https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=db...
It's hard to even visualise the effort it must have taken to overcome those obstacles to become one of the better self-published sci-fi authors. Respect.
How long did it take him to get to 1 million copies sold, and was there anything he did along the way that had an outsized impact on his success?
I'm not sure about the answer to the second question, I'll ask him over a beer next time we get together. I would say that an important factor was investing in professional cover art, editing, etc. He also more or less timed the rise of Kindle books, quite by accident, and I think that also helped his career.
But there's no substitute for caring about his work and putting in the time, which he definitely does.
And thank you to share your brother's work.
You don't need to say you are proud of your brother, I can see that in your words.
Please consider reading the work itself here: https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/
He’s joining company with works like Enders Game, Wheel of Time, Mistborn, and Stormlight Archive, and a dozen more I’m not able to remember off the top of my head.
OTOH, getting published in Tor at all is a much much bigger achievement - congratulations to the author!
You'd have to be absolutely passionate and have another income to do this, which is a shame. I think every craft should have its place. Clearly the market is terrible for writers; a bit like indie game makers nowadays.
I hope you get a breakthrough though; because if you keep doing this, you're clearly passionate about your craft!
See also: musicians (recording, less so live performance), DJs, photographers, journalists, documentarians, etc.
Essentially any creative pursuit where:
1) Making it carries high prestige and gratification.
2) The product can be reproduced digitally and appreciated by a large audience.
3) Technology to produce it has become cheaper.
The basic market forces are sucking all the money out of it. I think it's good for a society for skilled creative people to be able to spend most of their time on their art instead of having to do it as a side gig. But we don't seem to have an economic system that currently supports it aside from a small number of lucky winners of the zeitgeist lottery.
If you want to work in an arena where people are happy to do so for free you need to either get used to it or find a way to make competition illegal or very difficult. That way you can make things better for yourself at the expense of the consumer and people wanting to break in who aren’t related to anyone who matters. For an example see the Screen Actors’ Guild or the American Federation of Musicians.
Amateurs (or pros using an activity like writing in support of some other professional activity) make it more difficult for would-be pros--see also photography, people who do open source development on their own time, etc. Too bad.
Writing, unfortunately, remains something you have to get financially comfortable to be able to do... not a way to become financially comfortable. It's surprising that even in 2022 we haven't fixed that.
If anything, it's much worse now than in the early 20th century. There were tons of working-class writers making a living at fiction writing, then. Tons as a proportion of the population, relative to today, anyway.
Compared to then, now, nobody reads fiction. Except porn (romance novels & erotica). Only genre that's still kinda, almost doing as well as several genres did back then. Possibly even better.
Most of the writers are amateurs but they have diverse means of getting paid - some platforms like Wattpad and Webnovel help writers paywall later chapters, some writers do manually with a paid blog. Some ask for donations on kofi or patreon.
The thing is, speaking about someone who is putting in the effort and skill you'd need to publish for $100 in an anthology magazine - I wonder how much a writer like that makes on these platforms. $100 is only 25 five dollar doners. Maybe "1000 fans" is more profitable.
Here is a top writer from Royal Road - you can see they are pulling $1000 a month. This is surely unusual but it isn't bad https://www.patreon.com/MonroeByJahx
Many writers will advise you that it's ok to let your work go for free, if it'll get you exposure. I made a deal with myself that I'd charge something for it.
There’s a profound sub-narrative here on self-censorship, what is or isn’t acceptable within the bounds of fiction, and how genre in-groups police themselves toward Acceptable Messages.
Also, I think it would be very optimistic to assume an editor is deploying the word “problematic” about your story as anything other than an attack on its appropriateness and validity.
> where an eloquently written editorial review argued that it had problematic themes.
I'm an award winning published author and wokeness has taken over the publishing space to the point where you can't publish _anything_ negative about a few sacred cows, which are obvious to anyone with a working brain.
I'll bet my bottom dollar it was a white woman lecturing to a brown man why he's being racist too.
Disclaimer: light self-promo. Are others interested in more publishing posts like these? I've documented the journey to publication stories with stats, rejections, and a sense of the work involved for most of the short fiction I've published in literary journals. It's been cathartic and encouraging to share the entire process.
My most notable piece[1] ended up making it into The Best American Mystery Stories[2] a few years ago.
[1]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2018/10/30/how-loathing-travel-pu...
[2]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2019/10/01/how-a-regional-writing...
you need top .5% talent and work ethic to maybe earn a lower-middle class salary
A labor of love, as it's said
It’s being a musician, actually. Most writers have the skills to maintain good side gigs of some kind or another. Musicians have to dedicate more of their time to musicianship, and often end up on the lower side of the pay scale. Sure, there will be a few with a profitable clientele paying for private lessons and tutoring, but that’s far more rare.
Recording and producing music, making music videos, etc is a massive cost center that may or may not break even. Usually not.
Playing live gigs is usually a money loser for most - venues often have extremely unfavourable terms (especially when starting out - a lot of places are pay to play, where you have to market and sell the tickets and at best get to keep what's left over after venue hire is covered).
The real money is basically in teaching the offspring of upper middle class people how to play an instrument.
In reality, for most writing is a fading interest. It's a skill that anyone can really pick up if they wanted to but doing so is easy to learn and hard to master. You can go long periods of time writing and never improve.
Due to how the system as whole is designed most writers never improve. It's just how it works in the end because of the lack of a coherent structure or guidance system. Only if you belong to pre-established writing groups will you even really have a chance at learning it.
Sure there are several references openly available online, but all it can teach you is syntax. What you need to be a good writer is experience, training and mentoring which most people will never gain the opportunity of having. And even to those that do, it's a lifelong endeavor and one that requires complex knowledge in a variety of fields. It's one that most that pick it up will never be able to comprehend themselves or when they do, it's too late and trying to do so is fundamentally impossible for them due to their situation.
For various genres of the fantasy genre there's a fairly well trodden road nowadays of going from royalroad.com (with patreon) to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited.
royalroad.com lets people build massive followings and then translate them into patreon and other monetisation.
The audiences in the litrpg space right now are voracious and are fairly forgiving of typo's/grammar so long as they enjoy the story.
I'm not sure the same could've been said 10 or even 5 years ago. But again it's fairly genre specific.
> I… finally did it! And I also leveled as a [Demon Larva] thanks to the experience gained from leveling [Identification]! It was a total success!
> I could distribute my Stat Points and Skill Point later. For now, I focused on what was important. I glanced at the pebble closest to me and activated my [Identification]—
For what may be more relatable to many here, publishing a technical (or tech-adjacent, i.e. more popular industry takes of various kinds) book may be career-enhancing, even significantly so, in various ways. But you still will likely just make a few $K in direct moneys.I did a book about open source history/business models/etc. and it's been good--even was asked to do a second edition/done book signings at event/etc.--but still only made single-digit thousands of dollars directly.
This, unfortunately, has been the case practically for as long as literature has existed - very, very few authors make anything more than a pittance from their work in their lifetimes, and historically a majority of authors were the scions of wealthy or at least comfortably middle class families.
Now, thankfully, the publishing landscape is substantially more democratic, however the financial hurdles to being an author remain very real - it’s a side job, out of necessity, until you get published - and then it’s still probably a side job.
So, yes, it’s a labour of love. I don’t think anyone goes into writing to make bank, but rather because they have an insatiable urge to write, or to convey an idea, or whatever it may be - but financial success doesn’t weigh into it - in fact, for most, it’s an expensive hobby, insofar as it’s rather time consuming. Me, I just write whilst babysitting my telescope through the nights. Keeps the fingers warm.
TC: I think the reaction varies, because science fiction is a more commercial genre. There are a lot more people in science fiction whose goal is to make a living from writing fiction by publishing one or more novels a year. And people who enter science fiction generally receive more messaging about fiction writing as a sole source of income than, say, people entering mainstream fiction. The messaging there is different: get an MFA, teach; it’s understood that your teaching position supports your career as a writer. For writers entering science fiction, that’s not really a thing yet. We’re maybe getting there, but the messaging they receive is mostly: Be very prolific.
https://culture.org/an-interview-with-ted-chiang/
So basically most people don't write S/F "just for fun", and I'm pretty sure that was never the case and all the greats and less-well-known greats of the genre were all professional writers.
Depends. I left my high paying job and had mostly burned through my savings until selling programming ebooks saved me. Not saying that writing was the best option, but it was the first that started paying my bills consistently. Of course, the fact that my monthly expenses was around $150 helped a lot. I've now written 12 books and the past two years has brought my savings back to a comfortable level.
If you want to write listicles, sure you don't need as much talent and you can make above minimum wage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle#Literary_ca...
This very good story sold for about 3X the OP's story, at a time when print was the dominant medium.
There were many more pubs to publish to and more people bought short story anthologies.
This hasn't been a realistic goal since... IDK, the 50s? 60s?
My wife is in marketing for her day job and has been using that knowledge to help target and generate interest in her books, and it seems to be paying off, as her preorders are eclipsing quite a few established authors in the groups she's in, and this is her first book.
When she had half the preorders she does now, a friend was saying she could probably expect around $2k in sales in her first month, judging by the preorder numbers, so by the time it releases she might be seeing 2-3x or even more than that.
I’m not familiar with that study, and I try to keep up with the literature. You might be very interested to read about the historical rise of the grunge genre as an example of the kind of luck you are talking about. There was definitely a magical kind of serendipity at work between all the different musicians and bands who were up and coming at the time.
Some of the one on one interviews with the key players are amazing. If they didn’t pick up a certain phone call or move to a specific city or play music with this one person, entire careers would never have been made.
But it goes with all content creators - sports - academia, getting PHD or Professor title.
Funny thing is that a lot of people try to become boxers or writers, football players as it seems easy to "make it" but I don't know if there is "car sports" rags to riches stories, to do car sports one has to be quite on the rich side anyway.
But still to go path of Mike Tyson you still have to be .5% talent and work ethic and for quite some time getting scraps as payments.
I already built it, although it is in Portuguese. https://www.confabulistas.com.br
It would be easy to translate to English and try it in the US market. Is there any interest for that?
It is just like Substack. You create your page, people subscribe and get your fiction by email. The main difference is that people can read your books from the beginning, from the first chapter, in installments. With Substack (or any newsletter platform) new people can only get the future emails from the time they subscribed. In my site people will receive the first installment/chapter of the book (you can have several books published in there, one can be "Short stories").
It has the "paid subscribers" feature also.
I built it mostly to myself, as I am starting a side-career as a fiction writer wanted to own my audience. Fiction writers currently don't have a good platform to both distribute their work and gather an audience. What I built does the job pretty well I think.
Any interest?
Why it's not for me:
These days, the choice between self publishing and traditional publishing is really a question of what I want my job to be. If I'm willing to be a writer/editor/publicist/graphic designer/etc., then modern digital distribution means self publishing makes a lot of sense. It potentially also makes a lot of sense for people who already have largish followings, as it increases profits per sale. (People with following can also monetize those followings directly via things like Patreon, or likely your "paid subscribers" feature.)
For me, though, all I really feel comfortable doing is writing. I don't want to publicize, or format books, or cultivate a following that I can turn into patrons and monetize. I'm a slow writer, so unlikely to produce a steady enough stream of content to make a serialization/patron model viable. I also strongly dislike being on social media, which would really limit my exposure.
Being in control of publicity is empowering for some authors, but for me it would make the work harder, not easier. So I prefer traditional publishing, where my only job is to write the stories and have professional interaction with agents and editors. Self-advocacy isn't a major part of my job as an author, and I'm an author who doesn't want it to be. I'm to have (and indirectly pay) agents and editors to let me have a writing career without needing to do work I find onerous.
Best of luck to you, though. And things change, so who knows? Maybe someday something like this will be exactly what I need. I know a brilliant author who was traditionally published for decades, but has now reclaimed her rights and is self publishing to much greater satisfaction.
I started writing short stories a couple of years ago, and I created a Hugo website to host them: https://crooked.ink. The main issues with a blog are that it's hard to get an audience from scratch, and it's hard to be found with all the SEO effort you can do.
I also tried to submit a couple of stories to webzines and I got published once for free, but I really don't think I'll ever do it for a living.
What I wish more and still didn't get, though, it's a _feedback_ for my stories. So maybe the project could be intriguing for this, if it can get you closer to an audience.
Maybe market it as "Learn to write as Dickens did".
on edit: To get writers on board of course.
I've thought about this for a long time and have a lot of insight into the problem, and thoughts about the pitfalls. If you'd like to talk, post an email address (can be throwaway) and I'll reach out. I'm a novelist myself, with a book coming out in early '23.
The most important thing, over the next 20 years, is making sure that the self-publishing ecosystem isn't controlled or controllable by companies (e.g., Amazon). Amazon are currently the good guys (believe it or not) relative to traditional publishers [1] and chain bookstores, but God knows what they are doing with their algorithm, and we can't let them become a SPOF for the self-publishing ecosystem.
----
[1] Actually, the editors at the publishing houses themselves are a pretty good set of people (and, at least in the US, very underpaid). It's the rest of the trad-pub ecosystem--the tastemakers, the literary agents, the various sausage-makers who decide which books get celebrity endorsements--who can eat a bowl of taint cancer.
Thanks!
Given the quality of the work, I suspect that 2x-5x that many hours were spent on developing and revising the story (the parenthetical part). So let's call it 66 hours total.
Later:
> 8/27/2020 - RUOXI FROM TOR.COM EMAILED TO BUY THE STORY! They offered $1422.80 for exclusive digital, audio, and ebook rights for one year, non-exclusive afterward. Likely publication: early 2021. I said yes!
So, ballpark $20/hr. Some commenters have noted the low pay for this kind of work. How it's a labor of love rather than a living. And Tor apparently pays top dollar. On top of the fee, there's a profit sharing program, which starts to sound pretty good. But again, this looks to be the ceiling.
What's more interesting are the non-financial terms. The author can sell the work to others after one year. Depending on whether the author retains copyright (seems to be implied), this could be a pretty interesting way to go. I'm thinking about things like expansion into a novel, movie or other derivative works, for example. The acceptance letter doesn't quite make it clear how this works. How does it work?
Optioning for TV or film is usually the most lucrative, but can be very difficult, especially for new writers breaking into the field. This is especially true for short stories. One big exception is Arrival, which was based on Ted Chiang’s short story, which have paved the way for other short stories to get optioned in similar fashion.
Haven't seen this before:
>this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
And DRM-free! Cool. Feel free to pirate, I guess.
Generally you’ll be given a size to fit within, so it’s not like you can go Dickens on it and crank up the word count to cover your rent.
If a short story is made into a movie, the first step is for the production company to secure the rights to the IP. This is usually done through an options contract, wherein the writer sells the production company the exclusive but time-limited write to make a film adaptation. When their option period expires, the production company has to either renew the option for more money, or give up on the project.
How much money an option sells for depends on the profiles of both the author and the producer/studio involved. My first option contract for short fiction was $2500 for a one year exclusive option--slightly more than I made when I published the story originally. My most recent option contract was $12,500 for an 18 month exclusivity period.
Authors with large backlists can have lots of option contracts always expiring and renewing, and often have this as a meaningful income stream even if nothing ever actually gets produced.
I already replied to the parent question explaining how authors of short fiction do, in fact, make money when their work is adapted.
The WGA is a union whose members pay dues based on their writing income. The guild is incentivized to maximize their membership, and to maximize the earning of those members.
I'm an associate member of the WGAw--someone who's worked in the industry, but not done enough work yet to qualify for full membership--and I've never encountered any of the exclusionary attitude you suggest.
Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson, Paul Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael Crichton. Good writing is a serious art and craft. It's irrelevant how many hours a specific work takes down to the second. The author seems to think writing is hard and slow. It is slow, but after the first decade or two it gets quicker when the inspiration comes.
Mother Earth Mother Board is a great example of storytelling. I was using him as a sidestep from Crichton, given that's where the author is saying he's at.
HG Wells or Margaret Atwood would also be good places to start, when looking for examples of the craft of short-story writing.
I am a professional artist and I have found it very helpful to track my work at the resolution of a half an hour. I can quote prices with confidence that I’ll make a decent wage for the time I expect them to take. I can look at how much time I’ve spent so far and decide it’s time to stop noodling on one part and make sure other parts don’t get neglected before I do a final polish pass. I can experiment with new working methods and see if the get me to something that meets my standards faster, once I get used to them. It helps me keep my life from being dominated by projects that sprawl out of control, too.
It may not be relevant to anyone looking at the final art how long it took, but it’s super relevant to me. And keeping similar data is relevant to anyone who wants to try and make a serious go at doing a thing.
I'd love for fiction writing to be better, generally, but if you're looking to make a career of writing—which of those made/makes the most money?
[EDIT] Incidentally, I'd put Stephenson on about the same level as Crichton. Worse in some respects, better in others.
Why does "making money" have anything to do with producing art or working on a craft you love? Virtually every fine artist we now regard as a genius didn't make real money in their lifetime. The people selling their art retroactively make the money.
It’s okay to just not like a story you know.
