Making a living by writing is as rare as being a billionaire

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/making-a-living-by-writing-is-as

by Luc • 2 years ago

60 23 2 years ago

charlie0• 2 years ago

I'll add to that and say that a very large portion of the best authors likely built an online audience long before they published any books. It was the existing fame that made their books sell rather than a book making them famous.

pavlov• 2 years ago

Somehow I find this proposition surprising and even shocking because it seems to assume that the best authors are young enough to have started their careers within the past 15-20 years when the internet has actually been relevant enough that one could build an audience there first.

I mean, maybe it's true, and I'm just stuck reading books by the old farts.

odyssey72• 2 years ago

Also, getting a book to be a “bestseller” can be planned [0], further limiting the article’s statement that “in some cases, an author might get a small advance but make a lot of money via a surprise bestseller.”

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...

odyssey72• 2 years ago

The claim of the title turns out to be significantly narrower when you get into the text. Still, it offers some good points. The following is perhaps what’s most relevant to Hacker News.

In this, as Elle has pointed out before, the economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.

daymanstep• 2 years ago

Is this true for technical books? I can't imagine that a book like Practical Malware Analysis or The Rootkit Arsenal would ever be "wildly popular".

If publishers like O'Reilly were operating on this model then why would they ever publish any books on any niche subject? Surely they would only ever publish books targeted to a mass audience.

MisterBastahrd4• 2 years ago

Title does not follow through with article.

The author defines "making a living" as making 4x the median salary, and further ONLY considers authors of books. There are MANY ways to make an actual living wage off of writing that have nothing to do with book authorship. Blogs, newsletters, journalism, opinion columns, and screenwriting, for example.

mmcdermott• 2 years ago

It also assumes that big hits are the only ways for an author to make a living. I remember a blog where a fantasy author (https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...) advocated the opposite - of focusing on series and creating a range of small royalty streams that pay the bills. The mindset is entirely different as it is much closer to treating the author's oeuvre as a portfolio of assets rather than looking for the one big hit.

MisterBastahrd4• 2 years ago

Yeah, it also fails to acknowledge that self-publishing is a thing and you can make a nice career writing straight-to-epub books and print on demand books. Amazon allows people to bypass traditional publishers.

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

focusing on series and creating a range of small royalty streams that pay the bills.

This is a variation on some valuable business guidance I got a long time ago: it's better to get one nickle each from 100 sources than to get 100 nickles from one source. It spreads risk (losing 1 out of 100 nickle sources won't break you) and it also prevents any source from having too much control over you.

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

I don't think that's accurate. At least, I personally know a few people who make their living by writing. I don't personally know any billionaires.

But the thing the successful authors I know have in common is that they don't use only one way to publish and sell their writing. None of them only write books, for instance.

What they do is take a piece of writing they've done and repackage and sell it in a number of different forms in a number of different places. Sections of a book can be published separately on web sites, for instance. When I've talked with these authors, it becomes clear that selling the same writing multiple times in multiple channels is a key part of making a living doing it.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Oversupply jobmarkets are brutal and exploitive towards the naive and try to keep that naivete going to guarantee an Oversupply of exploitable workers sticking around in a steady stream. Up next an interview with Scarlett Weinstiensson.

Writing, music, game design, acting, fashion. All the nice things attracting all the bad people to profit from humanity needing all the nice things to make life bearable.

sandspar• 2 years ago

Another way to put it is that the most gentle among us are attracted to industries run by the most brutal among us.

Ferrus912• 2 years ago

This was the whole premise of Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' album.

TheCoelacanth• 2 years ago

The assumption of one book per five years isn't reasonable for a full-time writer making their living off of writing.

Most full-time authors that I know of write more like a book per year. Averaging more than one per year isn't uncommon. They also have a large back catalog of books that each trickle in some royalties to supplement what they're making off of new books.

j0hnyl• 2 years ago

I don't know many people who make a living a writing, but the ones that I do know rarely make a living from writing books.

vidarh3• 2 years ago

I agree with that - those who live of writing who wrote few books are likely the highest sellers.

But that said, in the UK the average full time writer earns less than minimum wage from their writing (but have higher than average household income)

pcthrowaway• 2 years ago

Making a living from book sales alone, by writing books is as rare as a billionaire.

Still. Quite sad to think about.

Of course, many writers use writing as part of a greater hustle, and there are of course also movie deals and other adaptations.

And this excludes journalism, tabloids, copywriting, technical writing, writing for hire, short-form writing, screenwriting, playwriting, and many others.

In fact, I think writers focusing exclusively on books is quite rare. I expect there are many more people making a living through writing alone than there are billionaires.

Ferrus912• 2 years ago

Indeed. Most books are written by people who are journalists in their day job, from what I see.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

On the floor below me is an army of technical writers. All making a living.

Making a living by writing is as rare as being a billionaire

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