best way I know to share insight about the human condition with others. We'd be poorer as a species without it, regardless of what capitalism thinks.
Agree. My non-fiction, niche book generated some income for almost 10 years even though it was outdated after the first 5 or so. I am guessing that in fiction they can earn for a lot longer. There are also other effects to take into consideration: Even a moderate hit will generate interest for previous books; books in a series or in a trilogy will boost each other’s sales. Not that getting the moderate hit is easy in any way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27106055&p=2
It's a good thread; I recommend it.
(Comments like this will go away once pagination does—it's just a performance workaround. Sorry for the annoyance.)