Does it pay?

[The Unseemly]

Dunno whether this was the correct place to post this sort of topic, but anyway...

As someone completely new to writing fantasy, I've just been curious - how's the finance's revolve around writing fantasy? The basic financial means of a person, the earning and spending, mainly that sort of thing, especially for the new writer.

Note: this post is not intent on barging into people's personal fiance's or get touchy about that sort of thing, simply to get a view of the big picture from an author's perspective.

 

[Chilari]

Not an expert here, but the impression I get from what others have said, and from my own predictions and calculations, is that unless your book becomes a hit you'll be lucky to be earning more than £30 a month from the first book. Fanbase increases as more books are published, and it seems that after a third book is out you can earn a decent income to supplement your day job. My calculations suggest that you can live in relative luxury on book income alone by the time 10 to 12 books have been published.

This is based upon book sales alone, and will vary from person to person depending on effort put into marketing, quality of writing, mass market appeal, book pricing, how many different formats are available (ebook, paperback etc) and so on. This does not include income from freelance writing, publishing short stories in pay market magazines, author events like book signings and talks, ghostwriting or other forms of writing income.

If you're in fantasy novels for the money, show yourself out while we try to get the laughter under control. There are ways to make money with writing, but it takes a long time to build an audience, not to mention the skills to write something worth publishing, if you're going fantasy novels only. Introducing different aspects of writing, like those mentioned above, changes the dynamic and the point at which you can start earning, but the number of people on this forum whose income is solely writing based can be counted on one hand.

For my part, I've been writing fantasy for about a decade, and have written an estimated 500,000 words of fiction in that time plus a roughly equal number of works of planning, thinking, outlining and so on. I have sold one short story which I was paid £1.46 for after Paypal took its cut and converted it from NZ$. I have published one other short story in Myths Inscribed for free. I have a blog where I post articles on fantasy and writing, and I have also written articles for the Mythic Scribes front page. My WIP is projected for completion (including rewriting and revising) in June 2013 and I plan on publishing it in late 2014 (giving me time to write another couple of novellas for pulblication shortly afterward, so I can have some publication momentum). The point at which I predict I will be able to quit my day job due to having sufficient income from writing alone to support myself and my fiance and any potential children we have by then is 2024; I expect to top my current day job income (which isn't very much at all) by 2020. That's what finances are like in fantasy. It's a long game.

Michael J Sullivan will be able to provide a better picture based upon actual data rather than predictions, if he is willing.

 

[Devor]

It depends a lot on how serious you are about writing and selling your book. I'm of the mind that if your book's any good, there's no reason you can't do well - if you put quality work into it. Still, "doing well" might still be a relatively small number, and it might only happen some time after your book's completed. It all depends.

If you go through a publisher, it may take years to get published, the typical advance is just a few thousand, and most books don't pay out their advances. If you go through self-publishing, it takes years to market your book, you'll have very few quality controls telling you where your mistakes are, and you're likely to find that selling takes a vastly different skill set than writing it.

Either way, there's a lot of hurdles to go through, a lot will depend on who you can get to review your book and how the reviews turn out, and your first book probably won't do well until your second, third or fourth books come out, so that each new book can help promote the others.

Which means, you're looking at a slow start to a career, and most will dump huge amounts of time and work into it, then give up when they realize they've done all that and are still in the very early stages, with a daunting amount of work before them.

But do that work, and don't give up, and the path is there if you have a quality book.

 

[TheokinsJ]

As a young author myself, I have to face up to the harsh reality that my book may not make the cut. Most authors don't earn enough to live off, due to the fact that not many people are willing to buy their books. Brandon sanderson did a really good lecture on this subject, and said that as a first time author, if you were selling more than 100 books a month, you were doing pretty well. As for rough estimates- these are by no means what authors may get, but from what I've heard, authors receive around between $1-$2 per book (again- I'm no expert, this is what I've heard and found in research).
I love writing and I want to write as a career but unless you make it big like JK Rolling or somehow get onto the New York times best seller list, you aren't going to have writing as a primary career. I'm thinking of studying architecture or something at university, and writing in my spare time, and if by the slim chance I get a reputation and my books sell well, then I might just quit my job and do writing full time.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter about the money, or how many copies you sell. Sure, everyone wants to write the next big thing, sell millions of copies and have their books adapted into movies... but that's not the focus of writing. The focus is doing what you love and telling a story, and wanting to express yourself and share that story with other people.

Hope this helped, good luck!

 

[Chilari]

from what I've heard, authors receive around between $1-$2 per book

If you self-publish, Amazon's rates for e-books are 35% of cover price under a certain threshold (I think it's either US$1.99 or $2.99) and 70% above that, up to another threshold that I don't remember because I never considered selling books at that rate.

I've been assuming I'd sell a novella at GB£1.99, a shortish novel at £2.99 and a longer novel at £3.99. Assuming 70% royalty (for the £1.99 one, it might be 35% but it depends on exchange rates and what the threshold is), that's about £1.39, £2.09 and £2.79 that I would get per sale, respectively.

So if you do manage to sell 100 books a month, at an average royalty of £2.09, that's £209 a month - not much at all. Enough for a few evenings out, cinema and meal out for two, each month. Not enough to live on in most of the western world.

Now let's say, for the sake of argument, that those 100 sales a month are based around 4 books, and that with each book published, monthly purchases increase at 20% for each book. So with 4 books, you get 25 sales each; with 5 books, you get 30 sales per book per month, and so on. In order to earn over £1500 a month, which is enough to live on, if you don't spend too much on nice things and have a good deal on your broadband, you'd need 10 books out. Now obviously this is based upon an arbitrary steady increase in fans per book, and uses simple formulae rather than factoring in a lot of different information, but the principle is sound - the more books you have out (of sufficient quality), the larger the fanbase will become as there's more to get a reader's teeth into and more to attract attention, not to mention sales momentum, fans buying more than one book and so on. It takes time and books to build a fanbase. You (probably) won't get rich on one book alone, it takes a lot of books to generate even a modest income.

 

[Steerpike]

From what I understand from those in the field, most fantasy writers do not make enough money to write as their full-time, only job. In fact, I believe that is true of most writers generally. This includes many writers whose books you may have seen on a shelf at Barnes & Noble over the years. It's like with any other art form - how many people do you know who are very good artists, or who are quite talented musicians, who have never been able to "make it."

A pretty well-known science fiction author and editor once told me that if you're going into writing, do it because you love it or because you can't stand not to write. Odds are against you making a living from it, even if you're a good writer. He said there are a hell of a lot easier, and more certain, ways to make money, and I agree with that.

 

[Devor]

Now obviously this is based upon an arbitrary steady increase in fans per book, and uses simple formulae rather than factoring in a lot of different information . . .

An S-Curve would fit the pattern a little better. Your first book won't do well, your second and third just a little better, then right around the fourth and fifth your work "takes off," then peaks and dwindles with books six and seven. The book numbers are arbitrary, and some will peak higher or lower, faster or slower than others, and new books still mean more revenue even if there aren't more fans.

But loosely speaking, at some point awareness of your work reaches a tipping point, where it has rapid growth (by comparison to before and after that point), and then comes a saturation point, where you've reached as many people as you're going to and they've made up their minds about your work already.

 

[Filk]

Terry Goodkind did well on his first novel. Terry Goodkind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Don't expect to do the same unless your manuscript is phenomenal and marketable!

 

[Zero Angel]

I've heard the average eBook makes about $100 per year. For my first novel that's been relatively accurate. For my shorts (priced at $0.99), it's about half that. I'm starting to have appreciable success with my nonfiction entries (appreciable by me at least!).

 

[The Unseemly]

Well, thank's everyone! It's been useful.

As of Chilari's, hmm, point: No, I don't care about the money as of such, however, in the modern society, money just happens to be something that you (unfortunately?) need, and I just like making silly things up, see how it goes.

Thankfully, I'm still relatively young (meh... still in High School) so there's still time, there's still time...
I'm not really certain as of how my own book will be received. I do remember posting the prologue some time back, and it didn't get a reply (sigh...:rolleyes2

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/showcase/7387-prologue-power.html

Ah well, only proves I've got just as much to learn as the next person...

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

My thoughts on this are simple:

If you commit ten hours a week to writing, revising, editing, etc, you're probably spending half that time making new words - 250 hours a year, or 125,000-250,000 new words of fiction per year. That's at least a book a year, maybe three or even four if you're writing shorter novels.

Guys, most people don't even do THAT much.

Most writers dabble a couple of hours a week, daydream a lot more than that, and then re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-revise their work until it's dry, stilted, and devoid of the passion that would have made people want to read the first version.

It is WAY easier to sit here on this board, or tweet, or blog, or build your Facebook presence, than it is to put your story down on paper/screen. So most "writers" don't write every day. They think about writing, but they don't write.

If you spend just one hour a day 350 days a year writing new words, you will be ahead of 99.99999999% of all other writers in your genre. And if you keep doing that, year after year, you WILL succeed. Because even if you suck when you start, you will get better. If you never give up, your stories will improve. If your stories improve, your sales will improve. If your sales improve of new works, and readers like them, they will read your older works too.

It's not something that happens overnight for most writers. It takes time. Effort. Work. Commitment. Discipline.

And if you can't do that, it's no big deal. You can have fun writing, produce a story every now and then, make some pizza money from the effort, and enjoy the process. There is nothing wrong with that. Most writers don't make a living from their writing.

If you want to be one of the few who do, you need to do the same thing they did: write. A lot. And keep doing it. The more you write, the better you will become, and the more work you will have out there for readers to find. NOTHING matters more than that, if you're shooting for a career.

 

[The Unseemly]

Well, thanks for that Kevin. A little inspiration never hurts.
I'm still in the process of deciding whether I want to accept option no.1 or option no.2 but hey, I've still got a bit of time. And, if I may to myself, I think I'm going to push my 8 eight hours per week to 10... hmm...

 

[Philip Overby]

Kevin makes a really good point. If you want to be a writer and have the potential to make money (that is any money, not just big money) you have to write constantly and not just talk about it. I've got in the habit of writing something everyday for at least an hour. The Word Warriors thread in the Writing Groups section here encourages just that. To write something everyday. Even if it's just one hour. It gets you in the habit at least.

Also, challenge yourself more often. Put the things you have completed out there in the market to get some feelers. Also like Kevin said, if you sit on your writing for too long and revise it into oblivion the less and less likely you are to send it out so it can actually have the potential to make money.

So yeah, forums and social networks and the like are great, but you have to balance and ration your time to determine what is important.

 

[Sparkie]

My thoughts on this are simple:

If you commit ten hours a week to writing, revising, editing, etc, you're probably spending half that time making new words - 250 hours a year, or 125,000-250,000 new words of fiction per year. That's at least a book a year, maybe three or even four if you're writing shorter novels.

Guys, most people don't even do THAT much.

Most writers dabble a couple of hours a week, daydream a lot more than that, and then re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-revise their work until it's dry, stilted, and devoid of the passion that would have made people want to read the first version.

It is WAY easier to sit here on this board, or tweet, or blog, or build your Facebook presence, than it is to put your story down on paper/screen. So most "writers" don't write every day. They think about writing, but they don't write.

If you spend just one hour a day 350 days a year writing new words, you will be ahead of 99.99999999% of all other writers in your genre. And if you keep doing that, year after year, you WILL succeed. Because even if you suck when you start, you will get better. If you never give up, your stories will improve. If your stories improve, your sales will improve. If your sales improve of new works, and readers like them, they will read your older works too.

It's not something that happens overnight for most writers. It takes time. Effort. Work. Commitment. Discipline.

And if you can't do that, it's no big deal. You can have fun writing, produce a story every now and then, make some pizza money from the effort, and enjoy the process. There is nothing wrong with that. Most writers don't make a living from their writing.

If you want to be one of the few who do, you need to do the same thing they did: write. A lot. And keep doing it. The more you write, the better you will become, and the more work you will have out there for readers to find. NOTHING matters more than that, if you're shooting for a career.

If Mythic Scribes had a Hall of Fame for posts, this would be a shoe-in. Thanks.

 

[MichaelSullivan]

As someone completely new to writing fantasy, I've just been curious - how's the finance's revolve around writing fantasy? The basic financial means of a person, the earning and spending, mainly that sort of thing, especially for the new writer.

I guess it depends on "compared to what?" In general writing novels or a living is a VERY tough business and only those that are really good, and work very hard, and produce regularly will ever earn well. That being said...genre fiction (like fantasy) does better than other forms of fiction (like literary) but isn't as lucrative as other genre's (like romance or erotica).

There are two main paths to publishing. In the old days, traditional was the only one that produced any significant income, but nowadays I think that for a "mid list" author (those neither at the top or the bottom) self-published people earn more than traditional.

Some basic statistics:

• It can take 1,000,000 words or 10,000 hours of writing to get "good enough to produce something publishable.
• Debut novel advance for fantasy is about $5,000
• It takes about 3 books released to earn decent money
• Most (80%) authors never "earn out" so the advance is all they will ever make
• An advance is usually spread over 3 or 4 payments and can span 1 - 2 years
• Reserves for return can hold back 60% of print sales for the first several reporting periods
• If you do earn a royalty it is paid twice a year.
• Self-publishers earn 70% on ebooks, traditional publsihers earns 17.5%
• Self-publsihers are made monthly - 60 days after sales
• I know more self-published authors who have quit their day jobs than traditionally published ones

For a peak inside income for traditional published authors - checkout this post

I'll write a companion article for self-publishing someday soon.

 

[DMHamilton]

Interesting stuff there Michael!

I find the publishing industry as a whole (trad and indie/self) really fascinating right now, as it seems to be in such a state of flux that it's hard to tell where things are going. I really wonder what the industry is going to look like in a couple of years time.

 

[MichaelSullivan]

I think it will be just as "in flux" in a couple of years as it is now. It's a good thing - lots of opportunities - but you have to stay on top of what's going on and be prepared to be flexible and adjust as needed.