> writing has to be among the worst ways to make money
It’s being a musician, actually. Most writers have the skills to maintain good side gigs of some kind or another. Musicians have to dedicate more of their time to musicianship, and often end up on the lower side of the pay scale. Sure, there will be a few with a profitable clientele paying for private lessons and tutoring, but that’s far more rare.
Most of the musicians I know make the bulk of their music-related income from private tutoring, its what funds the rest of it. They usually also will have a day job of some sort.
Recording and producing music, making music videos, etc is a massive cost center that may or may not break even. Usually not.
Playing live gigs is usually a money loser for most - venues often have extremely unfavourable terms (especially when starting out - a lot of places are pay to play, where you have to market and sell the tickets and at best get to keep what's left over after venue hire is covered).
The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
> The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
Agreed, but even then it’s bordering on low income. I saw an article a while back that claimed some musicians were making big money giving lessons online, but I never followed up on it. Apparently the really good ones could reach a larger pool of more potential students and double or triple their income.
The side gig used by many "writers" is to establish yourself as one of many mentors that offers guidance for get rich quick schemes such as the blacklist.
In reality, for most writing is a fading interest. It's a skill that anyone can really pick up if they wanted to but doing so is easy to learn and hard to master. You can go long periods of time writing and never improve.
Due to how the system as whole is designed most writers never improve. It's just how it works in the end because of the lack of a coherent structure or guidance system. Only if you belong to pre-established writing groups will you even really have a chance at learning it.
Sure there are several references openly available online, but all it can teach you is syntax. What you need to be a good writer is experience, training and mentoring which most people will never gain the opportunity of having. And even to those that do, it's a lifelong endeavor and one that requires complex knowledge in a variety of fields. It's one that most that pick it up will never be able to comprehend themselves or when they do, it's too late and trying to do so is fundamentally impossible for them due to their situation.
> The side gig used by many "writers" is to establish yourself as one of many mentors that offers guidance for get rich quick schemes such as the blacklist.
Wasn’t this Charlie Kaufman’s take, or was it Quentin Tarantino? I remember reading an interview with one of them who riffed on this complaint. For some reason, I think it was Kaufman, because I was obsessed with his process at the time.
There are more options than the past depending on genre niche and whether you're trying to entertain or write "literary works".
For various genres of the fantasy genre there's a fairly well trodden road nowadays of going from royalroad.com (with patreon) to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited.
royalroad.com lets people build massive followings and then translate them into patreon and other monetisation.
The audiences in the litrpg space right now are voracious and are fairly forgiving of typo's/grammar so long as they enjoy the story.
I'm not sure the same could've been said 10 or even 5 years ago. But again it's fairly genre specific.
Fascinating stuff. I had no idea people were reading (or producing) “literary RPG”. It’s like peeking into an alternative world:
> I… finally did it! And I also leveled as a [Demon Larva] thanks to the experience gained from leveling [Identification]! It was a total success!
> I could distribute my Stat Points and Skill Point later. For now, I focused on what was important. I glanced at the pebble closest to me and activated my [Identification]—
Yeah, it's a rapidly expanding an evolving genre with its own conventions and quite a bit of influence from Chinese webnovels and anime. Your average litrpg usually involves a System Apocalypse or an Isekai Protagonist.
System Apocalypse - God like Magical Computer "System" that tracks peoples stats/skills, recognises their feats and rewards them arrives on earth and integrates the world into "The System" usually in the form of a magical cli gui that appears in peoples vision as they go about their day.
Isekai - Average person going about their business dies in an accident and is reincarnated on another (magical) world with memories of their past life intact.
And I'd say that was a pretty good result overall.
For what may be more relatable to many here, publishing a technical (or tech-adjacent, i.e. more popular industry takes of various kinds) book may be career-enhancing, even significantly so, in various ways. But you still will likely just make a few $K in direct moneys.I did a book about open source history/business models/etc. and it's been good--even was asked to do a second edition/done book signings at event/etc.--but still only made single-digit thousands of dollars directly.
How Open Source Ate Software (from Apress)--think it's on Safari.
I've done book signings at Linux Foundation events and it's led to me doing a number of internal projects that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
I write, purely for my own pleasure, as as you say, it’s absolutely no way to make a living. I’ve hundreds of shorts, a few dozen novellas, and a couple of novels - with which I have precisely zero interest in doing anything. Writing them was the point.
This, unfortunately, has been the case practically for as long as literature has existed - very, very few authors make anything more than a pittance from their work in their lifetimes, and historically a majority of authors were the scions of wealthy or at least comfortably middle class families.
Now, thankfully, the publishing landscape is substantially more democratic, however the financial hurdles to being an author remain very real - it’s a side job, out of necessity, until you get published - and then it’s still probably a side job.
So, yes, it’s a labour of love. I don’t think anyone goes into writing to make bank, but rather because they have an insatiable urge to write, or to convey an idea, or whatever it may be - but financial success doesn’t weigh into it - in fact, for most, it’s an expensive hobby, insofar as it’s rather time consuming. Me, I just write whilst babysitting my telescope through the nights. Keeps the fingers warm.
Genre fiction like S/F has different rules. In S/F you're taught to write in a way that will get you published, and paid for your work. I posted this a couple weeks ago, it's a quote from an interview with Ted Chiang:
TC: I think the reaction varies, because science fiction is a more commercial genre. There are a lot more people in science fiction whose goal is to make a living from writing fiction by publishing one or more novels a year. And people who enter science fiction generally receive more messaging about fiction writing as a sole source of income than, say, people entering mainstream fiction. The messaging there is different: get an MFA, teach; it’s understood that your teaching position supports your career as a writer. For writers entering science fiction, that’s not really a thing yet. We’re maybe getting there, but the messaging they receive is mostly: Be very prolific.
So basically most people don't write S/F "just for fun", and I'm pretty sure that was never the case and all the greats and less-well-known greats of the genre were all professional writers.
I’m not sure if that’s so, or if it’s selection bias at work - the SF&F writers you’ve heard of, whose stories actual and literary you know, are the ones who plugged away at it to make a living. What TC says is true - and it has been so for a long while. So many of the greats ground their way up through the pulps - I collected the back catalogue of Analog under its various guises as I found it rather fascinating to see authors develop chronologically — you can practically see them honing their formulae in real time.
I write SF&F for shits and giggles, as I don’t like the idea of writing things to be commercially successful, having spent much of my existence focussed on commercial success elsewhere. Rather, I write for the catharsis and the vicarious experience of crafting a world and a narrative. I don’t know that I’m alone in that, but then again, I don’t know that I’m not - but I can’t believe myself to be particularly unusual.
>writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say
Depends. I left my high paying job and had mostly burned through my savings until selling programming ebooks saved me. Not saying that writing was the best option, but it was the first that started paying my bills consistently. Of course, the fact that my monthly expenses was around $150 helped a lot. I've now written 12 books and the past two years has brought my savings back to a comfortable level.
I've met people who've worked at these. They pay more than 25 dollars. Around a couple hundred. If you don't live in a third world country you can't afford this lifestyle, which leads to the poor quality you see due to lack of English proficiency.
Nowadays, the content farm has become websites like Webcomics and Webnovels which offer a variety of tools for authors to be able to make a living. In reality like the pre-existing mangaka business, you will never be able to have a stable amount of money each year as you struggle to keep afloat you cannot improve or get better. The game has been rigged by the publishers since the 80s. And only the very elite are given the opportunity to succeed in the correct social circles. For which most people will never be given the opportunity to even partake in. You can apply for workshops and the naught but if you aren't from the right family or friends with the right people your chances are close to none. It's the same in the music industry and pervades everywhere even in technology.
I'd be curious if short fiction writing was more lucrative several decades ago when literary magazines were a larger force. Was it more possible to survive as an independent writer before, or have the economics of writing always been so terrible?
Short stories used to be the more lucrative form. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald made most of their income from selling short stories to magazines like Collier's or Esquire, not novels.
Alexandre Dumas serial published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - being paid by the word - which is why they're so long - but also extra impressive how good they turned out.
The stories were not finished while the beginnings were being published.
That's right, I was forgetting serialized novels. They were big, too.
That method of Dumas was how Dostoevsky worked, at least some of the time--not knowing exactly what he was doing in a novel until after its first chapters had already appeared in a magazine. Presumably his gambling debts had something to do with this habit of working, although he supposedly had a case of what they call "hypergraphia," and could produce an incredibly amount of writing in a short amount of time.
In recent years this has changed to screenplays and sites like the blacklist, where every unexperienced writer posts a script for their chance at the megamillions. The reality is that for the most part the site is rigged in favour of those already in the industry and rating are chosen by those with the largest wallets.
You could in the past have made a career writing exclusively short fiction. Over time, however, short fiction became understood as a stepping stone towards novel writing where the "real money" was. However I would never call writing short fiction lucrative in any sense, not even if you're Ted Chiang.
"[Arthur Conan Doyle's] first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, which gave Doyle £25 (equivalent to £2,900 in 2019) in exchange for all rights to the story."
Back in the pulp era it was common for authors to churn out books under multiple names. There’s definitely a bit of that (including the questionable quality) in the self-publishing market but it’s much less visible.
Rent as a percentage of income is remarkably steady historically because it’s always as high as the market will bear. That’s the rationale behind Georgist Land Value Taxes. You can pay it to the government and the landowner or the landowner, the amount of rent will be the same. Food has gotten cheaper as well as tastier and higher quality over time. The proportion of income spent on food has been dropping for well over 100 years.
This is a major factor. Also, day jobs were a lot more chill. Writers still complained about having to go to an office job, but you could use the copious downtime on some of the work. You wouldn't want to do hardcore creative first-draft writing at your office job, but you could edit for typos and do background reading.
These days, so many fascistic surveillance technologies have been deployed to squeeze the downtime out of existence for most jobs. You could have a 1950s day job (well, if you were middle class) and be a writer, but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.
> but you can't really have a 2020s day job and be a writer, because jobs are so much more stressful.
This is disproven by the large majority of authors having a day job. Most people can’t have a day job and be a writer but the sentence is just as true as “Most people can’t be a writer.”
Writing is a solid way to make money in specific genres, however, especially if one is self-published. A business-saavy writer can make a good amount of money writing romance (which makes more money than most other genres combined) or self-help.
My wife is heading down that path right now. There are people she collabs with that made $200k in their first year of writing romance novels (but they wrote like, six books in a year. You need to churn them out quick to make that much money, usually in series of books, not one-offs).
My wife is in marketing for her day job and has been using that knowledge to help target and generate interest in her books, and it seems to be paying off, as her preorders are eclipsing quite a few established authors in the groups she's in, and this is her first book.
When she had half the preorders she does now, a friend was saying she could probably expect around $2k in sales in her first month, judging by the preorder numbers, so by the time it releases she might be seeing 2-3x or even more than that.
> (but they wrote like, six books in a year. You need to churn them out quick to make that much money, usually in series of books, not one-offs).
It helps that romance novels tend to be way on the short side. Self-published can be even shorter than the traditionally published stuff—a lot of those authors seem to get away with charging $4+ for maybe 70 pages, for each entry in their tens-of-books-long series. Much clearer path to some reasonable return than writing 350+ page thrillers or big ol' fantasy doorstops.
Well, my wife's first book is 90k words, so, right around the size of those thrillers (it almost was going to be 120k+ words, but it started getting too tight to the time she had booked for an editor for her liking).
But you're still not wrong, in general (although 70 pages might be a bit on the low side, on average). At least her next project is going to be a novella for an anthology at around 30k words. But her next novel will probably be similar to her first. She's going to try to release 3-4 her first year, and a couple novellas, while working a full time job. Of course because of that she's not doing too much besides work, write, market, stress, and sleep right now.
Right—sorry, I guess I should have mentioned that of course there are larger entries in that genre. It's more that what's considered a salable, stand-alone work has a distribution that skews far lower than in a lot of other genres, which you can see by looking at the shelves in used book stores (and self-publishing seems to have pushed that range even lower). Didn't intend it as a judgement of the genre, to be clear, and I hope it didn't come across that way, just an observation—in fact, as noted, I think that's part of why it's practically the only genre someone can enter with a hope of maybe making some real money, these days, beyond the lottery-odds of the other genres. Even sci-fi and fantasy, which are doing much better than lit-fic and others, aren't nearly as favorable to new authors who want to make anything resembling a living at it.
Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they separated groups and in each group different bands would come to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I could find it, it was quite a time ago.
> Yeah, I remember a study they did with music where they separated groups and in each group different bands would come to dominate based on luck (whoever got momentum first). Wish I could find it, it was quite a time ago.
I’m not familiar with that study, and I try to keep up with the literature. You might be very interested to read about the historical rise of the grunge genre as an example of the kind of luck you are talking about. There was definitely a magical kind of serendipity at work between all the different musicians and bands who were up and coming at the time.
Some of the one on one interviews with the key players are amazing. If they didn’t pick up a certain phone call or move to a specific city or play music with this one person, entire careers would never have been made.
Like all the "jobs" that should be done by people who don't need money to sustain themselves so kids of rich parents or self made people after they hit it big.
But it goes with all content creators - sports - academia, getting PHD or Professor title.
Funny thing is that a lot of people try to become boxers or writers, football players as it seems easy to "make it" but I don't know if there is "car sports" rags to riches stories, to do car sports one has to be quite on the rich side anyway.
But still to go path of Mike Tyson you still have to be .5% talent and work ethic and for quite some time getting scraps as payments.
It’s being a musician, actually. Most writers have the skills to maintain good side gigs of some kind or another. Musicians have to dedicate more of their time to musicianship, and often end up on the lower side of the pay scale. Sure, there will be a few with a profitable clientele paying for private lessons and tutoring, but that’s far more rare.