[cableshaft]

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.

[corrral]

> (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.

[cableshaft]

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.

[corrral]

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.