"The one where writing books is not really a good idea". Griffin cites 1000 true fans [0], where for $100k target income, you want 1K fans at $10 month. For me the consumer, that's $100/year per author, times I don't know how many subscriptions I'd budget. It's weird to think that the creative marketplace runs on patronage, but I suppose that's true going back at least to the Renaissance. She's opting to serialize her fiction on substack, toward the possibility of greater scale at lower unit cost.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
* Lamenting that 'publishing is a business' or 'ROI is everything to them' inevitably sounds whiny. Authors seem to be very aware (probably even overestimating in order to preserve ego) that the "I" part is very important. As much as she seems desperate for an advance, she obviously knows that large advance = large promotion budget & wants both.
* Her books seem to have failed to make anyone money. It's not that everyone but the author got paid. She got a slice of a small pie.
* Authors get paid so little because of how badly they want to be writers. This is actually evidence of supply-demand at work in job markets, something that is hard to come by. Without knowing any numbers, one might predict that garbage collectors get paid more than writers, professors, etc. No one want to collect garbage & lot of people wants to write. Supply of writers is high, price is low.
* Apart from the financial consequences, I imagine it would be very frustrating for a writer to live in this world of gatekeepers where you need permission all the time.
* I think this frustration is what makes writers sound whiny. Since they are constantly trying to get over the gatekeeper barrier, it seems like this is what is standing between them & crazy success. This lets them avoid the sobering ratio: # of books successful per year/ # of books written per year.
* Writers need to play a different game. Seth Godin/ Tim Ferris/ 1000 True Fans/ Trent Reznor/ etc. inspired (depending on taste) direct promotion. Also, try to make money indirectly. The Author cites how being a published author is already being a mini-celebrity. It might be possible to capitalise on this some way that isn't just selling books.
It doesn't necessarily mean that your job becomes marketing instead of art, but even just a bit of connecting with your fans can make a huge difference.
And this is more focused on creative fields, because they have been so widely 'disrupted' by technology. I can download a book from a torrent site, but I can't download a programmer's time at working on a problem (though I could of course download OSS code, but that's a whole other thing).
So books used to make a lot of money (for very few people), now they don't make as much money, but the positive thing is that more people can get in on the action, because the costs of distribution are so much lower. And in this author's case, she's basically ranting about how fans of her books aren't paying her, when she could spend that energy much more effectively by somehow connecting with and cultivating that fanbase. If they like her stuff, they'll probably pay her for something, if not a physical book.
> [...] 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 was the dollar figures that didn't make sense to me. Sure, if you can sell your fiction book for $100 on an installment plan, that brings in a lot more money per fan than a $10 book sold in one shot does. But those two scenarios seem rather different not so much because one is episodic but because one is getting 10x the dollars for the same final product.
> 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.
I'm not too sympathetic, on account of the following:
- Her figure of $24K is per book, and then she says (paraphrased) "well, if I were to write one book like this a year." Most authors producing mass-market paperbacks write somewhat more than one per year. The author in question appears to write several per year (looking at the Amazon listings) which probably gross a fairly similar amount. So, what's the meaning of this "if I were to write one" business?
- She expects to see the rest of her advance and some non-negligible amount of money coming in in the future from royalties and other rights, so it's not really fair to say that her "income" from this book is $25,000. As a professional author, she would be earning that $25,000 this year and also earning money from prior sales this year, and then she would be earning more from this book later.
- Finally, here's the Amazon synopsis:
Immortal Darkyn Lord Valentin Jaus and landscape artist Liling Harper are two lost souls. Brought together by fate, bound together by passion, Valentin and Liling find solace in each other's arms. But the ties that bind them are deeper—and more dangerous—than either of them can possibly imagine...
No offense to struggling vampire romance novel writers, but why is it important that people are able to earn a great living writing books like this? I don't think it's a big loss to society if people aren't getting rich at this particular trade. When authors who are really advancing the art can't make a good living, then let me know.*
* No, this isn't totally subjective. People will be reading Pynchon 30 years from now, but they won't be reading Lynn Viehl.
It certainly is possible revenue source--once you have a big enough fanbase to support it. Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero.
It is not, in the general case, very viable. Which is why nobody takes it very seriously as a good path for all, or even most, writers. Because they have to eat, too.
I disagree, it’s not all they have. And to back that up, I give you Patreon. One author I follow has over 1,500 patrons, most giving upwards of $3 a month.
Is this viable for all authors? Perhaps not, but between the new self-publishing market, Patreon, and pay-by-what’s-read models like KU, there’s more options than the shitty ebook racket that the publishers have created.
Would your 3000 rabid fans be willing to sponsor you at $1/m in exchange for some kind of precious items? Like a personal thank you note and access to all your books in ebook format the minute they're done?
That'd net you $3000/m, which is not a huge amount, but a start. And maybe you can get more than $3000, by asking for a floating donation - i.e. set the minimum to $1/m but let them specify an amount (some people would possibly be willing to donate up to $10 or even rarely $50/m to you if they really are rabid fans?)... or by increasing your fan base... If you can reach new markets and get, say, 10'000 rabid fans instead, or if you can convince people who are not quite rabid fans to sponsor you anyway, you could make a very comfortable revenue from this subscription model.
Ultimately, you are a "business" whose product is a flow of cool new books. The current model suggests that people pay for book that you've already written, but perhaps you need to turn it on its head and ask people to pay for the books that you're going to write. This would basically be a kind of micro-patronage.
"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.
> 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.
This is almost exactly what a subgenre called LitRPG does. The authors usually run a Patreon where patrons can read chapters in advance. If you look at this [0], there are 4345 patrons and the lowest tier is $1.00, giving a lower bound of $52k per year. Although it's likely to be far more higher than that, if you look at the patron->dollars ratio here [1]. In general, the model seems to function very well in some specific scenarios.
> This doesn't apply to webnovels. There are people there making over $1000 a month (some over $15 000) publishing completely free webnovels.
I don't consider authors of web novels or serials with Patreons like Wild bow or ErraticErrata to be representative of the broader population of authors on places such as Royal Road. I'd assume the total income distribution of web novel authors to be fairly top heavy.
There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3).
A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access...
Most of what I read is serial fiction, and it has been for years. The most popular site these days is Royal Road, with authors offering a Patreon subscription for early access to chapters. It has the same lopsided power law distribution of funding as any platform for paying artists, but there are plenty of authors making a living of it.
It's strange to see people speculating about whether this is possible, since it's already here.
[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
reply