from Hacker News

Why most non-fiction authors don't make any money

by rjyoungling on 4/16/21, 10:00 AM with 140 comments

  • by SunlightEdge on 4/17/21, 9:48 PM

    Unfortunately most writers of fiction make next to nothing too. Writers often are not happy writing either (unlike painters and video artists who seem to have a whale of a time).

    Sadly I toiled for 8 years on a novel (while working a day job). It was a massive effort.

    It might be hard for people to understand but I felt I had to write it (i.e. writers curse).

    I wish I had spent all that time on studying programming etc. Unfortunately humans are not fully rational. I actually like my novel. But it wasn't worth it.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Get-Restart-Jack-Gowan-ebook/dp...

    But hey that's life. Shrug.

    Writers should just write for the pleasure of writing and expect that the majority won't make it. It's about as likely as winning the lottery

  • by fighterpilot on 4/17/21, 10:18 PM

    Authors have the same problem as musicians. Their work has zero marginal replication cost, zero distribution cost, low barriers to entry and they're competing for finite attention.

    What invariably happens then is the top 0.1 percent of output is duplicated and sold to hundreds of millions of customers and that eats up all of the attention bandwidth for that vertical. It's the ultimate winner take all setup.

    Contrast this to the prospect of running a successful restaurant that is fundamentally limited by geography. No matter how well it serves region A, region B, C, D, etc is still up for grabs. A franchise can try to duplicate its success, but it's much more costly than a successful author making endless free digital copies of their work.

  • by Finnucane on 4/17/21, 9:05 PM

    He doesn't seem to understand what a royalty is. He quotes himself saying "To compensate for their 85% share of the royalties, a publisher needs to sell at least 5x more copies for you to break even [compared to self-publishing]." As the lady on the tv says, that's not how any of this works. In trade publishing at least, the author's royalty is a percentage of the cover price of the book. In normal retail selling, the publisher gets maybe 50-55% of the cover price in revenue, out of which they have to pay you and also all of their costs of producing your book.

  • by strogonoff on 4/18/21, 9:21 AM

    On #1 “Signing with a publisher before you have leverage”, a bit from an episode[0] of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Founder’s Field Guide podcast stuck with me.

    > If you ask questions of an industry and they won't tell you the answer, that's always a good sign that someone's getting very wealthy. In publishing, if you ask an author, ask any author, how much did it cost to print the book? What are your COGS? They will not know. Ask any literary agent that question and they'll think you're off your rocker. Ask any publisher to give you that information transparently and they will rip up your contract.

    > So call the printers in China, pick your favorite book, find out some print brokers here in the US, and say, "What did the printing of those books cost? Send me a spreadsheet." And when they do and you find out that a $50 retail book cost about $2 to print, and you're going to get 10% of [off?] cover price, they're requiring that you order 5,000 for your own list and they're going to give you a quarter of a million dollar advance, you realize that there's no way they've taken no risk at all.

    Interestingly, the person speaking was in the restaurant business… There’s quite a bit of insight in that episode.

    [0] https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/20135760/kokonas-know-...

  • by zrail on 4/17/21, 10:28 PM

    The comments here are incredibly harsh. As someone who has self published two books, quite a lot of this resonates with me.

    First book addressed a timely topic but ultimately aged out very quickly and I got burnt out trying to keep up with updates. It made roughly $80,000 in lifetime sales, of which I kept 96% (credit card fees + hosting overhead).

    Second book addressed a broader niche but fell into several of the traps he describes and only made $3000.

    I will likely buy his book and try to apply it on either a revision of book two or something new.

  • by DubiousPusher on 4/17/21, 9:21 PM

    > It’s because Hemingway’s Boat is broadly “about” a topic, whereas The War of Art promises—and delivers—an outcome.

    I certaintly don't know a damn thing about selling books. But I am an avid reader of nonfiction and this is exactly the opposite of how I shop for books myself.

    Other than the odd "how-to", I'm skeptical of any book promising me anything other than the author's diligent study and incisive distillation of a topic. I've read many books which caused my mind to grow and really excited me about the world but I've never read a book that "solved my problem". Of which, I assure you, I have many.

  • by krmmalik on 4/17/21, 9:20 PM

    I'm an author of a non-fiction book. I self-published. My book has a 5-star rating to date even though it was published nearly 5 years ago. My book meets most of the criteria laid out in this book. I even had both a publisher and distributor approach me and I had plenty leverage. Despite all that, I didn't get the book sales I wanted nor the PR.

    Everyone that reads my book is surprised to hear it's not topping the charts or plastered everywhere my audience hangs out. My book beat out all the competition when it came out in terms of reviews.

    While the points in this post are valid, I don't believe they get to the bottom of what holds back sales.

    Frankly, I don't know what the answer is -- I have a vague idea of what it could be but I haven't had a chance to try those things. Perhaps if my book had been in all airport bookstores a few years ago, it might have taken off (no pun intended) like Tim Ferriss' book but who knows.

  • by yesenadam on 4/17/21, 10:22 PM

    I enjoyed this, I thought it mostly made good points, and it linked to other articles I will look at. Yet..

    I started reading a blogger who teaches how to make a successful blog, sells courses about it, etc. I soon realized her blog is just about her making money from promising to help you make money from your blog. A frighteningly vacuous operation. It seems a modern cousin to the old ad in magazines promising to reveal the secret to wealth for $20. When you write to the given address you get a letter back saying "Do as I do." It's a pyramid operation.

    Writing books about writing books seems similar. Selling the dream of high sales when you write on other topics, when their books are the same "making money from promising to help you make money" from your book seems a bit fishy, has a scammy element. It's more than a lil "Do as I do."

  • by okareaman on 4/17/21, 8:20 PM

    Shouldn't #5 be "not promoting your book effectively" because he's clearly promoting his book effectively. I think this is fine if fame and fortune are your goal, which is an unquestioned assumption for a lot of people, but there are other reasons to write a book, which he does not address.

  • by ed25519FUUU on 4/17/21, 8:40 PM

    It seems to me that virtually everyone going into the creative fields (art, music, writing, acting) should enter that field without any expectation to make a living from it.

    We pay other people to do things that aren’t fun for us, not the other way around.

  • by gbourne on 4/17/21, 10:05 PM

    I got a publishing contract with a larger publisher to write a book on Agile (10 years ago, didn't end up publishing, long story).

    I know that amazing feeling the author mentions of getting a "yes", while totally ignoring that at best I was going to make pennies. If I recall it was 10% after all publishing costs were paid for. However, I had a full time job, so this was for-the-love-of-it rather than as a real source of income.

  • by cryptica on 4/17/21, 10:29 PM

    The real reason why most non-fiction authors don't make a profit is because only scam topics which sell a dream but don't add any real value can make any profit in our current scam economy.

    Self-help gurus, spiritual charlatans, snake-oil salesmen, get-rich-quick con men, corporate consultants, slick marketing experts; these are the people who are making profit in our scam economy.

    Just focus your energy on a fucking scam and you will make money by the boatload. You don't need a long article to tell you that. Just open your eyes and look around.

    It's not just writing which is affected; every 'intellectual' industry is affected; art, music, science, politics, technology... All the successful people are scammers. That's why you can't find any good content anywhere these days. The shit always floats to the top. The media is concentrating all our attention on the shit and away from the good stuff.

    Also, the rich people who are running the show are morons with no taste and 0 intellect.

  • by perlgeek on 4/18/21, 7:43 AM

    Step 1: sell 10k copies of your book through self-publishing.

    Step 0: already be successful at marketing or be well-known.

    There are certainly some valid points, but his solution pre-supposes that you already know your marketing.

    So the actual steps would be:

    * consistently produce good content for several years, build an audience (and an email list, as quaint as it sounds)

    * write a book, self-publish it

    * promote the out of it

    * THEN try to get a publisher on board

  • by k__ on 4/17/21, 8:59 PM

    Having the right publisher is probably the most important.

    I can recommend https://newline.co

    I wrote a book with them and made enough to pay my rent for over a year with the money I made.

  • by darthrupert on 4/18/21, 10:29 AM

    I wrote a mediocre book on a popular programming language, and have gotten something like 10-20keuros. It took a year to write it, dunno how many hours, but probably not a very good hourly pay.

  • by currymj on 4/17/21, 9:19 PM

    how much are these numbers skewed by academic monographs? these are books that are basically going to be sold only to university libraries, which might explain why they sell <500 copies.

    there are many such books where no author ever expects to make money -- they have other incentives due to the way academia is organized.

  • by ng12 on 4/17/21, 8:50 PM

    So 3/4 of the tips are: write a book people want to read?

  • by m01 on 4/18/21, 1:07 PM

    I enjoyed reading the article. However, I think the author is over-generalising a bit with targeting this at "non-fiction" authors. #1 & #2 are perhaps broadly aplicable, but #3 & #4 seem more geared towards self-help books, books about management and the like. I suspect people who read a memoir, an auto-biography, an eulogy or about true crime may well be interested in reading about a topic rather than looking for actionable advice?

  • by nottorp on 4/18/21, 7:50 AM

    ... because most non fiction books are wrote as a product to make money, not to communicate something useful to the reader?

  • by crecker on 4/17/21, 8:35 PM

  • by mkoubaa on 4/18/21, 11:41 AM

    All the money is in substack these days. Maybe there could be a startup that anthologizes substacks into print books with low margins but high volume

  • by 07121941 on 4/17/21, 8:34 PM

    Fantastic advice. Now all I've got to do is write