Our goal as writers is to craft a story so interesting that strangers will pay money to hear it.
Gordon Gekko, you are no doubt too young to remember, was a movie villain who stood in front of a crowd of stockholders to announce, “Greed is good.” He then made a fairly rational case for his statement. My statement is exactly the same – only different. Cash is good because working for free sucks. You should volunteer to build homes for the homeless, or visit shut-ins, or help bring medicine to the underprivileged. But you still need a day job to take care of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs (food, clothing, shelter and Internet access). This post is for people who want to make a living (cash) from writing.
Where is the gold mine? Open market capitalism is a pretty simple system: if you make something people want, you will make money. How much and how many people want it determines how much money you will make. In writing, there is no correlation between the effort you put in and the money you take home. Science Fiction is a small genre with complex worlds and epic adventures usually in lengthy editions of 100-200,000 words. Romance (aka erotica) is a simple formula in a relatively short format but it’s the most crowded market to join. Thrillers are a little more mainstream but with a higher reader expectation for intricate plotting. In short, the writing gold mine is a vein buried deep in the rock. The only way to get it is to work hard.
A quick review of this series, Part 1, Architecture: Quality products will continue to sell while less satisfactory products will sell only once. Part 2, Foundations: Determine your commitment by discerning your interests and whether writing is a hobby or a profession. Part 3, Appreciation: It’s not as easy as it looks so we deconstructed our favorite books. (Right? You did do the exercise, right? …oh for crying out loud. Go do it now!) Part 4, Ignorance is Bliss (not cash): Ignorance of the market, our readers, our competition can kill our ability to make money not just now but far into the future.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got all that. So…
Show me the money.
First and foremost, LOVE IT. Write what you love and your passion will speak for itself. Look at the difference between Steve Berry talking about religion from a tourist’s point of view and Joanna Penn’s Oxford-educated theology degree. Berry writes interesting facts about rituals as if they were watched from afar. Penn writes about rituals from inside the believer’s mind, taking us right up to the point where the believer begins to doubt his own faith and actions. (The most faithful people always doubt, read Mother Teresa’s diary.) The difference for the reader is palpable.
Second, keep the FOCUS on your readers. Know who they are and what they like or dislike. Getting feedback, even from nasty reviews, is critical. You can do this in writer’s groups in person or online. (You can only push your family and friends so far … trust me.) Make sure your reviewing groups are made up of people who like the genre and have read it extensively. Your target audience has options for their entertainment dollar. Respect that fact and you will find more success. I recently critiqued a book filled with insider references to Turkish Islamic culture that had nothing to do with the story. It was distracting. Turkey is not the first place you think of when you hear diamond smugglers. The author had been sent there by his day job and interesting facts crept into his work. It’s not about you and your travels. The readers want to know about the diamond smugglers and having them run from NYC to Istanbul just didn’t fit no matter how well written.
WAIT FOR IT. Don’t come to the marketplace with a half-baked novel. You, like everyone else, have little patience for people offering something inferior. There is a standard of quality expected for everything that costs money. If you want to make CASH, invest in your manuscript. Pay a real-live editor real money to fully annotate your manuscript from beginning to end. Expect to pay $1,000 or more. This is a first pass for editing. It will bring your structural engineering under control. If you were an English Lit major (God help you), and you are unusually realistic in your self-assessments, you might skip the line-edit at $2-3,000. I don’t recommend it. The Editorial Department offers former Big 6 editors at exceptionally low prices. Use them. I did. If you want to look around, call the authors who have paid them in the past and ask them, was it worth it? I did.
Don’t have the money to invest? Read books on self-editing, writing, plotting, character introduction. And don’t read the celebrity authors. Those who can do, and those who can’t teach. You want the teachers who make the topic understandable. Then get a larger review group. The more voices you hear, the more you know which ones to listen to and which ones to reject.
MARKETING & EARNINGS. Here is the math. First, understand that whatever amount of money you want as disposable income, you need to bring in twice as much to get there. Taxes, accountants, trade shows, marketing, research, insurance, etc. all eat up a big chunk of what you gross. Let’s say you want to earn $100,000 US per year. Sound reasonable?
Here is one of ten thousand different ways to get there. Be sure to do your own worksheet*. It would not be smart to jump in without having done the cost analysis.
| Editing | $2,500 |
| Proofing & Finals | 2,500 |
| Art & Packaging | 3,000 |
| Marketing | 9,000 |
| Publicity | 7,500 |
| Reviews | 2,100 |
| Total Sart Up w/o hardcover | $26,600 |
| Desired Net Income | $100,000 |
| Hard Costs | 26,600 |
| Gross Royalties Needed | 253,200 |
| Gross Revenue (Amazon) | 361,714 |
| Unit price | 2.99 |
| Royalty Rate | 70% |
| Unit Sales Required | 120,975 |
| Daily Sales | 336 |
Impossible? Not at all. Hard? YEP! Note that there are 100 authors in the top 100. How many of those are indie authors? About a third. I counted on my thumbs. Before you get too excited note that there are nearly half a million authors. Like I said, there is a gold vein in that rock. Lots of hard work to dig it out. But 30:500,000 is a lot better odds than the lottery.
What do you think? Easy or hard? Ready to quit your day job?
Here’s the reality check: daily sales of 300+ is pretty high up there on the Amazon scale. No one knows how the sales rankings on Amazon work (probably not even Amazon). However, I did a test by putting a dummy ebook out there. My first week rank was in the high 400,000s with zero sales. One morning, I bought and paid for 20 ebooks and sent them to friends (with a disclaimer). I jumped to 150,000. Meaning there are 300,000 books out there that did not sell 20 units that day… interesting, no? I also know from others that once you get above the six digit pack, the numbers increase exponentially. As best I can tell, 300 units a day means you’re expecting to land somewhere in the top 100. To make the income above, that means STAYING there for 360 days or having a second and third book sharing the work load.
Keep swinging that pick. Only five hundred yards of igneous rock to go!
Peace, Seeley James
NOTE: Due to many emails, tweets, etc, I added an addendum addressing ROI.
Coming up next on THE ACRHITECTURE OF WRITING, the nuts and bolts of how to write stories that people will pay money to read. Next week: Books about writing that actually help the writer.
*These are numbers I came up with after making a significant number of calls & emails to various people/organizations. I’m sure you would have done it better; but, in the words of the immortal philosopher, Popeye, “I yam wad I yam.” (Before calling any publicist, editor, or marketing firm, I first contacted the authors these companies claimed to have represented. There were a few interesting responses and several ringing endorsements.)
