I've been self-publishing fiction for a couple of years. Many years ago I looked down on self-published works, expecting them to be of low quality. I thought if someone self-published it was just because they weren't good enough to get a "real" publisher.
It is true that self-publishing has a lower barrier to entry so there's a lot of crap that gets put out. But even for _really good authors_ who take the work seriously, trad publishing makes little financial sense most of the time. To succeed in self-pub in the most competitive and lucrative genres your book has to be on-par with any traditionally published book. Expectations have risen.
And when you're sitting there looking at a trad deal that will make you a few cents at best from every sale and compare that to the 70-100% royalties you can get self-publishing, the trad deal begins to make much less sense. New writers sometimes think a trad deal will pay off in other ways: they won't have to worry about marketing or other business aspects of putting out a book. But that's not even the case anymore - many traditional publishers expect you to market your own work and build your own following. They won't spend marketing resources on most writers they sign.
Making a living as an author is hard, and making a living as a traditionally-published author is near-impossible.
I've found myself enjoying more and more self published books. I wish a LITTLE more care was put into cover art and small details though. The cover art and book quality seem to be the two things that stick out like a sore thumb on self published works.
Even knowing that a lot of my favorite reads every year are self published, I am sometimes skeptical of a new book because the cover art looks like it was done poorly by someone in 15 minutes in photoshop. I guess I'm quite literally judging a book by its cover here but... In a world where you get a cover and a 2 paragraph blurb about a book... That is a significant factor.
This is actually a huge factor - both the covers and the blurbs are hugely important. Self-published covers in competitive genres now have to be on-par with trad covers for a reader to bother clicking on them.
Niches where there may not be much trad coverage can be more forgiving. If you're writing in a small niche that not many other authors cover, you have more wiggle room with the cover art. But very popular genres with a high ceiling really benefit from a professional cover designer (or a professionally-designed premade).
Luckily, there are budget designers out there who are decent. I started out publishing short stories and doing my own covers and editing. My first works _sucked_ and I'm glad I used them more for practice and did not put money into them. Gradually as I started making more, I began investing those royalties in peripheral services: editing and covers. I now pay for covers, developmental edits, copy edits, and proofreads for each new book. I've improved a lot and am steadily building a readership, but my books still barely pay for themselves with the outlay required.
I don’t think your impressions are entirely off-base here. If the author is so bad at judging the quality of the cover art (or, for me, the typesetting) I think it’s possible that it suggests a similar lack of judgement of quality for the writing (or, perhaps, editing) itself.
100% this. I would so love someone artistic to have created my book cover, but the book was a passion project for me to make a Sci-fi book my daughter would have liked, and is being sold for $0 so paying anyone was outside my budget. I have since talked to an artist and we may do an illustrated version together.
Not sure what your standards are, but a notably bad cover also shows the author has invested essentially $0 in their book. You can get passable quality work from sites like GetCovers for ~$10-$30 (I think I paid $25). Though it’s possible these are the kinds of covers you’re reacting negatively to.
“Real” covers from US-based artists start at more like $300, which is a more substantial outlay for a project that’s unlikely to pay it back.
I read some reddit's post regarding to this topic.
The main takeaway was that living, or higher profits came only if you were being aggressive with ads.
Something like reinvesting 50% of the profits in digital ads (google, amazon).
If your book reaches near top #1, you've done it. Now I realized that most of the books I read published on XXI century had been very popular, top of the chart books in some genre, during some years and I found them trough reddit/forums recommendations. Books that you would still find regarded as best in Amazon.
Internet it's pushing Pareto principle to an extreme. The same goes for music, digital art, cinema, teaching, etc. Small artists are sheltering themselves in services like Patreon because they beat the giants in terms of selling.
Also I think people are reading less. My friends don't read. They pay +15/30 USD a month to Netflix and other services. That's money and time "taken away" from reading, books.
I know quite a few authors making a living without paying for any ads, but it's definitely a different type of effort. You have to really hone in on social media, getting large review teams, etc to get visibility for your books without ads.
IMO someone starting out is probably best off not spending money on ads. They have too many other things to perfect as they learn, which can only be done by publishing over and over. At least with fiction, you're looking at building a backlist - it's not a "write one breakout book and live off of it forever" kind of thing. After a few books published it can make sense to start setting an ad budget, and using ads successfully is a whole other learning curve to dive into.
Not just higher profits, but if you are self-published or have no reviews yet then your book is usually on the 400th page on anyone's search.
I have still told nobody I know about my book, it's kind of an experiment, because it would be easy for me to email blast everyone I know to like it, but I really want people to read it without pre-conception and so far no sales, even though it is free! (or 0.99 cents on Amazon as that's Amazon)
I will say that I think succeeding as an author requires business skills that most of them appear to lack.
Amazon has started getting better at notifying me that there are new books available by an author from whom I've previously purchased books, but for a long time, and even now, I'd say most authors that I read aren't even getting me on an email list to eg tell me there's more stuff of theirs that I can buy. That's really business 101 and they're just not doing it. It's weird.
Also, its very difficult to make money on just one book. Most indie authors start seeing better sales after 5-10 books, having built up a loyal reader base.
Really appreciate you sharing your perspective. I recently wrote a book as a passion project and have been sitting anxiously on a contract. I'm not concerned about the money (I don't think my book will be a huge thing). My main motivation for going trad is the credibility as you somewhat alluded to. Do you think this is misguided on my part? Basically just so I can point at it in the future and say "a professional in the industry thought my book was worth printing with their name on it"
First, congratulations on finishing your book and getting a contract! That is a huge achievement.
I do not think your reasoning is misguided at all. If you think a traditional publisher affords you more credibility and a sense of satisfaction, that is reason enough to go with trad - _especially_ since as you say you're not concerned about the money, so there is no reason to worry about a traditional publisher's royalty rates compared to other options.
I believe your reason for wanting to go with a publisher is perfectly valid.
> But that's not even the case anymore - many traditional publishers expect you to market your own work and build your own following. They won't spend marketing resources on most writers they sign.
so is the only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?
> only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?
A few really important things come to mind:
- Editing. I'm not talking about mere copy editing which you can get done reasonably cheaply, but rather having an editor that is reading through everything and giving feedback is hugely important.
- Layout and printing of the book There's a lot that happens between writing and having a polished book in your hands. You can contract all this out but it adds a lot of work.
- Distribution. While the burden of marketing a book has increasingly fallen upon the author these days, if you want your book to be on the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble, then your much better off going with a traditional publisher.
- Prestige. Like it or not, the vast majority of people on Earth still look down upon self publishing. For some types of books this is less important: technical books and fantasy fiction books can go without in many cases (but if you want to use your book for credibility in something like consulting you'll still want a traditional publisher). But if you want to write on a serious topic it helps a lot to have an academic press publish your work, or if you want to really pursue writing literature you at least want some publisher that is recognized in your relevant community.
Currently I think the only really good use cases for self publishing are the fantasy fiction and niche technical book markets assuming you already have an audience. And even in those cases there are plenty of reasons to go with traditional publishers over self publishing.
Say you have a Mexican restaurant in NYC. There must be hundreds of them, right? But imagine that someone in NYC googles "Mexican restaurant," and your restaurant is the first search result that comes up. That's worth a lot of money.
Self-publishing is like opening your own restaurant, while being published by a major publisher is like being on the first page of Google. When, say, CNN wants someone to be a panel expert, they might call you. You can get invited to conferences on the strength of that credential, and then build up to greater opportunities from there. In essence you've been socially validated.
That's worth quite a lot of money, though it's up to you if it's worth the cost. If you didn't have any fame going in, then I think it will be.
a traditional publisher will distribute your book through all of their sales channels. if you self-publish, it's very hard or near impossible to sell your book at a proper bookstore. the sales reps will also push the books onto independent booksellers, who might love the book and want to handsell it.
For most authors the advances are pretty laughable, too. There is a very small percentage that publishers throw all their weight behind, offer generous advances to, marketing resources, etc. The rest of those they sign are more like "filler".
I can't speak for all writers, but here are a few reasons I have seen some authors going with a trad publisher:
* Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.
* Translations. There are some great untapped translation markets out there (like Germany). Some authors self-publish the English version of their books and sell translation rights to a publisher. The publisher then does the work of translating and republishing in the target countries, taking that effort off the author. The royalties are lower, but funding high-quality translations can cost a fortune and for many authors offloading that cost and effort can be worth it.
* Audiobooks. Similar to translations. Author may publish the ebook themselves and sell audio rights. Good narrators can cost a fortune, and many authors can't justify that outlay themselves. A trad audiobook publisher can get access to the best narrators and fund the entire production if the author doesn't have the means or desire to do it themselves.
So how do I find you guys? Because that's the biggest problem between the two of us. It should be based on my reading history, but goodreads is pretty useless, storygraph is better but still not that great.
I've been recently finding most good books by lengthy talks with GPT4 since I can explain in detail what I want, what I enjoyed and what I didn't, but that only works for books which are already popular (and even with old books, there are some great ones which are niche enough to never become really popular).
Unfortunately discovery still usually comes down to some manual sleuthing. It really depends on the genre, but I think you'll find that many ebooks on distributors like Amazon, Kobo, etc are self-published, so we're pretty easy to find! Check out the top 100 category in your favorite niche and you'll _likely_ find a good number of self-published titles there. If you come across an author you really end up liking, most have newsletters and/or a social media presence.
You can also sign up for ebook deal sites like BookBub, which send out deals for books in your preferred genre. They often feature self-published works. BB tends to be quite selective with what books they work with, so hopefully you'd find some nice quality work there (but of course it can always be a bit hit and miss).
On Substack, someone gave me "Legends & Lattes" which is a recent book I'd never have known about.
fyi: it's a "high stakes / low conflict" book. Yes, there are orcs, elves, and so forth, but they're kinda incidental to the plot. Not really sci-fi IMHO.
A few years ago I had beers with a NYT best selling author using trad publishing. Millions of copies sold on multiple continents, translated into many different languages, etc etc. You've heard of him, or at least his one big hit.
He said, at best, over his entire lifetime he may make $200k from that book.
He basically has to write a book every single year just to make his mortgage payments, and its a grind.
When I told him I make $8/book self published he nearly fell out of his chair.
A typical royalty is 10% of the retail price. If the book is $30 (cheap these days), then a million copies sold (an extremely rare feat, even for a best seller, but...) is $3 million dollars. How does this story add up? (Foreign rights are often a lump sum rather than royalties, but still...?)
Yeah, I wish not only self-publishing one’s own work, it also creating a small journal for publishing other writers was the first instinct of young writers, especially young writers of fiction, rather than seeking publication through more traditional outlets. I think small collectives of dedicated writer and self-publishers and self-producers is literature’s best hope for a new epoch of great writing.
Do you have any tips for self-publishing, or reliable resources that talk about it? Or do you manage PR, did you get access to any form of media coverage? I thought this was the main point of getting a publisher.
I point out romance because that's what I write, but it's just one example. At a quick glance through the first few product pages there, most of those books appear self-published.
To get to #1 in these general categories on Amazon (Romance, Contemporary romance, Paranormal romance, etc), you need _a crapton_ of sales or page reads (if you are in Kindle Unlimited). These authors all stand out because they are making bank right now, as indicated by their presence on this list.
(Of course this does not reflect expenses like ad spend, but that's a whole other story that is near impossible to measure without info from the author themselves.)
Afraid not! I write under a pen name. It's not a huge secret, but not something I advertise either for various reasons (the main one being that I'm still not as good as I'd like to be... but I'll get there).
Having a small and sparse population, Icelanders seem to have a tradition of wearing multiple hats rather than sticking with one specialization. When the men's football team made their first World Cup, the head coach wasn't just a football coach, he also happened to be a dentist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimir_Hallgrímsson
It seems like a lot of people lament that more folks can't make it as full-time authors, but I don't really have a problem with that if the demand for their writing isn't there. But if the US were more like Iceland and typical "real" jobs paid a livable wage with reasonable hours, maybe those passionate about writing could still manage to take a shot at it without it being a big deal if their book turned out to be a commercial flop?
It would be so great if more professions in the US had part time options. I could make a zillion dollars as a dev for a big tech company, but there's nowhere that pays 80% of that for 80% of the hours. Hell, I don't think I have the option to make 50% of that for 80% of the hours. Salaried careers seem to only have full time positions, and it sucks.
"It would be so great if more professions in the US had part time options. "
I agree with this, and I've personally led a life that has had many different kinds of occupations (I've been a musician, a teacher, and a programmer- usually all three at once).
I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the reason for "full-time" employment has to do with making workers unavailable for other projects.
Or, if you prefer, full time jobs aren't there because 40-hours-a-week is how much can be gotten out of a worker, but because that's how much time is necessary to keep someone from getting another job that might interfere with the "real" job.
Many folks, especially folks who do weird stuff that requires, if not great intellect or training, familiarity with a specific system (as is the case with software, for instance) aren't actually working a full time load. That's a really common observation, I think. But the way to understand why that continues to happen is that their employment ensures their availability.
That may see strange, and on some levels it's simply not correct and certainly not how most folks are thinking about full time employment.
But if you push an employer to give you fewer hours, that understanding might make a lot of sense out of why they generally won't allow part-time work- if you've got a side gig, they can't have that take priority over their tasks.
Your value to your company is also not a linear function of your time there. There are high fixed costs to training, liability, insurance, etc. They are paying you to always be available, etc.
With that said, I think it's very possible to find a much more easier development job with a lower salary. You should be able to meet performance expectations in very little time.
if you have the soft skills (I sure dont lol) I -think- contracting/consulting can be a solution to this? It's not exactly part time, but you work your contract and then take a break before you pick up the next one, which does give you more flexibility with your time. You could eg work six months on, six months off, that way.
Maybe. I knew a PE who did this years ago, but I wonder if there's any software engineers on this board who have successfully done this
The company Galois notably supports this sort of arrangement (you pick your hours and your pay is scaled accordingly). I think their corporate structure could be applied more widely.
As someone who has a full time job and has self-published a novel I wrote in my spare time, I do not think that supply of books is the issue. In fact, as I went through the process of learning how to self publish, I met many people who write in their free time, including people I know and friends of friends I don’t know. I was actually surprised by how many people there are who have either already self published or who have an unpublished book they work on in their spare time.
From my experience, the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read, and when they do read, it’s usually a super popular book all their friends have read or that Tim Ferris talked about. When I published my book, I was surprised by how many close friends and family bought the book to support me, but have never opened it. And it wasn’t until after I published my book and became more aware of the reading habits of those around me that I realized how little most people read these days. There are a handful of people who read 30-50 books, but if you were to take the median so those people don’t skew the average, I’d estimate that it’d come in around 1-2 books. Probably half of the people in my life don’t read a single book in an average year.
While I never wanted to make a living off my book, I’ll admit it was discouraging to see how few people read it cover to cover. I took Mark Dawson’s course and got all of the social ads, lead magnet, etc. setup. The ads did work, but I quickly found out that of the subset of people who do read a lot in the US, most are 60+ and want self-published books to be either $0.99 or free. I had multiple angry old ladies reach out to me through my Facebook ad complaining that they weren’t going to pay $2.99 for a self-published book and that it was upsetting I’d even try.
It wasn’t all bad and I did find readers who genuinely enjoyed my book and supporting self-published authors, but these type of people are a very small percent of the population. If the average person read 15 books per year and was ok paying $10 per book to support authors, I think you’d see a lot more self-published books. From my anecdotal experience, there are plenty of people who aspire to write, but we lack a supportive reading culture to fully cultivate authors (even part-time authors).
EDIT: I’ll also add that among the people in the median reading 1-2 books per year, most are listening to those books as audiobooks. I’m not one of those people who say listening to books isn’t reading, but for the average full length novel it costs about $10k to get an audiobook made, which is way outside the budget for anyone trying to publish books as a hobby. I paid for an audiobook to be made because I have the income and thought it’d be a fun experience (which it was!), but I will never make enough from the book to cover that expense
After graduating college at the age of 22, I've read between 20-50 books every year.
I'm often surprised at how far ahead of the bell curve I am. I am very rarely able to have a conversation about literature with people in real life. If I'm lucky enough to find someone that's read a recently published book I've also read then they often haven't read anything else by the same author. Or they haven't read the influences the author had for the book. Or they aren't aware of the genre trends the book took part in.
Self publishing causes a huge increase in noise since there are no barriers to getting published. So there's a big risk you'll pick up some garbage, but also vast supply which drives down prices. It also means new books on popular subjects can be quickly written, so unless you have some credentials the odds are stacked against you. So i think it comes down to marketing one way or another.
I plan to write a book one day, but mainly as an aid to establishing my credibility for courses I'll run, so marketing from the other direction.
I feel this. I write non-fiction in the tech industry. I start every project estimating the potential number of readers. My second book is the only one written for a particular profession. I calculated there were at least 20,000 people in the profession. Over 13 years it has sold about 2,000 copies.
I have also written the only history of the IT security industry. I update it every year. It too only sells 2,000 copies per edition.
Definitely not a way to make a living.
> the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read,
I got back into reading, but its been an effort. Books are big and expensive, my library actually doesn't have stuff available often so I'm always on a wait list. Its hard tough to find time let alone quiet time to focus on a book. So many distractions around, roommates, city noise, neighbors making noise.
I've been reading about 5-10 books a year for the last 10 years or so, after having not read anything of substance (outside of school) for some years prior to that.
Since my reading time is limited, I want to read books that are really good. I have to say, quite frankly, that many books just aren't that amazing (and I'm including both traditional and self-published in this). That makes me reluctant to pick up a book unless it's from an author I already know, comes with a really strong recommendation, or just has a superb opening. If a book doesn't have at least one of those three (or ideally two), I'm just not going to pick it up.
This is all anecdata, but my point is the demand side is more complicated. Even given the competition, the vast availability of both traditionally and self-published books doesn't guarantee that quality goes up, at least in aggregate.
The demand side is also that for people who do read their spending may be down. I used to buy roughly $400 in books a year. I now buy maybe 1 book a year and subscribe to kindle unlimited for everything else. I don't think I'm reading much less but authors are certainly making less per read, especially since 30% of my spend on KU goes to Amazon and any book that has a publisher still needs to give the publisher their cut out of the remaining 70%.
While there may be less demand for books, I am less sure of the corollary that there is less reading. I remember when Harry Potter was having its hey day, and the Amazon Kindle was first announced, there were stats showing that worldwide reading blipped up.
I suspect folks these days read faster, and read more words, than people past. Except it might be content like Hackernews, YouTube comments, X/Twitter and other doom scrollers, that make that up.
Less reading imho, is a symptom of increasing hours worked (which is also linked to lagging livable pay). The US has been increasing the hours worked. Less leisure time and less disposable income drives a host of negative effects.
As much as I dislike publishers gatekeeping what gets read, It's a big ask to commit several hours to a self-published book. This is one thing I like about Japanese light novels, I can look up the release calendar and pick out a few that look interesting. They are a relatively quick read and only around $7 (about half that if you live in Japan).
I feel it's not so much that people don't read, it's that people don't read books anymore in lieu of other mediums (most prominently social media) or methods (eg: watching television, playing games with a story component).
We all do plenty of reading in our lives, after all.
This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.
This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.
What does the data say?
* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."
* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]
* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]
* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]
* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]
Iceland is an affluent western nation with its own language, but a population of less than 375,000 people - fewer people than many cities in other countries. And yet these people want books just as much as any other people - perhaps given the nation's culture even more so.
For supply (and selection) to keep up with demand, it requires a far higher percentage of the population to write.
It’s more than that. In Iceland you’re allowed to just stop working and the government will give you a basic income (along with a recreation stipend!) indefinitely. This gives people so much time for pursuits they’re passionate about.
Do you have a source for Iceland having a universal basic income like that? How much is it? I’m not finding anything about it with Google searches, and it seems kind of hard to believe.
Maximum efficiency in regards to what metric?
(Before you say 'money/the economy', inequality seems to be bad in that respect [1], and that's about the only thing in regards to which US system seems to be highly efficiency ;)
It's the same with most creative fields really. The vast majority of people earn very little from their work, and a few really skilled/lucky folks at the top of the field earn a fortune.
See also music, art, game design/development, content creation on sites like YouTube and Twitch, blogging, etc.
Part of this is simply due to competition; there was stacks of it before the internet got big, and there's probably a thousand times more now the internet has become normalised. The barrier to entry to writing a book or becoming a writer is extremely low in the grand scheme of things (well, if you have the determination/patience to finish), so enough people do that you're spoilt for choice there.
Add this to how challenging the marketing/sales side of running a business is by default, and how trying to make a sustainable income as an author or creator is basically being a sole trader/entrepreneur, and well, it's not too surprising that most people don't do particularly well from it.
On the competition aspect, I think it's also important to look at the consumer side. For me it was wild knowing Mission Impossible struggled at the box office because of Barbie/Oppenheimer, especially because it was such a big budget film and it was actually my favorite of the three. The reality is that most people would maybe go once a month to the cinema, so they have to prioritize what to watch.
To make matters worse, you are also competing with all of history. If you want to read 12 books this year, when are you going to get to the small creators with years-worth of classics to go through?
Agree with your overall point, but the Mission Impossible thing isn't that surprising to me. I think a lot of people are tired of endless reboots/sequels of action-adventure movies. Also I think Tom Cruise can have the opposite of star power these days, a lot of people feel kind of ick about him.
That's a good point really. Not many people realise that the majority of the population doesn't buy many creative works at all.
They'll only go to the cinema maybe once a month, buy perhaps a few video games and tabletop games a year if any, watch perhaps a few TV shows or films or streaming services every month, buy perhaps 10-12 books a year, and for many of them, not buy any paintings or display art at all.
And then unless it goes viral/gets picked up by the media/becomes a meme, it probably won't even get noticed by the general public. So you have to hope the right people find your work so that happens too...
For most non-fiction authors, far and away the biggest monetary benefit of writing books is indirect, e.g. reputational benefits associated with being a published author on a topic. (Going with a recognized publisher can make more sense in this case.)
I did make a few thousand the one time I went with a publisher. I’ve also self-published and didn’t really try to make direct income at all as I had a free downloadable ebook. The only real cut I got was when third parties bought books for me to do book signings.
On the other hand I’m pretty sure I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars at least in indirect professional benefits.
I'm convinced this is what most tech oriented books are about, not so much about earning money from a book, but putting "Author of xyz" on their CV and website; "you literally wrote the book on xyz, you are an authority on xyz"
I suspect a younger generation of authors coming up now will almost exclusively self publish.
In the niches of fantasy I read there are no traditionally published authors any more, they all monetise via patreon, kindle unlimited and audible. From what I've gleaned no traditional publisher can compete with this.
I think probably we reach a point where hardbacks become "collectors editions" for successful works only, while paperbacks are print on demand. The vast majority of consumption will be ebook or audible.
This would follow the same path as the music industry and the revival of vinyl record albums. Most are collected and not played since streaming is so much easier and portable. I would go further and say that paperbacks will fall almost completely out of favor as they are less durable and could be seen as more of a "waste" environmentally. A bookshelf in a home is still a wall of virtue and interest signals and I don't think that will go away completely.
Paper books have legal value - you have rights to resell it, for instance, that you don't have for ebooks. Until we unfuck those, ebooks will never completely replace them.
Paper books aren't particularly environmentally wasteful - if you buy one extra electronic device (say, an ereader), that basically outstrips the damage of any number of books you'd buy. That might not be relevant to the perception, though.
Books as expensive wallpaper will definitely keep being a thing while dead-tree books are common, but they're fundamentally about conveying an impression, and impressions can change - if ebooks become the overwhelming majority to the point that office decoration is the main point of books, then anyone who sees the bookshelf will assume you're a poser doing it for the image, and thus people will stop doing it. So wallpaper-bookshelves can't exist as a sole purpose of books (probably).
There’s still a large “I like the feel of a real book even if it’s a paperback” contingent. But I assume that is much less true of relatively younger people. (I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my books that are in the public domain and would largely clear out most of my paperbacks if I could magically get them in digital format.
Record stores that still exist aroud me seem to have travelled back in time, I now feel like the first days of the CD sales, where they were at a corner in a shop full of vynil records.
Also someone is buying those vynil players with bluetooth and USB connectors.
> In the niches of fantasy I read there are no traditionally published authors any more, they all monetise via patreon, kindle unlimited and audible. From what I've gleaned no traditional publisher can compete with this.
I see this too, but I've also seen the next step: Publishers chase them down for book deals. Azarinth Healer is the one that comes to mind (since I'm working through Book 3 again), where the author monetized via Patreon for years, then got a publishing deal through Portal.
Honestly, it's been a good thing overall. The audiobooks are high quality, and the editing has done the story a tremendous amount of good.
Moving from self published Patron into traditional publishing is a bumpy ride. To use your example, Azarinth Healer’s author significantly reduced output while working on editing the book without disclosing why they were doing so. They then didn’t hand out copies of the edited work on Patron thus massively discouraging people from continuing to support them.
I went through that process a few times with minor variations and it’s annoyed me enough that I decided to permanently boycott both Amazon (including AWS) and Patron.
The reverse where traditional authors give fans more access on Patron is less problematic, but also distracts from actually writing.
You take away the importance of getting bookstore shelf space, material marketing and book tours (good luck getting that), etc. and publishers add less and less for a huge cut. As I commented ed elsewhere I almost certainly benefited non-monetarily from going with a well-known technical publisher but I wouldn’t do it going forward at this point for various reasons.
Worries me a bit that an established “natural selection” process pivoted towards quick turnaround. Thirty years ago publishing house would decline 99% of the manuscripts, the rest they will heavily edit, print in somewhat large numbers, and extensively promote. Today they accept more stuff, print in small 3,000–5,000 batches, then throw away forever. To me, feels like a young but promising author went from a 1% chance of getting recognized to 10% chance of getting printed and 100% chance of getting forgotten right after.
Been writing tech books now for over a decade, got about 8-10 under the belt depending on if you count 2nd and 3rd editions as new books.
Definitely not writing them for the money — that’s about $300 a month usually. Enough to buy a few knick knacks and some meals.
It’s more the notoriety of being a “subject matter expert” that counts.
I work full time and then put what I learn from the job into the books to share it with the world. No point hanging onto the knowledge and hoarding it all dragon-like.
For people in this thread, I strongly recommend Rob Fitzpatrick's book on how to write a book as a business, "Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction":
Most of what they talk about is fiction, romance novels. No wonder it's still popular to be sold, I'm the wrong demographic, to me they're the generic rags with the generic tall strong man and falling woman on the cover. They give them away at the library and nobody wants them still.
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It is true that self-publishing has a lower barrier to entry so there's a lot of crap that gets put out. But even for _really good authors_ who take the work seriously, trad publishing makes little financial sense most of the time. To succeed in self-pub in the most competitive and lucrative genres your book has to be on-par with any traditionally published book. Expectations have risen.
And when you're sitting there looking at a trad deal that will make you a few cents at best from every sale and compare that to the 70-100% royalties you can get self-publishing, the trad deal begins to make much less sense. New writers sometimes think a trad deal will pay off in other ways: they won't have to worry about marketing or other business aspects of putting out a book. But that's not even the case anymore - many traditional publishers expect you to market your own work and build your own following. They won't spend marketing resources on most writers they sign.
Making a living as an author is hard, and making a living as a traditionally-published author is near-impossible.
Even knowing that a lot of my favorite reads every year are self published, I am sometimes skeptical of a new book because the cover art looks like it was done poorly by someone in 15 minutes in photoshop. I guess I'm quite literally judging a book by its cover here but... In a world where you get a cover and a 2 paragraph blurb about a book... That is a significant factor.
Niches where there may not be much trad coverage can be more forgiving. If you're writing in a small niche that not many other authors cover, you have more wiggle room with the cover art. But very popular genres with a high ceiling really benefit from a professional cover designer (or a professionally-designed premade).
Luckily, there are budget designers out there who are decent. I started out publishing short stories and doing my own covers and editing. My first works _sucked_ and I'm glad I used them more for practice and did not put money into them. Gradually as I started making more, I began investing those royalties in peripheral services: editing and covers. I now pay for covers, developmental edits, copy edits, and proofreads for each new book. I've improved a lot and am steadily building a readership, but my books still barely pay for themselves with the outlay required.
All the designs I got on 99Designs were crap.
“Real” covers from US-based artists start at more like $300, which is a more substantial outlay for a project that’s unlikely to pay it back.
The main takeaway was that living, or higher profits came only if you were being aggressive with ads.
Something like reinvesting 50% of the profits in digital ads (google, amazon).
If your book reaches near top #1, you've done it. Now I realized that most of the books I read published on XXI century had been very popular, top of the chart books in some genre, during some years and I found them trough reddit/forums recommendations. Books that you would still find regarded as best in Amazon.
Internet it's pushing Pareto principle to an extreme. The same goes for music, digital art, cinema, teaching, etc. Small artists are sheltering themselves in services like Patreon because they beat the giants in terms of selling.
Also I think people are reading less. My friends don't read. They pay +15/30 USD a month to Netflix and other services. That's money and time "taken away" from reading, books.
IMO someone starting out is probably best off not spending money on ads. They have too many other things to perfect as they learn, which can only be done by publishing over and over. At least with fiction, you're looking at building a backlist - it's not a "write one breakout book and live off of it forever" kind of thing. After a few books published it can make sense to start setting an ad budget, and using ads successfully is a whole other learning curve to dive into.
I have still told nobody I know about my book, it's kind of an experiment, because it would be easy for me to email blast everyone I know to like it, but I really want people to read it without pre-conception and so far no sales, even though it is free! (or 0.99 cents on Amazon as that's Amazon)
Amazon has started getting better at notifying me that there are new books available by an author from whom I've previously purchased books, but for a long time, and even now, I'd say most authors that I read aren't even getting me on an email list to eg tell me there's more stuff of theirs that I can buy. That's really business 101 and they're just not doing it. It's weird.
I do not think your reasoning is misguided at all. If you think a traditional publisher affords you more credibility and a sense of satisfaction, that is reason enough to go with trad - _especially_ since as you say you're not concerned about the money, so there is no reason to worry about a traditional publisher's royalty rates compared to other options.
I believe your reason for wanting to go with a publisher is perfectly valid.
so is the only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then?
A few really important things come to mind:
- Editing. I'm not talking about mere copy editing which you can get done reasonably cheaply, but rather having an editor that is reading through everything and giving feedback is hugely important.
- Layout and printing of the book There's a lot that happens between writing and having a polished book in your hands. You can contract all this out but it adds a lot of work.
- Distribution. While the burden of marketing a book has increasingly fallen upon the author these days, if you want your book to be on the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble, then your much better off going with a traditional publisher.
- Prestige. Like it or not, the vast majority of people on Earth still look down upon self publishing. For some types of books this is less important: technical books and fantasy fiction books can go without in many cases (but if you want to use your book for credibility in something like consulting you'll still want a traditional publisher). But if you want to write on a serious topic it helps a lot to have an academic press publish your work, or if you want to really pursue writing literature you at least want some publisher that is recognized in your relevant community.
Currently I think the only really good use cases for self publishing are the fantasy fiction and niche technical book markets assuming you already have an audience. And even in those cases there are plenty of reasons to go with traditional publishers over self publishing.
Say you have a Mexican restaurant in NYC. There must be hundreds of them, right? But imagine that someone in NYC googles "Mexican restaurant," and your restaurant is the first search result that comes up. That's worth a lot of money.
Self-publishing is like opening your own restaurant, while being published by a major publisher is like being on the first page of Google. When, say, CNN wants someone to be a panel expert, they might call you. You can get invited to conferences on the strength of that credential, and then build up to greater opportunities from there. In essence you've been socially validated.
That's worth quite a lot of money, though it's up to you if it's worth the cost. If you didn't have any fame going in, then I think it will be.
I can't speak for all writers, but here are a few reasons I have seen some authors going with a trad publisher:
* Reputation. It can just feel cool to say "Oh yeah I have a book published by Tor" (or whatever). This one is pretty weak for me. Trad publishers don't hold that much special prestige anymore.
* Translations. There are some great untapped translation markets out there (like Germany). Some authors self-publish the English version of their books and sell translation rights to a publisher. The publisher then does the work of translating and republishing in the target countries, taking that effort off the author. The royalties are lower, but funding high-quality translations can cost a fortune and for many authors offloading that cost and effort can be worth it.
* Audiobooks. Similar to translations. Author may publish the ebook themselves and sell audio rights. Good narrators can cost a fortune, and many authors can't justify that outlay themselves. A trad audiobook publisher can get access to the best narrators and fund the entire production if the author doesn't have the means or desire to do it themselves.
I've been recently finding most good books by lengthy talks with GPT4 since I can explain in detail what I want, what I enjoyed and what I didn't, but that only works for books which are already popular (and even with old books, there are some great ones which are niche enough to never become really popular).
You can also sign up for ebook deal sites like BookBub, which send out deals for books in your preferred genre. They often feature self-published works. BB tends to be quite selective with what books they work with, so hopefully you'd find some nice quality work there (but of course it can always be a bit hit and miss).
fyi: it's a "high stakes / low conflict" book. Yes, there are orcs, elves, and so forth, but they're kinda incidental to the plot. Not really sci-fi IMHO.
He said, at best, over his entire lifetime he may make $200k from that book. He basically has to write a book every single year just to make his mortgage payments, and its a grind.
When I told him I make $8/book self published he nearly fell out of his chair.
I point out romance because that's what I write, but it's just one example. At a quick glance through the first few product pages there, most of those books appear self-published.
To get to #1 in these general categories on Amazon (Romance, Contemporary romance, Paranormal romance, etc), you need _a crapton_ of sales or page reads (if you are in Kindle Unlimited). These authors all stand out because they are making bank right now, as indicated by their presence on this list.
(Of course this does not reflect expenses like ad spend, but that's a whole other story that is near impossible to measure without info from the author themselves.)
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24399599
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/444296-mo...
But of course most of these authors aren't full-time authors whose income comes chiefly from their books. In fact, the Icelandic Prime Minister recently released a novel: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/28/iceland-pm-rel...
Having a small and sparse population, Icelanders seem to have a tradition of wearing multiple hats rather than sticking with one specialization. When the men's football team made their first World Cup, the head coach wasn't just a football coach, he also happened to be a dentist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimir_Hallgrímsson
It seems like a lot of people lament that more folks can't make it as full-time authors, but I don't really have a problem with that if the demand for their writing isn't there. But if the US were more like Iceland and typical "real" jobs paid a livable wage with reasonable hours, maybe those passionate about writing could still manage to take a shot at it without it being a big deal if their book turned out to be a commercial flop?
I agree with this, and I've personally led a life that has had many different kinds of occupations (I've been a musician, a teacher, and a programmer- usually all three at once).
I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the reason for "full-time" employment has to do with making workers unavailable for other projects.
Or, if you prefer, full time jobs aren't there because 40-hours-a-week is how much can be gotten out of a worker, but because that's how much time is necessary to keep someone from getting another job that might interfere with the "real" job.
Many folks, especially folks who do weird stuff that requires, if not great intellect or training, familiarity with a specific system (as is the case with software, for instance) aren't actually working a full time load. That's a really common observation, I think. But the way to understand why that continues to happen is that their employment ensures their availability.
That may see strange, and on some levels it's simply not correct and certainly not how most folks are thinking about full time employment.
But if you push an employer to give you fewer hours, that understanding might make a lot of sense out of why they generally won't allow part-time work- if you've got a side gig, they can't have that take priority over their tasks.
With that said, I think it's very possible to find a much more easier development job with a lower salary. You should be able to meet performance expectations in very little time.
Maybe. I knew a PE who did this years ago, but I wonder if there's any software engineers on this board who have successfully done this
From my experience, the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read, and when they do read, it’s usually a super popular book all their friends have read or that Tim Ferris talked about. When I published my book, I was surprised by how many close friends and family bought the book to support me, but have never opened it. And it wasn’t until after I published my book and became more aware of the reading habits of those around me that I realized how little most people read these days. There are a handful of people who read 30-50 books, but if you were to take the median so those people don’t skew the average, I’d estimate that it’d come in around 1-2 books. Probably half of the people in my life don’t read a single book in an average year.
While I never wanted to make a living off my book, I’ll admit it was discouraging to see how few people read it cover to cover. I took Mark Dawson’s course and got all of the social ads, lead magnet, etc. setup. The ads did work, but I quickly found out that of the subset of people who do read a lot in the US, most are 60+ and want self-published books to be either $0.99 or free. I had multiple angry old ladies reach out to me through my Facebook ad complaining that they weren’t going to pay $2.99 for a self-published book and that it was upsetting I’d even try.
It wasn’t all bad and I did find readers who genuinely enjoyed my book and supporting self-published authors, but these type of people are a very small percent of the population. If the average person read 15 books per year and was ok paying $10 per book to support authors, I think you’d see a lot more self-published books. From my anecdotal experience, there are plenty of people who aspire to write, but we lack a supportive reading culture to fully cultivate authors (even part-time authors).
EDIT: I’ll also add that among the people in the median reading 1-2 books per year, most are listening to those books as audiobooks. I’m not one of those people who say listening to books isn’t reading, but for the average full length novel it costs about $10k to get an audiobook made, which is way outside the budget for anyone trying to publish books as a hobby. I paid for an audiobook to be made because I have the income and thought it’d be a fun experience (which it was!), but I will never make enough from the book to cover that expense
I'm often surprised at how far ahead of the bell curve I am. I am very rarely able to have a conversation about literature with people in real life. If I'm lucky enough to find someone that's read a recently published book I've also read then they often haven't read anything else by the same author. Or they haven't read the influences the author had for the book. Or they aren't aware of the genre trends the book took part in.
Reading in America is a lonely hobby sometimes.
I plan to write a book one day, but mainly as an aid to establishing my credibility for courses I'll run, so marketing from the other direction.
I got back into reading, but its been an effort. Books are big and expensive, my library actually doesn't have stuff available often so I'm always on a wait list. Its hard tough to find time let alone quiet time to focus on a book. So many distractions around, roommates, city noise, neighbors making noise.
Since my reading time is limited, I want to read books that are really good. I have to say, quite frankly, that many books just aren't that amazing (and I'm including both traditional and self-published in this). That makes me reluctant to pick up a book unless it's from an author I already know, comes with a really strong recommendation, or just has a superb opening. If a book doesn't have at least one of those three (or ideally two), I'm just not going to pick it up.
This is all anecdata, but my point is the demand side is more complicated. Even given the competition, the vast availability of both traditionally and self-published books doesn't guarantee that quality goes up, at least in aggregate.
I suspect folks these days read faster, and read more words, than people past. Except it might be content like Hackernews, YouTube comments, X/Twitter and other doom scrollers, that make that up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
I feel it's not so much that people don't read, it's that people don't read books anymore in lieu of other mediums (most prominently social media) or methods (eg: watching television, playing games with a story component).
We all do plenty of reading in our lives, after all.
This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.
This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.
What does the data say?
* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."
* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]
* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]
* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]
* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]
[1] https://wordsrated.com/global-book-sales-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/12358/which-countries-produce...
[3] https://internationalpublishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/... , page 17.
[4] https://masterenedicion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/BookM...
For supply (and selection) to keep up with demand, it requires a far higher percentage of the population to write.
> There’s not enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser.
That's the key issue in general, not just for US. When the system is designed to extract maximum efficiency, there is little room for other stuff
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf
See also music, art, game design/development, content creation on sites like YouTube and Twitch, blogging, etc.
Part of this is simply due to competition; there was stacks of it before the internet got big, and there's probably a thousand times more now the internet has become normalised. The barrier to entry to writing a book or becoming a writer is extremely low in the grand scheme of things (well, if you have the determination/patience to finish), so enough people do that you're spoilt for choice there.
Add this to how challenging the marketing/sales side of running a business is by default, and how trying to make a sustainable income as an author or creator is basically being a sole trader/entrepreneur, and well, it's not too surprising that most people don't do particularly well from it.
To make matters worse, you are also competing with all of history. If you want to read 12 books this year, when are you going to get to the small creators with years-worth of classics to go through?
They'll only go to the cinema maybe once a month, buy perhaps a few video games and tabletop games a year if any, watch perhaps a few TV shows or films or streaming services every month, buy perhaps 10-12 books a year, and for many of them, not buy any paintings or display art at all.
And then unless it goes viral/gets picked up by the media/becomes a meme, it probably won't even get noticed by the general public. So you have to hope the right people find your work so that happens too...
I did make a few thousand the one time I went with a publisher. I’ve also self-published and didn’t really try to make direct income at all as I had a free downloadable ebook. The only real cut I got was when third parties bought books for me to do book signings.
On the other hand I’m pretty sure I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars at least in indirect professional benefits.
And traditional technical publishers are probably a more effective route for this reason even if you’re leaving some direct money on the table.
In the niches of fantasy I read there are no traditionally published authors any more, they all monetise via patreon, kindle unlimited and audible. From what I've gleaned no traditional publisher can compete with this.
I think probably we reach a point where hardbacks become "collectors editions" for successful works only, while paperbacks are print on demand. The vast majority of consumption will be ebook or audible.
Paper books aren't particularly environmentally wasteful - if you buy one extra electronic device (say, an ereader), that basically outstrips the damage of any number of books you'd buy. That might not be relevant to the perception, though.
Books as expensive wallpaper will definitely keep being a thing while dead-tree books are common, but they're fundamentally about conveying an impression, and impressions can change - if ebooks become the overwhelming majority to the point that office decoration is the main point of books, then anyone who sees the bookshelf will assume you're a poser doing it for the image, and thus people will stop doing it. So wallpaper-bookshelves can't exist as a sole purpose of books (probably).
Also someone is buying those vynil players with bluetooth and USB connectors.
I see this too, but I've also seen the next step: Publishers chase them down for book deals. Azarinth Healer is the one that comes to mind (since I'm working through Book 3 again), where the author monetized via Patreon for years, then got a publishing deal through Portal.
Honestly, it's been a good thing overall. The audiobooks are high quality, and the editing has done the story a tremendous amount of good.
I went through that process a few times with minor variations and it’s annoyed me enough that I decided to permanently boycott both Amazon (including AWS) and Patron.
The reverse where traditional authors give fans more access on Patron is less problematic, but also distracts from actually writing.
Definitely not writing them for the money — that’s about $300 a month usually. Enough to buy a few knick knacks and some meals.
It’s more the notoriety of being a “subject matter expert” that counts.
I work full time and then put what I learn from the job into the books to share it with the world. No point hanging onto the knowledge and hoarding it all dragon-like.
https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...
Even though I'm not an author I found the advice very useful, it can trivially be applied to building and marketing any product.