Does anybody make money by writing books anymore

In My Humble Opinion
1

Curious question

Does anyone make any money by writing and publishing a book anymore

Or with today’s soundbite and short attention span (myself included) is publishing a book not really feasible unless you are a well known author

Are they more likely to watch a streaming video rather than a book.

Of course, the problem with putting together a video is that once it gets on the web, it will be posted and pirated endlessly and it would be difficult to make much income off of it.

Even the videos posted on clips for sale don’t make that much money from the people who have tried to publish short videos for money.

The reason I ask this is that I am currently semi retired and am thinking of writing a book on my experiences over the past 25 years but although they are interesting to me, I don’t see any potential for it to make much income.

I have been considered writing this since a meeting and talked to a retired nasa engineer who wrote a couple of books on his experience at nasa.

He did tell me that he sold more books online than physical copies but he said the hardest part was getting the attention of a publisher for his books.

Of coursr, there is Jeff bezo’S amazon which I believe will allow one to publish a book online before attempting a printed version.

Thanks for any responses and advice

2

Yes you can make money writing books. My wife does. Not hundreds of thousands of bucks, but she has over a dozen books published - none self-published - and some even make royalties, while others were one time payments. Most are for junior high age kids, non-fiction, but she has done some textbooks and is finishing up an adult book on vaccines.

People ask her to write them. She even turns stuff down.

If you self-publish your book, don’t expect it to make any money. There are a very few such books that make some, and a long tail that sell in the dozens. I was in a writing group with a guy who wrote a memoir. He was an excellent marketer, and even got on the radio to promote it. It still didn’t sell any copies.

If you just want to write about your experiences, for friends and relatives say, just e-publish it and don’t worry that it doesn’t sell. If you want to try to make money, the first thing to do is to write a chunk, and then find a writing group or reputable editor who will look over your book. (The editor will want money - it is worth it.) You’ll get lots and lots of feedback. Some painful. If you don’t want to listen, e-publish. If you do then revise the sections you’ve written and write the rest using what you’ve learned.
Then find an agent. Non-fiction usually gets sent as an outline and a few chapters (depending on the agent) but if you have no published samples and no track record you might want to have it finished first. If you don’t find an agent, e-publish. If you do the agent will try to find a publisher.

And first - do you have an elevator pitch? That is, a one or two sentence reason why the person in the street will be interested in reading your book.

Good elevator pitch: My book recounts my life as lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones and famous druggie.

Bad elevator pitch: My book talks about all the fascinating things that happened to me as a Chartered Public Accountant.

You get the picture.

3

JK Rowling isn’t doing too bad.

Give that her books are mostly aimed at teenagers and young adults, who stereotypically have the worst attention spans, I wouldn’t worry too much. Assuming that you’re actually a good writer, of course.

4

Thanks

That is great advice. As you say people are more interested in wild and crazy stories of a rock star than being a chartered
accountant

My stories and experiences would be slightly more interesting than a chartered accountant but nothing like a rock star.

As mentioned, it would probably sell in the range of dozens (if I was lucky)

And the idea of getting an editor to look over it is excellent as I am an okay writer but not outstanding.

Of course, to write a book takes a lot longer than one would think. Just reading what it would take to e publish, tells me that it may take 10x longer than what I anticipate it would take.

Good point on Jk Rowling but she is the exception to the rule and her topics of wizards and magic has a certain fantasy appeal.

What is stopping me right now is that I see all the effort in putting together a book only to sell say a few dozen copies at best. Many years ago, I spent the majority of the summer writing the autobiography of my grandfather (which sold about a dozen copies) mostly to friends and relatives.

Of course, I always could ramp up the stories to make it more interesting but even still, it would not be as interesting as a celebrity tell all book.

On a secondary pojnt, do books on technical matters engineering principles still sell or has Wikipedia taken over most of that market.

Also, I did work for a fortune 500 company, (and this heading towards legal advice) but when writing a book about the operations of a large company, it is likely that I will be critical of certain aspects of the operations

The advise I have been given before on this is that honest criticism is not going to get into too much trouble but1 outright slander will.

Thanks for the responses

5

Certainly people make money writing books. I know quite a few people who write full time. Few are household names, but they manage to make a living from writing (I counted 20 Facebook friends, and that was only a small portion of my list). There are also many who make money doing it, but not enough to write full time. Nearly all of them write science fiction/fantasy; most sell to mainstream commercial publishers, though there are a few small press authors.

None use self-publishing except for a book or two as a sideline.

It is extremely difficult to sell a book to a commercial publisher; lots of competition for a small number of slots. However, once you do sell, you will make money. Self-publishing means you will get a book to point to, but you’re not likely to make anything.*

It’s especially difficult to make any money writing memoirs. The question you need to answer is “How many times have I paid money for a book of this nature?” If the answer is “none,” assume that the answer for other people is also "none. "

Now, if you want to write something up and self-publish it, you can go right ahead. It could be an interesting exercise and putting the information down might be good for you. The good thing these days is that the startup costs to self publish are relatively small. But I wouldn’t expect it to sell to anyone outside your immediate friends and family.

Technical books have a better chance, but they’d have to be about something specialized that is not covered anywhere else.

As for saying bad things about a company, legally your in the clear if you can back up what you say. The truth is an absolute defense against libel (not slander for the written word). Further, libel requires a false statement of fact; opinions are not libelous.** If you’re writing critically about things that actually happened, libel is not a concern.

*The one exception is a nonfiction book on a specialized subject. My brother has made some money self-publishing a book on the history of Harmony Guitars, which fits that profile perfectly. But a work of fiction does not.

**Not that a company couldn’t file a libel suit that you couldn’t afford to defend, even if you won it.

6

Thanks

I plan to go ahead and write my memoirs and as I say if I end up selling more than a dozen books I would be surprised.

Yes, you are right in that I have not ever bought many books of anyone else but I have the time so I am going to try this as it is easy to self publish and it keeps me from surfing the Internet all day.

7

Publishing went the way of Hollywood a couple of decades ago: putting all their money into a few superstar authors (King, Crichton, etc.) at the expense of finding, supporting and developing lesser names into bigger sellers. At the same time, the bar to publishing got lower and lower, so small, micro and self-publication became more prevalent. The divide has only spiraled wider since then.

But it’s still the same problem: you have to reach and interest enough potential readers to make back costs, much less anything for the time and effort of writing the book. On that basis, no, I don’t think many people make money writing books, even e-books, these days. Very off the cuff and not talking about the NYTBS crowd, I’d wager that 1-2% of serious authors make a very good living from their books; maybe 10-15% make enough to make it worthwhile as a career (e.g. not a sideline or hobby), and maybe another 10% more or less break even on the venture. Everyone else is losing money down the chain.

But then, if you’re writing books to make money, you’re missing the point. If you can write well enough to garner readers, and have something to say, making money from the effort is entirely secondary.

8

There must be. There are currently dozens of authors who are the literary equal of the three or four giants of the past century (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, FitzGerald), and in fact, probably better. Most would probably keep on writing for no recompense, for the love of the art, but still there is enough financial reward to keep them writing.

I suspect that many of them get the greatest reward from the movie rights, and sadly, a lot of books read like that is the author’s objective. Cormac McCarthy, arguably the best, has sold out and now seems to be interested only in screenplays.

9

Here’s a plan: Go out and get famous (or infamous), and then try to sell your memoir. :slight_smile:

10

Yes, people do. We have at least one Doper who nearly makes a living by self-publishing. I know several authors who make extremely nice livings (six-figure equivalents) by self- and indie-publishing a ton of titles under several pen names. And then there are the people with their feet in the commercial door, and yes, when you sell a book to a big publisher, you get a nice advance and if you’re lucky it even makes it to royalties.

The usual path of the full-time writer isn’t like Crichton or King. The usual path is to bust your ass churning out 4-6 pulp titles per year, and never get to a point where any random person would ever know your name. You can make a hugely nice living this way, if you market it exactly right and publish frequently. But you won’t be famous.

11

Which is perhaps the one thing I left out: if you write more or less nonstop (and are any good at it at all), yes you can make a steady income - but it’s not likely to be more than $10/hour employment, at the end of the day. It’s just a job like anything else, then.

But writing a book or two that doesn’t have a major publisher contract and doesn’t have a shot at best seller or high niche sales? Almost certainly not.

I left writing for a living when it finally sank in that some good friends - big names, with a foot or so on most bookstore shelves - worked any job they could get to pay the mortgage. Tech writing, store management, even house painting and auto repair. And these were NAMES. I turned to other things. I still write, but it’s not where the money comes from.

12

My niece does; about $50-70K a year between downloads and hard copies. She does semi-porn-ish romance novels heavily to the BDSM side of things. It makes for a nicer lifestyle than her family could afford without it.

13

Good. You are realistic. One good thing about e-books is that it makes it much easier to publish a high quality niche book. I have a book someone wrote about the battalion my father was in during WW II. Veterans of the battalion bought it, but probably no one else. One company was in Bastogne, but they didn’t go through a lot of high drama, which may be why I’m here.

I review engineering books for a journal, so I get a lot in my specialty. I’ve had chapters in some also. They still sell, especially as texts, but you need a reputation in the field to get a publisher interested. This can be as a professor or as an engineer with a good reputation and some papers published. I’ve also reviewed some book proposals. I doubt specialized books sell a lot of copies, even when published by big publishers. Textbooks do, but they are more work. My wife wrote a biology textbook, and she found it a big pain because of the constraints in subject matter and word length the publisher had. To get all the concepts in the space available she didn’t have room for interesting asides and transitions. This is why most textbooks today suck so bad.
The advantage of a book over Wiki is that there is room to start from basic principles and explain. If you want a formula, on line is good, but if you want to understand the formula a book might be better.

14

…and hope you catch the formula early enough to catch on, and don’t have it burn out on you when you come to depend on it. Lots of sad stories in that ride. Some are commercial.

15

I know someone who does two series - steampunk and Amish romances. (She comes from that background.) She is doing well now, but it took years to break through.
It seems that a common method is to give the first book in a series away and then charge for the second and later ones.
Now, while she makes a good bit of money, I also know a lot of people who write mystery after mystery and sells 100 copies of each. There are a lot more of those than the successful ones.

16

A friend of mine got on the best seller list last year with screen play offers and other book deals she has been offered. She was a nobody a couple of years ago. She upgraded her living quarters and car so I assume she is making some money.

17

e-books aren’t replacing physical ones. In fact, the latter have gone up in sales in recent years.

18

1.) Recreational reading has never been something done by anything other than a minority of a population.

2.) Making (any appreciable amount of) money off writing has never been something done by anything other than a minority of authors.

19

I don’t understand how authors make money.

It seems like the very day the book becomes available on Amazon, someone is selling it “used”.

I don’t think an author makes any money on the sale of their used books. Before Amazon if one wanted to read a newly published book, they would have to go out and buy one from a book store. And the author would be paid their share of the proceedes of the selling of said book.

Am I missing something here?

20

Which would mean that they bought it new first, right?