The costs and benefits of publishing your own books

[CupofJoe]

From the BBC News Website

The costs and benefits of publishing your own books

This is the second article on a week about the perils or not of being a writer... Are they trying to tell us something?

First article here...
Typical writer 'earns £11,000 a year', research reveals

 

[wordwalker]

Figures? I'll see your BBC and raise you a Hugh Howey: Media Bias Against Self-Publishing | Hugh Howey

 

[skip.knox]

Even more than however much money per year, the really relevant figure is how much a person typically earns over the course of a career. As with other professional arts, just because you made a bucket of money this year doesn't mean you'll make that much next year. Between the market and the muse, it's unlikely it will be the same amount, one year to the next. Again as with other artistic professions, if you start making money you'd better have a solid long-term financial plan.

I'd really like to see a comparison of *career* figures (say, over the course of 40 years) with career figures in other lines of work. If I can point to other arts one more time, the age-old advice holds: if you're doing it for the money, you'd should be doing something else. If the prospective writer can be frightened off by reason, he should be.

 

[acapes]

I'd really like to see a comparison of *career* figures (say, over the course of 40 years) with career figures in other lines of work.

Me too, that'd be very interesting. I think the default thinking about that writing income is that it will naturally increase year after year, as you get 'better' and 'more work out there' but there the must be so many writers who have dips and plateaus - and surely that's the norm?

I wonder if say, Hugh has had an evening out of income after a few years of rising? I bet it's still steady of course - but over 40 years as you say, would be interesting.

 

[ThinkerX]

As a decades long fantasy and SF reader, I know of quite a few authors who had fairly popular series or books ages ago with few or no publishing credits since then.

FM Busby wrote a multi volume SF series featuring tyranny and relativistic space travel, with the last volume appearing something like fifteen years ago. Nada since then.

Ann Logston spent much of the 90's writing a fantasy series featuring elves and humans which sold well. These days all I could find is a bare bones website.

And they have a lot of company.

 

[skip.knox]

I think of someone like Tanith Lee. Or Thomas Burnett Swann. And those are well-known authors; I think more of those who got two or three novels published and thought "here we go" only to find things trailing away. I was astonished to discover that of all of T.H. White's books, only the Sword in the Stone is still being published. I know he wrote for magazines as a way to get steady income, and he was not alone in that for mid-century authors.

 

[acapes]

Martin Middleton here in Oz wrote a couple of good series in the 90s too and not sure what happened, whether he went for another career or sales weren't enough for the publisher, but I enjoyed his books.