Hmm…interesting.
Partially, it is discouraging. When you see a low number like 40, why bother?
Partially, it is validating. I always beat myself up for not fully going for it as a writer – i.e. I tell myself “If you’d of just thrown caution to the wind and gave writing your all instead of playing itself and getting a day job…”
Then another part of me asks what is the definition of success? If I can take in an extra $10,000 in income, that’d probably be enough to motivate me to write in my spare time into perpetuity.
I hope there will be a rise in middle class writers – i.e. people who are able to take in 50,000 a year with their writing. They won’t get rich but they won’t be in the poorhouse either. Writing seems like a rich or poorhouse proposition without much middle in between. Hopefully that changes.
The cat is out of the bag, finally we know exactly how many self-published authors make it big: 40.
Yes, that’s not a typo.
40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t. This interesting statistic, recently revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that self-published authors are not doing any better elsewhere.
“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that, and have even gone on to establishing their own publishing house, like Meredith Wild. Her story is fully reported in the New York Times, here, and well worth pondering over.
That story reveals some further nuggets about the current…
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Bookshelf Battle 