> [...] writers who can command a paying audience have heretofore been significantly underpaid.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect the writer-paid-monthly model is straight up more effective at pulling money from readers' pockets than the magazine subscription model.
I mean, I can pay £34 a year for a fortnightly magazine with quite a few writers doing quite a lot of investigative journalism, and even mailing a paper copy to me. I can pay £10 for a novel by a bestselling author who takes several years to write each novel.
But with the market positioning of "$10 per month" it turns out you can sell one person's writing for £86 ($120) per year.
Strange that the output of one full time human writer could be priced so differently, even when every example is award-winning and well known. Perhaps the future of writing is a return to Dickens-era serialisation, and the next J. K. Rowling will be posting two chapters a week on Patreon.
It feels like a bit of a gamble to write a series of books and throw a huge marketing budget at them. That's what publishers have been doing, and it doesn't work for most of their books.
Average earnings for published authors in UK is £11k pa.
> The top 10% of professional authors, those who make £60,000 or more a year from their writing, earned 58% of all the money made by professional authors in 2013, and the top 5%, those making more than £100,000, earned 42.3% of that money. The top 1%, who make mean average earnings of more than £450,000, take 22.7% of all earnings, said the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, which commissioned the UK-based survey.
> The picture for lower-earning writers was much bleaker. The bottom 50% of authors were those who earned less than £10,500 in 2013, and accounted for just 7% of the amount earned by all writers put together. And 17% of all writers did not earn anything at all during 2013, said the ALCS, adding that 98% of those authors had published a work every year from 2010 to 2013.
I dunno, does this make it sound like the scam / system described in the submission is worth a punt?
> But could fiction do the same? That is a yet unanswered question. There are a few serial fiction writers on Substack—but none are paid. There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).
I think those statistics are extremely suspect. I subscribe to a few fiction authors on Patreon, and there's a few I did subscibe to but don't any more. I know of at least 4-5 fiction authors making a lot of money, like $10k+/mo ($15k+/mo in some cases) writing fairly niche content (litrpg and/or xianxia type work).
Then, when they get enough chapters for the current long-running fiction together, they bunfle it into a book and release on Kindle Unlimited, as an additional source of income.
Here's some examples:
- https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul - 2163 patrons as of now, minimum tier is $2.50/mo, but I suspect most people are paying $5 since that gives access to all advance chapters and not just some, and you can read delayed chapters on royalroad.com. So, probably somewhere between $4k and $8k a month, and this is their side hustle while in college I think.
- https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels - 1393 Patrons. There is a $1/mo option, but various tiers from $3/mo to $10/mo give you up to 50 advance chapters from where it's publishes for free on royalroad.com.
- https://www.patreon.com/jdfister - Page says they are making $4,116/mo from 517 patrons, similar situation as above with royalroad.com and advance chapters, as a point towards how much to expect the above people are making.
- https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth - $12,753/mo from 1,886 subsribers. Same situation as above with free publishing on royalroad.com and advance chapters.
These are just some people I actually read or read at some point in the past for a while, not a bunch I searched out that includes the top people. This is an answered question, IMO. If random web serials I'm reading are making this much money, I suspect there's a large amount of people making money this way.
"I am not sure how this is true. Look at past serial writers and they all seem to be making a better living then $25,000 a year."
Serial writing is practically dead. Short story rates have stayed constant in nominal terms for decades, soinflation has eaten them.
"Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Harry Potter lady, they all have done very well for themselves."
Those authors combined are less than 0.0001% of the professionally published novel writing population but I would be surprised if they took less than 5% of all US author royalty dollars. Very, very skewed distribution.
> There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).
This is just incredibly wrong? There are quite a few web serial authors making more than $5000/month on Patreon.
Well you're talking about publishers. But what author can afford to write for months on end, if they only sell 1k copies at £5 each? (I don't know what percentage of that actually reaches the author after publishing)
> 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.
> hopefully this takes off (there are writers in her genre making hundreds of thousands, including a couple writers she's friends with, maybe she'll become one herself, although I'd be happy if she can get it to the point where it's like $60k/year)
That might be more difficult than becoming a runaway success. I don't think the distribution of author earnings peaks in the middle.
From what I've heard, writer's income looks like a power-law distribution — you get a few lottery winners like Rowling, but most authors, even most of the ones you've heard of, earn so little from the writing that it's a second job.
Even ignoring AI, the maximum possible market for writers is also quite small: If every single person buys a new book every week, even if this money is evenly distributed so that every author gets £12,000 per year (fantastic if you're living where The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is set, not so much when you're living where the series author is based), that's a maximum of about 34,667 authors worldwide, which I think is about the number of agricultural workers in just famously small and not-agricultural Singapore[0].
Personally I am of the opinion that arts should be funded mainly by government grants, though not entirely from them as free markets do at least help align production with demand.
She's WAY off with her data, because she's only going classic publishing and ignoring the fact that the 'new and untested' serialization model has many successful practitioners and has for a long time. To get to NK Jemisin's 5k per month on Patreon, she went down past 22 writers on the graphtreon rank.
This part: There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).
That's just wrong. Pirateaba, Zogarth, Kosnik4, Shirtaloon, Wildbow, SenescentSoul and more make more than $5,000 a month - there are a bunch. There's a model here and it's working.
She didn't have success on Patreon because she didn't use a platform like webnovel, royalroad, her own website or something similar to release the free tier and link to the patreon like everyone successfully using patreon to pay for their writing does.
> It always surprises me to see professional fiction author with books ranked >1M on Amazon, as that implies that they're selling single-digit copies per month.
As a decidedly non-professional self-published writer, at present my two novels so far are around the 1M ranking on amazon.com and ~270k on amazon.co.uk... I'm above the single-digit copies per month for them, but not a whole lot, so can vouch that your numbers are pretty reasonable.
But with respect to being surprised, recent numbers from the UK - I wish I remembered the source, suggests the average income for authors from their writing is around ~13k/year, while average household income for writers was ~80k/year.
In other words, even most "professional" traditionally published authors are either doing it as a second job or has a partner in a high paid job. Writing is very much a "job" that for most people is a passion that may or may not even break even, and where only a tiny proportion of writers ever get to the point of making a living.
Part of that is building up back catalog, and building up an audience. I recall Charles Stross, to take someone who is living of it now, mentioned on Twitter a while back that it took him about a decade before he made 5k in a single year from his writing.
To take a more extreme example of this, Georges Simenon (Maigret etc.) at one point sold only ca. 8k copies per new novel from his French publisher. He was still wealthy, but because of the sheer number of novels (he wrote several hundred), number of translations and number of adaptations, but each new novel added just a trickle and mostly served to keep interest up.
A Norwegian author, Kjell Hallbing, mostly writing as Louis Masterson, sold 20 million books before he died, yet all but his last 6 or so sold in tiny numbers[1] But he wrote well over a hundred novels, and they were translated to more than 20 languages before he died (but not to English; the first English translation came years after he died, and they're not great).
[1] The last six represented a return of his most popular series after a multi-year hiatus - his publisher was mocked when they printed a first edition of 100k for the Norwegian market, but it sold out in no-time; ~30 years of accumulating an audience and building nostalgia among people who mostly will have read just a small portion of his books has an effect...
> Not to mention, an author would have to come out with one book a year to maintain that salary.
I wouldn't classify releasing one book per year as a full time job, at least not based upon on the data provided.
Turning a writing into a full time job means:
- Investing considerable time into promoting a book, in an effort to net more than 10,000 copies sold.
- Writing books that are heavily based upon research, in which case your book should be selling for more than $15 per copy.
- Publishing more than a book per year, most likely in forms other than books (unless you're an established author).
I'm not going to pretend that consistently writing 300 words of publication quality material per day is easy. Some of us are lucky if we can do as much one day in a year. On the other hand, it should not be easy. At the very least, an author is implicitly asking each reader to invest several hours of their life into the product of their labors. Authors need to be willing to put as much effort into writing as readers put into their livelihood.
> As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers.
She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with each chapter being released individually.
I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters. Or long delays. Episodic gaming was a big hype in the game industry for a while but it suffered really heavily from these issues and it's now pretty much defunct. A few companies like telltale made it work but even telltale is now out of business. The 'early access' model was also tried there but is failing for similar reasons: There is no incentive to ever finishing a game, in fact the incentive is to never finish it.
It also means you'd be spending $100 on a single book. In this model you pay $8-$9 a chapter, normally this is the price you'd pay for an entire book. I also wouldn't want to wait for the next chapter every time. I don't see this working out at all.
I don't know what the answer is. But I don't think this is it.
Edit: As many people have pointed out this model has been around much longer, even before the internet... I didn't know that and thanks for pointing it out! I still don't think it will work for me as a reader though. I view a book as a unit, and having reading sprints of a few hours per month will dilute the story for me.
I feel that this article might suffer from being a bit hyperfocused on specifically publishing novels, and therefore ignoring other forms of fiction.
> The real success story here is N. K. Jemisin who was earning $5,068/month publishing fiction on Patreon before she received a traditional publishing contract and went that route instead. But she is the only real case study we have.
In particular, this line rings false, considering Wildbow is currently publishing fiction at $6000/month and has been steadily growing for years. Taylor Fitzpatrick[1] is publishing fiction at a per-story rate, which is harder to calculate a strict number for, but could easily be up there. SenescentSoul[2] is making at least $5000/month, but doesn't show the actual number on their patreon. I could go on; although I've read Wildbow's work in the past, I've never heard of the other two, and just found them by searching "writing" on patreon.
Of course, none of these are strictly writing novels: Wildbow is a web serial author; SenescentSoul appears to be the same, and the other is a short story author. This is perhaps why the author (intentionally? unintentionally?) seems to have left such a large area of successful fiction writing out of their article.
However, not mentioning the huge success of self-published LitRPG, romance, web serials, etc. in an article that is centered around positing the question "Could the creator economy work for fiction authors?" seems like a rather large oversight to me. None of these people mentioned are making the prized $10k USD/month that the author holds so highly (although [2] might be), but they're all extremely successful even relative to the world of traditionally published novels, and they're far from the only examples.
I understand that this author is quite focused on novels specifically, but self-published novels from romance/litrpg authors can also be quite successful; this is much harder to find numbers for than patreon-based authors, of course, so this is only an anecdote.
I am not sure how this is true. Look at past serial writers and they all seem to be making a better living then $25,000 a year. Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Harry Potter lady, they all have done very well for themselves.
Even making only $25000 on one book a year, if you have written 5-10 books the past 5 to 10 years, you have to be making money off those books as well... Especially if her advance is $50,000 a book!
I have to agree that I have no real sympathy for this.
This is correct. I give $3/month on patreon for 2 chapters a week to this one author. $36/year isn't a lot, but it takes these authors' years to finish these books at this rate, and any author would kill for the amount of amount I sunk into 1 book. Multiply it out, and it becomes a livable wage if you can get enough people to support your patreon. I have a friend I personally know who did this. He's not even a good writer. He just found an underserved niche and made a livable wage $1from somebody at a time. His writing improved and I'd say it's passable, but no one would pay $10 at all once for any book he wrote. Apparently over a year is fine though.
> According to a 2018 Author’s Guild Study the median income of all published authors for all writing related activity was $6,080 in 2017, down from $10,500 in 2009; while the median income for all published authors based solely on book-related activities went from $3,900 to $3,100, down 21%. Roughly 25% of authors earned $0 in income in 2017.
I feel like the author is smuggling in an ill-defined notion of what makes someone a "writer". I've played the piano since I was three, but don't get paid for it: am I "a pianist who got paid $0"? I also took a one-off front-end engineering contract once: should I be shifting the statistics of what the median front-end engineer makes for every year that I don't work in frontend?
Fundamentally, the author is describing a fulfilling hobby that pays a partial income, and bemoaning the fact that it doesn't guarantee a full career. I'm not unsympathetic to where she's coming from; the reason I'm a longtime supporter of UBI is because I think that things like the ability to engage in arts and hobbies should be supported at a baseline for every citizen. But this article somehow casts writers as uniquely poorly off, ignoring all the people who would love to do any of a number of hobbies full-time but have career paths that are far more limited.
>also a significant chunk of it goes to the author.
Many (most?) books through publishers don't earn out their advance which is probably low 4 figures in most cases. In practice, writing books is either a hobby or it's a reputational side-gig for you day job whether self-employed or employed by some organization.
Many authors are their own publishers. Writing (and most arts) pays so little because society values their work so little. We seem to value a decent novel at about $5. An author already sees about $0.50-$1 of that. Respected, well reviewed, award winning (but not best selling) authors I know would still be hard up earning a living wage even if their income increased tenfold by them getting 100% of the proceeds.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect the writer-paid-monthly model is straight up more effective at pulling money from readers' pockets than the magazine subscription model.
I mean, I can pay £34 a year for a fortnightly magazine with quite a few writers doing quite a lot of investigative journalism, and even mailing a paper copy to me. I can pay £10 for a novel by a bestselling author who takes several years to write each novel.
But with the market positioning of "$10 per month" it turns out you can sell one person's writing for £86 ($120) per year.
Strange that the output of one full time human writer could be priced so differently, even when every example is award-winning and well known. Perhaps the future of writing is a return to Dickens-era serialisation, and the next J. K. Rowling will be posting two chapters a week on Patreon.
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