How much can you realistically make e-publishing?

I did. I couldn't find any. That's why I'm asking again.

If your goal is to make money from self-publishing and you currently write poetry, you should absolutely stop doing that and start writing genre romance with sexy vampires. At that point your job is to suck it up and get good at the stuff that shifts units.

I mean, if sweet romance was literally the only genre that sold, and you wanted to make money off writing stories, would you still write thrillers?

 

And if you did that, in a world where sweet romance was the only thing that sold, you would never turn a profit, because in this scenario there is no market to be generated. Even in the real world where realistically there is a market for virtually anything, it might just be vanishingly small - creating a market where none exists is really hard.

Look, my whole point with this (just as it was the last time we had this discussion) is that if you're going into self-publishing, you can't afford to assume what you want to write is going to sell. If you want to make money from your writing, you need to enjoy writing rather than just enjoy writing your story, and be prepared to get good at whatever it is the market wants to buy.

And this is possible. My heart isn't really in writing adverts, but I practised and I got fucking good at it and now I get paid quite a lot for doing so. Writing in any genre is a skill. It can be learned, if you want to.

For fiction, I think we've also got our own example here in Bayview - she's said before that if she stopped being paid for writing, she'd stop doing it. Maybe I'm reading her wrong, but it doesn't sound like what she writes is really her passion. But she's evidently good enough at it to have been published and make some decent money off it.

As you've noted, while those numbers are interesting, none of them really relate to:

I'd find that line more believable if it was 'often self-pub authors who make money start to make money around book 3 of a series' - but that's a very different thing.

 

I make about $50 an hour for writing, more or less.

That's more than I'd make from doing anything else that I enjoy more than writing, if that makes sense.

I make more than that at my day job, but I enjoy my day job less.

Everything's relative.

In terms of writing to the market, I think writers do well to keep their goals in mind. If a writer's primary goal is to make money, I think that writer should absolutely write with the market in mind. I don't honestly think there's much connection between writing "with passion" and writing well. I've seen too many incredibly passionate writers producing total crap!

If a writer's primary goal is self-expression or whatever else that isn't making money, then the market is less important, obviously.

 

Sorry if repetitive here, didn't read the whole long thread. I'm going with "self-publishing" in my reply, since "e- publishing" can be done by anyone from an individual to a giant publisher so really doesn't make much sense to answer imo.

I make a steady $100-200 a month from my self-published titles under two names, about ten books, mostly short nonfiction. I have no idea how it translates "per hour" though.

So, that's been with no thought of what sells but just writing whatever I feel like writing. I see no logical reason why that income trickle won't grow into an income stream with more titles out - and with paying at least some attention to what sells well, which is one of my goals for 2018.

 

That's "gross" and, yes, certainly far less than I'd make at any day job.

I do know of a few authors who make a decent living at it, even if they are only self-published or published by small presses. But they are both very prolific (along the lines of a book per month or per every other month) and write in popular genres.

ETA: Then again, I haven't been writing anything like a steady work week and once it's out there, it's passive income. So I guess I really have no idea how to calculate it...

 

You think someone could dole out chapters for .99 cents a whack to build the first audience?

 

.99 sounds much too high for a self-published chapter.

Laurie King, traditionally published and a NYT-bestselling author, only charges $1.99 for The Marriage of Mary Russell, a fairly long short story (42 pages in...uh...what's the larger paperback size?) that depicts a critical and previously missing part of the Russel/Holmes timeline.

 

I struggle to see myself buying a single chapter. I'd happily buy a self-contained short story for that amount, if I liked the sound of it, but I don't like the idea of buying only a bit of a story. That'd be just as true whether it was $0.99, $1.99 or $0.20.

If you're after building an audience and you're not interested in being traditionally published, you'd probably have more success giving the first few chapters away for free. Put them on a blog, maybe make a PDF people can download. I'd imagine that'd give you a larger audience and make you more sales of the full book in the long run. If you're going to sell something as a teaser, a short story (or set of them) with the same characters or just set in the same universe could work.

 

Yes, if you have a webcam and a youtube channel Then you can write a book about it: "How I made millions while eating tacos, spinning around in my office chair and taking selfies". The bestseller list awaits you

If you can write that well, you'll be able to sell your book to a publisher anyway, so that sort of defies the purpose. On the other hand, I know of a writer who charges 10 bucks a pop for sending out a short story each month and no, they are not a household name. You need to somehow establish an audience first, which means that you need to be good at something. You need your own gimmick. After that you can even go to sites like Patreon and ask for people to send you money for your everyday expenses while you think of the Next Best Thing to write. There's this guy who just sold 20 000 copies of his new book within the gaming community he was part of. Much better than publishing. All those people did something well and it paid. You just need to find out what you can do well. You can't just dole out "something" in chapter form

 

Bloody hell, something on this subject I actually agree with Moose on

Self-publishing isn't for the stuff you can't sell to a trad publisher. There's plenty of good reasons for doing it.

 

Self-publishing is the way of the future, and traditional publishing is beginning to be on its way out. Thanks to how prominent e-books are becoming, there's less of a reason than ever to rely on a traditional publisher to print your books for you. You don't need them for that anymore; or at least not for too many more years.

The biggest thing publishers are going to provide for you are marketing help and editing. Those are still two big things you don't get when you self-publish, but "self-publishing" your indie video game on Steam and other similar platforms has become the way of the future for many game developers. If you're able to market yourself correctly and your manuscript is in a good state, what do you need a publishing house for?

Of course, publishers (both reputable houses and scummy, predatory ones) know this, so they're trying really hard to convince people that publishing e-books is hard and you need a publisher's help to understand the vast complexities of copyrighting (the most hilarious claim publishers make). Don't fall victim to the lie that you need a publisher to copyright your book for you. I've seen big name publishers trying to tell people this.

 

The distinction between self and traditional publishing isn't about putting ink on paper.

And what's your evidence that traditional publishing is "on its way out"? Cites, please.

Games are not the same as books. Lots of bands also produce their own CDs; that's equally irrelevant.

 

Erh, this is like the largest reason publishing houses exist. Of course you can pay a publishing house/self-publisher to print off books for you, but the purpose of traditional publishing was that a publishing house likes your product so much that they print it on their dime instead of you being the one who pays for it. The distinction is primarily that a publishing house will print your work for free...

There's no hard facts to necessarily cite at the moment. Traditional publishing will never die, obviously, just like video game publishers will never die even in the face of indie publishers, or how music publishers will never die even though you can distribute music online. But they're losing power. You don't need them anymore to make your work available (just a decade ago or so, if you wanted your book to be distributed and read, then it had to be physically printed out, there was no "kindle reader e-book era"), so the things a traditional publisher offers is getting your product created physically and helping you with marketing and making sure the product is well edited. Never before have you not needed publishers for your book as much as today.

They are exactly the same thing as books. I don't know what you're talking about. They are two products that you no longer need physical copies to be created for because we have the internet and electronic devices capable of not needing a physical video game or a physical book. While it's true that there's no "Steam for e-books" platform yet (Amazon sort of counts but it's not quite the same thing), an indie video game and a self-published e-book are the same thing (in terms of the type of product they both are, of course).

 

The point I'm trying to make is that you don't need anyone to print books for you anymore. You can distribute it as an e-book.

I mean that you're not directly paying for the publisher to create the books. Most self-publishers and vanity publishers have you paying upfront for produced books.

 

The obvious answer here is 'because you don't want the hassle of self-publishing your book'. I quite enjoyed the process myself, but I can see it being attractive to have someone else do all that for you and just send you a cheque every few months.

TBH I think indie game producers are a fairly close analogy to indie publishers. Both now have the ability to get their content into the world in a way they didn't have before, both have a few people doing well at it and a lot more people not getting a return on the money they put into it. I imagine the same is true with musicians attempting to go label-free.

 

@TheRealStegblob- No offense, but you sound really unknowledgeable about both self-publishing and trade publishing. Are you actually published, either way?

 

Excuse me, lol? Do you want to provide any reasoning for that claim, or...?

But since you asked. No, I am not traditionally published. I was close to going down that route (my manuscript was picked up by an agent and we were talking about selling it to a publisher, but in the end I actually decided to not do it. I didn't want sell away my rights to the IP and all that, and I didn't want to go through a lot of the hoops a publisher was expecting of me ((frequent and inoffensive presence on social media, stuff like that)).)

I am part of an indie development team that makes video games. We have one product released on Steam at the moment and are currently working on our second product (after scrapping like three concepts over the course of the last two years, it's been a weird road). I am also currently producing my own side-project video game that is a choose your own adventure interactive novel game.

If you want to back up why you think I'm unknowledgeable about this sort of stuff, please do so.

 

I do not know much about how successful most self-published writers tend to be (I'd imagine many of them fail, just because there's so many more people able to complete and e-publish their manuscripts as opposed to how much more work it is to make an actual game and get it on Steam or sell it yourself or whatever. So there's an endless supply of people tossing up a badly written first novel on Amazon and then posting "hey guys buy my book plz lol" on FaceBook) but it's not hard to make decent money indie publishing your game on Steam. In fact, Steam is so generous with how they market you that it's almost impossible to lose money as long as your game isn't shit and you don't actually mismanage or something. Lots of people make decent livings literally pumping out dinky 1.99 games they spam Steam with.