The Internet is full of seemingly contradictory advice regarding exactly how much stuff you need to write before you'll accumulate an archive large enough to make a living. So whether you're trying for that 20-books-to-easy-street, or you're trying to peg exactly how big your audience has to be in order for you to make a living, I want to take a moment to throw a particularly large bucket of water right in your face.
Because the answer is very simple... you have to make as much as it takes.
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| It is, unfortunately, the answer no one wants to hear. |
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Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!
No Man Knows The Day (And Only Liars Say They Do)
There's a reference to the end of days in the Bible that tells readers no man knows when that time draws nigh. Anyone who claims they know is either a liar, or a charlatan. This is something all the folks panicking on rapture-tok should have kept in mind, but it's also worth remembering for when it comes to making a living as a writer, artist, or professional creator of any stripe.
Because there is no guarantee. Your success could come with your next release, or the one after that, or the one after that. It might not come until you've been rotting in the grave for 20 years, and people rediscover your work. It might never come at all. There's no way to know.
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| Buy from living authors. In case you had doubts for some reason. |
Now, as I've said before on this blog, the more swings you take, the more likely you are to be successful. The more books you write, the more videos you make, the more articles you compose, the better and better your chances are of finding an audience. That is not what's in dispute here. What is in dispute, though, are people who claim they have a system, that they can tell you exactly what you need to do to be successful, and that they know exactly how much stuff you need to make in order for you to get paid.
And that's a lie for two reasons.
The first, and most obvious, is that not every author is going to create the same kind of work. Everyone is writing their own books in their own style, and just because one author managed to finally start cashing checks when they released their 5th, or 10th, or 20th book, that's no guarantee that someone else is going to achieve the same feat.
The second reason, though, is that the environment has likely shifted between when one author managed a particular feat, and them giving this advice. The world is constantly changing, and what worked yesterday isn't going to work today, and by tomorrow it will actively harm you. It's the same reason you can't use the same social media strategy today that you would have used 5 years ago, why email newsletters haven't been a viable strategy for a decade, and why you can't just write another book and trust your publisher to handle the rest... the world has moved on since then.
These promises have taken all sorts of forms over the years. When I started off this blog, it was that you needed 400 posts before you had enough regular traffic to generate ad revenue. And guess what? The entire ad structure of the Internet shifted so badly that making money from ads became impossible. I've seen folks swear by the 20 novels formula, saying that if you get 20 books out on the market that will give you enough penetration that you'll build a following. Alice Liddell, who runs the YouTube channel Alice The Author, has over 30 books on the market, and she's scraping by just as hard as I am, if not harder some months. There are people who swear that once you hit 10,000 followers on Instagram it's all easy street from there, or that if you can build your YouTube archive to 100 videos and 5,000 subscribers or more that you'll be able to start coasting.
We need to recognize all these promises for what they are... piss in the wind.
Just like how crash diets and bro science swear up and down that if you do this cleanse, or adopt that workout routine that you're guaranteed to hit your goals, you should be extremely suspicious of anyone promising that once you release a certain number of projects that you'll be able to kick up your feet and relax.
Because as of right now I have half a dozen books on the market. I have over 200 roleplaying game supplements, including the full RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic. I've made over a hundred videos for YouTube over the past several years. I've put out over 300 articles in my Vocal.Media archive, and thousands of posts on my two blogs. It's a rather impressive amount of work, in my opinion, but when it comes to coin of the realm, it's all just barely enough to scrape by on rent in government housing. With a roommate.
If You Want Us To Succeed, We Need Your Help
I've said this a dozen times or more before, but it's worth repeating. You, as the creator, cannot force your own success. You can write dozens of books, produce massive series of stories, or put together several long-running podcasts... but if no one watches them, reads them, or buys them, then you won't earn anything for them.
The only thing that gets authors paid is audience effort and interaction. Period. Because if 10,000 people all went out today and bought my cat noir books Marked Territory and Painted Cats, that would give me a bigger payday than I've had in 15 years. I would be able to rest, relax, and slow down for the first time in a decade. And if 25,000 people all decided to go and check out The A.L.I.C.E. Files and watch the episodes we have up so far? That would monetize the channel with a finger snap, and get money rolling in to help with expansions.
If people decided to keep buying my books and RPG supplements, and watching my videos even if I stopped making things tomorrow, I would still get paid for that consumption. And if I keep making things at a fever pace until I drop dead, but no one reads it, watches it, or buys copies, then I'm never going to get paid.
It doesn't matter how much you make... it matters what people interact with. No audience, no money. But for most of us it's a lot easier to focus on writing X number of books, or making Y number of videos, than it is to actually try to expand our audience. But if you want money, you don't need more books; you need people to read the ones you've already written while you work on the sequels.
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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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