Should You Give Up Writing if No One Reads Your Books?
No One Will Read Your Book
And other truths almost publishing
After I completed my first novel, I had dreams of a beautiful black book, its ivory pages sewn into the binding, the title embossed in aureate foliage, a single blood-red ribbon denoting the place where a reader might pause in their reading, adrift in another world.
Maybe, if I was lucky plenty, more than than a few reader s would dearest it. Mayhap, in my wildest dreams, Reese Witherspoon would even recommend information technology to her book club. Maybe it would proceed to go a New York Times bestseller and How-do-you-do Sunshine would suit it into a series for HBO. Perhaps I could spend my life as an author, writing books from the far corners of the world.
Yes, perhaps. The unicorns of the publishing industry — Dan Chocolate-brown, Anne Rice, Stephen Rex, Paulo Coelho — allow us to dream that maybe, just possibly, our books volition make it too. If we just write well enough and persist long enough, past some miracle our books will go far onto Oprah'south nightstand and our dreams of being an author volition be realized.
Alas, that's all information technology is. A dream.
No ane will read your book
"One of the biggest ironies well-nigh this business organization is that there are lots of people who want to go authors, but that doesn't necessarily equate with the number of people who are voracious readers," says Rachel Deahl, news director at Publishers Weekly. "In that location is a disconnect. Non enough people read enough books."
Deahl, who has covered book deals for more than a decade, tells me the problem is a supply and demand one. "If you ask people how many books they read in the past year, they'll say four. Or two," she says. "There are lots and lots of people eager to become writers. But we need more than readers. We need more people who are readers than we have writers."
Almost a 3rd of Americans don't read books at all. And, according to the US Agency of Labor Statistics, the ones that do spend just sixteen minutes per solar day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to three hours per 24-hour interval consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year while a reader gets through merely 16 books — and that's presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books.
In reality, books compete for our reading fourth dimension aslope newspapers, magazines, and other online publications. Even this year, when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw merely a subtle increment in sales over concluding twelvemonth — by 2.viii percentage. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215 percentage with near of that time taking place on Facebook (23 minutes per day), Google (14 minutes per day), and MSN (5 minutes per day).
If the marketplace for our attention is intensely crowded, the sliver of that marketplace devoted to reading books is very, very minor. And if the demand for books is small, the supply of books is great. To make information technology onto a reader's nightstand, an author will accept to compete with the roughly 3 million books currently in print to get in that location — and a seemingly countless supply of ebooks.
And how a reader chooses those carefully selected few is a rather convoluted (and heavily commercialized) organisation. Information technology has more to exercise with what Amazon recommends, what's trending on The New York Times Best Seller listing, and what a friend is obsessed with on Audible — and those algorithms are heavily dictated by what is already selling.
"People tend to purchase the books that are already actually popular," Deahl says. "They wait at the bestseller list to see what they desire to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It's a very top-heavy organisation. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. Merely it'due south really hard to create that spark."
Your book will non make The New York Times Best Seller listing
The "Big 5" publishing houses — soon to be the "Large Four" as Penguin Random House appear the conquering of Simon and Schuster this winter — are so-called because they own nearly 75 per centum of the book publishing market place. They are the big conglomerates of the publishing world and they account for every book that has topped The New York Times Best Seller list — at least in the past five years.
Because of this, it is normally assumed by authors that their best odds of publishing success will come from securing a contract with a Large Five house — and they might exist right. But winning a Big V contract is no guarantee of success — far from information technology. Publishing houses brand money by adhering to one simple strategy: Spend $five,000-$ten,000 on thousands of author advances, and hope that one of them will go on to become a huge bestseller and earn the company enough money to pay for all the rest.
It'due south basically tech investing: Throw all your money at a bunch of startups then hope for the unicorn.
"There'south a maxim in publishing: 80 pct of authors fail, and the 20 percent that succeed pay for all the failures," Deahl says. "It's almost building upwards big bestsellers. They are the people who pay for all the people who don't make it."
And the unicorn in the publishing industry is exceedingly rare. Co-ordinate to an EPJ Information Scientific discipline study that used big data to analyze every New York Times bestselling book from 2008–2016, there are 100,000 new, hardcover print books published each year — of which, less than 500 make it on to The New York Times Best Seller list (that'south 0.5 percent).
And most of the books that make the list are written by already famous authors. Read through the list on whatsoever given calendar week and yous will see a handful of well-known favorites. As I write this commodity, John Grisham, James Patterson, Stephen Male monarch, Michael Connelly, Danielle Steele, and Nora Roberts are all topping the listing — the same cast of characters who take been in that location since I was in high school. As the investigation concludes: "The success of a book is deeply linked to the previous success and the name recognition of its writer."
Surely there are some debut authors who brand the list. Yes, that is true — co-ordinate to EPJ, 14 percent of bestselling fiction authors wrote only 1 book during the fourth dimension studied — just the rest had ii or more. In fact, the 2,468 fiction books that made the list were written by only 854 authors. (It's worth mentioning that 51 of those books were written by James Patterson, 31 were by Clive Cussler, and 25 were by Danielle Steel.)
Not merely that, but virtually fiction novels (26 percent) announced on the listing for just a week. They surface briefly considering they surpass the selling threshold required to brand the list (generally one,000–10,000 copies per week, depending on what'southward on the list, according to the EPJ study), and so they peter out just as chop-chop. About books peak in the first 10 weeks after their debut, then exit the market.
There are exceptions, but they are rare. During the period of time studied, only ten bestsellers remained on the list for more than a twelvemonth, and those were helped greatly by their adaption into an honor-winning film (The Help, for example, which was on the list for 131 weeks) or a hotly followed series (the 5th volume in George R.R. Martin'southward A Song of Ice and Fire series).
That being said, the list is non the end all be all. It tracks sales, not reads, and sales numbers tin be inflated by industry practices such equally requiring that a bookstore buy a certain number of copies in society to secure the author for a reading, or mass purchasing a certain book to wind up on the list. This is the reason behind the listing's infamous "dagger" — a line item that appears next to books on the list whose sales numbers might be artificially inflated.
Not to mention, "The New York Times Best Seller list is a scam and is also just super racist," says L.50. McKinney, author of the YA novel A Blade So Black and founder of the hashtag #publishingpaidme. "Information technology's not a surprise. There's not a lot of us on there. And when I say us, I mean Blackness authors, Blackness women authors in particular."
McKinney's hashtag started trending during the summer of 2022 when authors began to break the silence around author advances, highlighting some of the disparities between what one volume sells for vs. another. Comparable author advances reported ranged from $25,000 (scientific discipline fiction author N. Thousand. Jemisin) to $three.four million (science fiction writer John Scalzi). "Information technology revealed just how staggering the bias is towards non paying Black authors equally much every bit white authors are paid in publishing," McKinney says.
Simply advances are not earnings — they are a gauge on the part of the publisher what an author will earn in volume sales. Though there may be disparities in how one book is favored to sell over another, and what marketing dollars are earmarked to promote it, the volume still has to sell — whether it goes on to underperform that advance, sell it out, or far surpass it. And whether it sells enough copies to brand The New York Times All-time Seller List is a longshot no affair what.
"Even if you're bought by a large publisher, and even if they spend a decent amount of money on the volume, publishers don't take the ability to do a huge corporeality of marketing for their titles," Deahl says. "And then a lot of the books they purchase don't go the money and resources they demand to become attention. In that location are a lot of wonderful books that are published that never find an audience."
Molly Barton, who spent the better office of a decade at Penguin Random House, agrees. "From my ain experience equally an acquiring editor inside a major publishing house, you take to go through a pretty significant gauntlet of approvals in social club to make an offer on a kickoff-time fiction writer," she says. "The novel that I first acquired, I call back I had to get sixteen people to read it and say, 'yep, we remember we should publish this for a very small sum of money.' And then it was a battle at every step of the mode to get attention."
You volition non become a millionaire from your book
If, by some chance, a novel is the outlier that reaches The New York Times All-time Seller listing, what does that hateful financially for the author?
According to the EPJ data, 96 percent of a fiction book's sales take place in the showtime twelvemonth, and the majority of New York Times bestselling books sell betwixt 10,000 and 100,000 copies in their first year. Presuming the average royalty cheque is 12 percentage and the average hardcover fiction book retails at $xv, that means authors are earning roughly betwixt $xviii,000 and $180,000, as a bestseller. Not-bestselling authors then, every bit a rule, earn comparably less.
"The fantasy that you're going to get an author and get rich doing it is misguided," Deahl says. "Very few people become rich, and very few people even earn a living doing it. Most books don't succeed. When you call up about it, information technology takes some people 10 years to write a book. Even at $15 an hour, over 10 years you will be paid more at minimum wage than you will earn on the book."
That's not to say authors tin can't brand a living at it. McKinney, who shared some of her story with me, says she received an advance of less than $45,000 signing with Imprint, an imprint of Macmillan, and is able to earn a pocket-sized living from sales of her book series. "I am non living some lavish life in New York or on the West Coast or anything like that," she says. "I am able to pay the rent and pay bills and be simply exterior of paycheck-to-paycheck. And then I'g still able to alive off of my traditional publishing."
Rachel Hawkins does the same. As the writer of more than 10 paranormal YA fiction novels, she has been a full-time author for 12 years. "I was very, very lucky that I got into YA right every bit information technology was the Gold Rush years post-Twilight," she says, "and so I was able to make a living as a writer right away. Before that, I'd been a teacher then it wasn't like I was making a huge amount of money. Unfortunately, we don't pay teachers nearly plenty, so [the pay equally an author] was comparable to what I'd been making before."
Both McKinney and Hawkins published their novels with Big Five publishing houses. Hawkins' first serial was with Disney Hyperion, then everything after that was with Penguin Random House, with her adult thriller now at St. Martin's, an banner of Macmillan. "Information technology's like annihilation, sometimes there have been years where that's been piece of cake," she says. "And sometimes there have definitely been lean years where you go a picayune more than creative and look around for different streams of revenue."
"The books that sell for half a million and upwards, those are outliers," Deahl says. "Only a handful of those books sell every year. Information technology's not a lot. Those are similar the Cinderella stories. People see that and think 'I tin can make a lot of money.' It's possible, simply it very rarely happens that way."
Self-publishing is not the answer
Having explored what happens to books that are published traditionally, an writer might be tempted to go the indie publishing route, or even self-publish. And I have to admit this is something that both speaks to and terrifies me.
The draw here is that authors become to keep 70 pct of their book's earnings while maintaining the rights to their book. The trouble is that Amazon is the largest publisher of self-published titles, and Amazon doesn't share their statistics. This ways authors who wish to publish their book via Kindle Direct Publishing have no data available to them equally far equally how many books the behemoth publishes each year, how their book volition exist promoted alongside competition, and how many of their books will exist sold.
What we do know, is thanks to Paul Abbassi, CEO at Bookstat. His visitor aims to achieve what thus far no analytics company has been able to: to detect and report information on the ebook marketplace as a whole. Until Bookstat came along, NPD Bookscan and other reporting outlets were able to report book sales from every retail outlet except Amazon. Only with 49 percentage of print sales, without Amazon, we're missing half of the information.
Even then, according to Abbassi, "no accurate industry data exists on the full number of ebooks published each year," which ways cocky-publishing an ebook is like screaming into the void. There's a gaping black hole into which those books go, and just Bezos knows where they'll autumn on the countless scrolling pages of Kindle Unlimited. May the algorithm exist ever in your favor.
Though it's no longer possible to track exactly how many new ebooks enter the market each year, Abbassi says that from 2022 to 2018, the number of Kindle titles available on Amazon increased by 1.two to 1.4 million ebooks each twelvemonth — which should give us some indication of the market. He also estimates that 65–lxx percent of new books each twelvemonth are self-published.
If in that location are upward to ane.four million new book titles inbound the market each year, and upwardly to 980,000 of them are self-published, and then the traditional publisher acts equally a filter. "For every traditionally published volume that gets accepted and published by a publisher, there are dozens of other manuscripts submitted by aspiring traditional-route authors that publishers reject — the slush pile," Abbassi says. "With self-published books, that unabridged slush pile gets published, too."
When I ask how self-published books perform compared to traditionally published books, Abbassi says that's a fundamentally flawed question. Comparing the average traditionally published book to the boilerplate self-published book, he says, would be like comparison the average earnings of only the winning lottery tickets (traditionally published books) to the average earnings across all lottery tickets (self-published books).
That being said, there are certainly success stories. There are a couple k cocky-published authors currently earning six-figure incomes from their ebook sales, Abbassi tells me, and a couple dozen earning seven-effigy incomes. In fact, some genres may see more than success in the self-published world than they would elsewhere. "In certain fiction genres, such equally romance, scientific discipline fiction, and fantasy, there are far more loftier-earning self-published authors than traditionally published ones," Abbassi says.
Romance author H. 1000. Ward, for instance, self-published a novel in 2013 "to run into what would happen" and institute herself atop New York Times bestselling lists and earning eight-figure revenues without the help of a traditional publishing house. The self-published model lends itself well to these genres because books are typically written in a series, sold at lower price points, and consumed more chop-chop than other categories.
Romance novels, for example, sell more than any other genre and readers in that category admit to consuming five books a week and spending $sixty per calendar month on books. That being said, the H. Chiliad. Ward'due south of the world are still the outliers of the industry. In a sea of some 1.4 million new ebooks annually, those couple thousand that earn half dozen-figures are still the minority (0.14 percent).
In the end, whether an author goes the traditional route or the self-published route, "in each case, the 'boilerplate' book will stop upwards performing very poorly," Abbassi says. "Financially successful careers in the creative arts are quite rare, and this is equally true for traditional-route authors equally well equally self-publishers."
Serial novels are not a viable culling (yet)
Whether a volume is traditionally published or self-published, the author is at a disadvantage. Writing a fiction novel takes a lot of time and for most authors that fourth dimension is unpaid. When the novel finally debuts, information technology has 10 weeks to sell, and by the end of the year it volition have sold near all it will always sell. At that point, only a few 1000 people will have read it and the book volition autumn into oblivion.
Only at that place used to be some other manner. When Alexandre Dumas debuted The Count of Monte Cristo it was published as a feuilleton — a portion of the weekly newspaper devoted to fiction. From August 1844 to January 1846 his chapters were published in 18 installments for The Journal des Débats, a paper that went out to 9,000 to 10,000 paying subscribers in France — and readers were rapt by information technology.
In the forward to a 2004 translation of the book, the writer Luc Sante wrote: "The upshot of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled… is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, mayhap something like that of a especially gripping telly serial. Day after twenty-four hour period, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else."
Information technology was basically "Game of Thrones." Readers could not look to get their hands on the next chapter and that bode very well for the author who was not only paid past the paper in existent-time for his work (by the give-and-take), only also grew the popularity of his work over the entirety of the time it was being published.
"The 'Presse' pays nearly 300 francs per day for feuilletons to Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, De Balzac, Frederic Soulé, Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau," Littell's Little Age , Volume 10 wrote in 1846. "Simply what volition the result be in 1848? That each of these personnages will have made from 32,000 to 64,000 francs per annum for 2 or three years for writing profitable trash of the colour of the foulest mud in Paris?"
That "profitable trash" earned those writers an annual salary of between $202,107 to $404,213 in today'southward dollars — and the obvious disdain of that Littell writer who, even then preferred the merits of a leap and published volume. The aforementioned volume goes on to say that Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845.
In that location exists some mod precedent for the series novel. The Martian was originally published as a serial on Andrew Weir's personal blog. When the pandemic struck in 2022 Lena Dunham published her novel Verified Strangers every bit a choose-your-own-take chances serial on vogue.com. J.One thousand. Rowling released a previously unpublished children'southward book, The Ickabog , on her website inviting children who were following along to dream up their ain illustrations for it.
But once again, I am speaking only of the success stories which then, as at present, make upwards simply a minor portion of writers. Fifty-fifty still, in that location is an argument to be made that serial content could perform meliorate than static. An episodic television series, for instance, sees watchers for as many years as at that place are seasons, compared with a picture show that might see watchers for i.
Series Box aims to capitalize on this thought, disrupting the static book publishing model by bringing back series novels and giving them the popularity of a binge-worthy television serial. They exercise this by hiring rooms of writers — much equally is done in television writing — and releasing chapters on a weekly basis. The reader tin buy a book for $9.99 and then follow the "episodes" as they come out, choosing whether they desire to read or listen to them through the Serial Box app.
"We typically conceive of a season that has eight or 10 episodes," says Barton, now co-founder and CEO of Series Box. "Our more than successful series proceed to have 2d, third, or fourth seasons. So we're definitely thinking in the way that television writers do effectually story worlds that could lend themselves to later on seasons."
It's an enticing model, especially compared with traditional models. After 12 years in traditional publishing, Hawkins became the lead author for Serial Box's Victorian, Gothic romance The Haunting of Beatrix Light-green . "So much of [publishing] does feel like a shot in the dark," she told me. "What I actually liked about Serial Box is that they take all the data. They tin can actually meet, 'nosotros know that it can't be any longer than this. Because our data has told us that people plow off an episode after X amount of minutes.'"
Holing up in an Airbnb with the other writers on the projection, Hawkins and her team pored over the data available to them and mapped out the project together. "You can be like, 'okay, this needs to be 3,000 words because that volition be about 20 minutes, and xx minutes is about where we desire to hitting for this episode.' It's very interesting to me considering yep, and then much of publishing only feels like, 'oh, it didn't sell a million copies. We don't know why.'"
Serial Box declined to comment on the number of users they have or the number of purchases their books run into, which means writers are all the same in the dark as to how their volume volition perform relative to other avenues. And writing with a room is an altogether different thing from working on a solo project — both creatively and financially speaking.
The deal is: "We'll pay you lot X amount of dollars per episode you write," Hawkins tells me. "So because I was lead writer responsible for helping put the writing team together, writing the airplane pilot episode, and working a little fleck more on the synopsis, I got an extra fee on top of that. So you get a flat fee per episode you do and so if you are a atomic number 82 writer, you become a little bit actress on elevation."
With royalties effectively out, writers are paid equally contractors. McKinney besides worked on a Serial Box project every bit a writer for the Curiosity series Black Widow, and she describes the compensation this way: "You're contracted out on a project-by-project basis. So Series Box would have to exist my employer — like information technology would have to exist a 40 60 minutes a week type deal — for me to exist able to make a living off of just Serial Box," she says.
You lot will not brand money from your Patreon or Substack platform
As a writer, I tin only dream of working like Dumas. Writing with a weekly deadline, paid on ane as well. The artistic freedom of writing fiction for a living paired with the financial stability of a regular paycheck.
I could alive where my books take place, spending the afternoons wandering through jungles and drinking tea in pagodas, gathering inspiration for the chapters I would write the next day. I could stretch out under my masterpiece in the mornings like Michaelangelo beneath the Sistine Chapel, chiseling away at the philosophies etched in my mind before sending them out polished to my readers each week.
I definitely romanticize the Renaissance for that reality — for the thing it did nigh beautifully was financially back up people who would otherwise be poor, peasant farmers to get Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci. At the fourth dimension, that fiscal support came from some wealthy financier, a patron who wanted to support an creative person, so the artist could do the birthday time-consuming thing called creating a masterpiece.
Afterwards the Renaissance, the artist vicious into obscurity. Masterpieces became the side hobby of a select few, and the full-fourth dimension job of an even fewer. Authors (and artists and musicians) required the support of a publishing company (or a gallery or a tape label) to get in front of an audition, earning an always diminishing sliver of the profits in the process.
Social media started to change things. With Facebook and Instagram and Spotify and Etsy, creatives could get their work direct in front of a devoted audition without the help of a publisher or gallery or record label to promote it. They only needed a platform on which to gather their fans and a product with which to sell to them.
Now we have Patreon and Substack — technologies that have been much aggrandized for their power to monetize the creator. To permit thousands of fans (instead of 1 patron) to financially support the work of an artist. Substack leads the newsletter charge, offering writers the ability to write exclusive content for their followers, with those followers paying a monthly subscription fee to receive it.
Paid newsletters not only back up the writers who write them, merely allow the writer the creative freedom to cater to a select few (meet: niche audience) rather than a great many (run across: mass appeal). In the fiction earth, that is paramount. My book could best be classified as literary fiction, and unfortunately, that's a somewhat abstract genre. Commercial fiction is the more read thing. It'due south what you detect on The New York Times All-time Seller listing. It's the crime thrillers and romance novels, the kind of book that millions of people pick upward at airports each year. Literary fiction, by contrast, is only the opposite. Information technology's strange and poetic and philosophical, information technology's loved by a pocket-sized but devoted few.
Merely if the literary sort are at a disadvantage when it comes to making it in the traditional publishing world, they might be ideally suited to the reader-supported earth. Theoretically, an author could earn $v,000 per calendar month from just 1,000 people — if each follower contributed $5 per month — and that idea is very enticing considering… well, come across dream scenario above.
Wired writer Kevin Kelley believes this is the hereafter. In a since viral postal service, he states that the reader-supported economy no longer demands that a creator reach millions of followers, but simply 1,000 truthful fans. Ones who are and then devoted they will wind up paying the creator well-nigh $100 a year. "If y'all keep the total $100 of each true fan, then yous need only ane,000 of them to earn $100,000 per year," he said in the commodity. "That's a living for virtually folks."
Affections investor Li Jin calls this "the passion economic system" and she thinks creatives could reach an even more niche audience. "I believe that creators need to amass only 100 True Fans — not i,000 — paying them $1,000 a year, not $100," she said in an article for a16z, the blog of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. "Today, creators tin finer make more money off fewer fans."
Certainly, we've seen some successes with the passion economy. As a devoted patron of the artist Jamie Beck, I immediately spent $100 when she debuted her Isolation Creation serial to her 300,000+ Instagram followers during the pandemic. Many of her fans did the same as she pledged to donate 10 percent of her proceeds to charity and reported altruistic $15,000 only 2 months after — an estimated $150,000 for the creative person.
Run a risk the Rapper, for another, famously opted to go label-less despite offers from nigh every tape label in boondocks — including Kanye's. Having clustered a defended following on Soundcloud and Spotify, he turned his followers into concert attenders, somewhen ranking fifth on a 2022 Forbes list of the highest-paid hip hop artists in the world — with $33 million.
Hamish McKenzie wants to run into fiction exercise that too. As the co-founder of Substack, he once aspired to come across it become a place for serialized novels. "I personally am excited nigh the potential for Substack to be a abode for serial fiction," he in one case posited on kboards, a forum for Kindle authors and users. "The idea of receiving book chapters by e-mail is only cool to me. And I like the idea of subscribing to a writer individually, and then that author gets paid every month instead of simply when a book is released."
Feedback on the forum came dorsum with a resounding "that will never work." "Why would anyone pay for a subscription to a single author when they can pay a subscription to [Kindle Unlimited] and go a million authors?" one user asked. "Would you?"
That'southward the meg-dollar question — and it'south 1 without an answer. Thus far, there are no fiction authors currently on Substack (though there are a handful of nonfiction journalists who seem to be doing well). Patreon has quite a few, only very few success stories. Of all the fiction authors currently on the site, I found only 25 earning more $1,000 a month, and only 15 earning more than $4,000 a month.
Not only are success stories on Substack and Patreon exceedingly rare, only neither function as a platform on their own. A Substack or Patreon writer volition have to gain a following somewhere else (i.e. social media) before they can attempt to convert those followers to paid Substack or Patreon subscribers. And for writers, finding the right platform has historically been hard.
Though photographers and fitness gurus have plant success on Instagram, handmade crafters and artisans accept institute success on Etsy, and rappers and musicians have found success on Soundcloud, until recently there hasn't been a adept place to find and follow writers. Ev Williams tried to make a platform for writers when he co-founded Twitter — but nosotros all know how that turned out.
Thankfully, Williams' second venture turned out more than promising. In 2012 he founded Medium, this time focused on long-grade manufactures. Medium is at present a platform where readers tin can follow the writers and publications they love, and writers can develop a following for their work. Readers don't demand to pay every unmarried author they follow (à la Substack) — but simply for i annual Medium subscription — and writers are compensated based on how well their manufactures are received.
"Ane of the things… people enjoy well-nigh writing newsletters today," Williams recently wrote on Medium, "is the feeling that you're publishing to a relatively consistent grouping of people who intendance what y'all take to say. Even if it's a pocket-size group. This lets you lot write with more freedom and conviction… do and so reliably and that readership grows."
Whether a writer decides to build their platform on Patreon or Substack or Medium, thus far none take proved a successful domicile for fiction. There just does not nonetheless be a market in which consumers pay a monthly fee to read an author'southward volume via email, and the author earns a decent living from it. That doesn't mean it'southward non possible in the future, or that edifice the platform isn't valuable. Quite the opposite.
"I recall one of the things that authors have mastery over is edifice up an audience," says Barton. "Building up your superfans and the people who are following your blog, or subscribing to your Substack — or however you're talking to people on a regular footing — doing that early work is going to make every other piece of your career easier, because y'all have a quote-unquote 'platform.'"
The only matter a writer can do
Andy Weir first published The Martian as a series for his own blog, then as a self-published novel on Amazon, so as a traditionally published novel with Random House.
"I had an email list with almost 3,000 people on it, so, initially, the audience was roughly that much," he tells me. "When I first posted it to Amazon, I didn't do anything to market place or publicize information technology. All I did was tell my readers it was available there."
The volume was on Amazon for 5 months, at a price point of 99 cents, and he sold 35,000 copies before Random House bought the rights in February of 2014. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller and a blockbuster movie starring Matt Damon.
"The publicity and marketing machine of a traditional publisher can't exist beat," he says. "They become your volume into the easily of reviewers who have a lot of influence. The only con is that they get the king of beasts'southward share of the sale price. Simply because the majority of that goes to paying for the cosmos of the physical book, I'm non too worried about it — and their marketing engine makes it more than worthwhile."
When I tell this story to Barton, she says Weir'due south story doesn't prove that the traditional publishing model works all-time, but that traditional publishers are trying to find some guarantee that a volume volition have an audience — and 35,000 sales in 5 months, with no marketing, meant they had a sure thing on their hands.
"I'k non sure that whatsoever of the traditional publishing success for [Weir] would exist possible without those first two steps," she says. "In that detail example, nosotros might be giving unfair credit to the traditional publisher piece of that career progression."
In other words: in that location is no algorithm that suggests that books virtually scientists growing potatoes on Mars will exist successful. Even Big Five publishing houses are unable to predict which books readers volition beloved and which books they won't. The simply thing they tin predict with any certainty is whether or non the author has enough followers that will purchase their book — and Weir had 3,000 devoted readers. It all started because of them.
"You have this dichotomy," Deahl says of the publishing industry. "You're e'er looking for people with actually big platforms. If Kanye West is going to publish a book, he's got a large audience already, you lot don't have to build an audience for him. So someone with a congenital-in audience, who can accomplish out to them and say 'I'm publishing a volume,' that book can go a bestselling book immediately."
Information technology's a hazard. "Y'all will always have daydreams about why this book and why not that book," Deahl says. "You will ever have more books failing than not." But the 1 thing we know for sure is that devoted fans brand all the deviation. Considering whether a volume is traditionally published, cocky-published, or serialized, lonely its odds of success are side by side-to-none — but with a couple g devoted fans, anything is possible.
Accept Rupi Kaur, for example. The poet developed a following for her poetry via Instagram. Her self-published poetry collection milk and honey was picked up by independent publishing house Andrews McMeel Publishing and sold 2.5 one thousand thousand copies. Her second book the lord's day and her flowers debuted on The New York Times All-time Seller list and remained at that place for 73 weeks. All because she developed a devoted following for her work on Instagram, and they bought her books when they debuted.
Personally, I take more than 200 Medium followers and shut to two,000 newsletter subscribers — readers I hope volition purchase my book 1 day, however it happens to be published. If, every bit is near likely the case, few people always read my book— if it won't sell more than a couple g copies at best and is unlikely to earn me a living, much less minimum wage — then, at the very to the lowest degree, some portion of my readers, who similar what I have to say enough to follow my piece of work, will read my novel. Because my book doesn't have to mean everything to everybody, as long every bit it ways something to somebody.
It is in this reality that I notice my answer. For it is comforting to me in the mode that existentialism is: if at that place is no significant in life, then I needn't business myself with finding it. If, in all likelihood, no one will read my book, so I needn't concern myself with whether anyone volition ever like it. In the terminate, I wrote my novel because I wanted to write information technology — and doing so was the nigh beautiful thing I've ever done.
In his final communication to me, Weir offers this: "I would say to try the traditional route first. If you can't get traction with agents or publishers, and then consider cocky-pubbing. If your book does well equally a self-pubbed ebook, you lot can go back to agents and publishers and say 'look, information technology'south a proven seller.'"
Judge I'll become try and find a publisher.
—
Update: Upon further research, I decided to publish my novel as a serial (merely like Alexandre Dumas) via Substack. Y'all tin learn more than well-nigh that hither or you tin subscribe to my newsletter here.
Source: https://writingcooperative.com/why-no-one-will-read-your-book-caa0e77ed5aa
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