Robin, I read all sorts of genres and styles, from spicy comedy shorts to some really hard core things, just to see what might interest me. I remember reading one short story on an adult stories site that was interesting, and then went back to read some other stories by this writer (most were in the adult fantasy/scifi genre).
I later found these same stories on Amazon, with the author's real name, selling for $9.99+! When I broke down and bought one of the eBooks, I compared it to the copy I had saved from the adult site and it was word-for-word the same exact story! There were no adds/deletes/changes that I could detect! The copy from the adult site was free, the Amazon copy cost $10 plus tax!
How a writer can go from one style (free) to getting paid on 'Zon is beyond my understanding, but it worked for this writer. Can it work for Jade or others, sorry, my crystal ball is very dirty and cracked right now!
Yeah, I've only published that one volume on Amazon, so I don't know? Sometimes, authors do get their work put on other sites without their consent and it's hard to know because some authors do post their work in different places. And maybe the opposite can happen? But having a book up on different sites under different names seems unusual?
From what I know, selling on Amazon can be tough. It depends on what genre your in and when I've looked (not recently) I can't recall seeing any essay collections like Jade writes or some other people here on Substack I've seen. I've worked with more than a few authors over the years, mostly in straight romance, and none of them have sold much on Amazon either. Riley sells a lot less than I feel she should, but she sells more than other authors I know, and she works super-hard at it (not that other authors I know haven't).
So it's a really difficult situation and very few authors make much financially; enough to support themselves. I'd say less than 1 in a thousand, at a guess. Given the amount of time writing takes, and all the other stuff independent authors do -- editing, making covers, trying to promote, jumping through hoops to get published, dealing with platforms trying to silence us -- my guess is it's probably the lowest paid profession there it. Which sucks.
For perspective, I'll just add, even though this is from 8 to 10 years ago. The authors I worked with usually paid for editing and covers. Professional editing and proofing cost about 1 cent per word, sometimes a bit less. For a novel that often was 75,000 words, this would be about $750, rarely as low as $600. A professionally designed cover back then, using a stock image, was about $150 for both a kindle and print cover. Some writers bought release packages from different services that cost maybe $200 to $400, but could run into the thousands.
So it wasn't unusual for an author to spend almost $1000 to publish a book. The lifetime earnings of a book, since sales dropped off a lot after 2 or 3 months back then (and I think they still do) were a few hundred dollars in many cases.
One author who was a client of mine, and a pretty well known journalist, spent over $20,000 launching her first novel and got onto a bunch of podcasts and everything else to promote it. It never got into the top 100,000 in Amazon's sales rankings, which meant at the time it wasn't getting much more than a sale per day then.
I know 2 authors from then who are is still writing, but one makes her living doing other things. The other is doing well enough to still be publishing after 11 years, which is pretty impressive. And of course authors who don't pay for editing and covers at least get paid something, even if it's small.
But the bottom line is that a lot of writers pay a lot of money to write. I can't think of another profession where that's true. (Musicians might come close?)
Robin, I read all sorts of genres and styles, from spicy comedy shorts to some really hard core things, just to see what might interest me. I remember reading one short story on an adult stories site that was interesting, and then went back to read some other stories by this writer (most were in the adult fantasy/scifi genre).
I later found these same stories on Amazon, with the author's real name, selling for $9.99+! When I broke down and bought one of the eBooks, I compared it to the copy I had saved from the adult site and it was word-for-word the same exact story! There were no adds/deletes/changes that I could detect! The copy from the adult site was free, the Amazon copy cost $10 plus tax!
How a writer can go from one style (free) to getting paid on 'Zon is beyond my understanding, but it worked for this writer. Can it work for Jade or others, sorry, my crystal ball is very dirty and cracked right now!
Yeah, I've only published that one volume on Amazon, so I don't know? Sometimes, authors do get their work put on other sites without their consent and it's hard to know because some authors do post their work in different places. And maybe the opposite can happen? But having a book up on different sites under different names seems unusual?
From what I know, selling on Amazon can be tough. It depends on what genre your in and when I've looked (not recently) I can't recall seeing any essay collections like Jade writes or some other people here on Substack I've seen. I've worked with more than a few authors over the years, mostly in straight romance, and none of them have sold much on Amazon either. Riley sells a lot less than I feel she should, but she sells more than other authors I know, and she works super-hard at it (not that other authors I know haven't).
So it's a really difficult situation and very few authors make much financially; enough to support themselves. I'd say less than 1 in a thousand, at a guess. Given the amount of time writing takes, and all the other stuff independent authors do -- editing, making covers, trying to promote, jumping through hoops to get published, dealing with platforms trying to silence us -- my guess is it's probably the lowest paid profession there it. Which sucks.
For perspective, I'll just add, even though this is from 8 to 10 years ago. The authors I worked with usually paid for editing and covers. Professional editing and proofing cost about 1 cent per word, sometimes a bit less. For a novel that often was 75,000 words, this would be about $750, rarely as low as $600. A professionally designed cover back then, using a stock image, was about $150 for both a kindle and print cover. Some writers bought release packages from different services that cost maybe $200 to $400, but could run into the thousands.
So it wasn't unusual for an author to spend almost $1000 to publish a book. The lifetime earnings of a book, since sales dropped off a lot after 2 or 3 months back then (and I think they still do) were a few hundred dollars in many cases.
One author who was a client of mine, and a pretty well known journalist, spent over $20,000 launching her first novel and got onto a bunch of podcasts and everything else to promote it. It never got into the top 100,000 in Amazon's sales rankings, which meant at the time it wasn't getting much more than a sale per day then.
I know 2 authors from then who are is still writing, but one makes her living doing other things. The other is doing well enough to still be publishing after 11 years, which is pretty impressive. And of course authors who don't pay for editing and covers at least get paid something, even if it's small.
But the bottom line is that a lot of writers pay a lot of money to write. I can't think of another profession where that's true. (Musicians might come close?)