Recently, a new writer in a group came to us with gossip (unsourced news) that he’d heard an unspecified someone was quitting writing, as they’d concluded that after 5 years, they weren’t making the money they’d expected, and it was just a very expensive hobby.
Without naming the alleged quitter, the genre he is in, the books he writes, or what he has or hasn’t done for marketing, the newbie wanted to know what “they did wrong”…
So, time for a reality check.
Let’s look at indie games on Steam.
A game that earns $10,000 gross, lifetime revenue would be in the 68th percentile. That means that game did better than almost 3/4 of all games on Steam. Yet, Valve will consider it an underperforming game. The visibility fulcrum is at $250,000, which happens at 91.5th percentile. Once your game earns somewhere around $250,000, the Steam algorithm starts to show you in more places and you can maybe ask Valve for some special featuring.
That’s right… you have to be in the top 9% of all games on steam before you get discoverability.
Source here: https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/11/28/the-median-indie-game-does-not-earn-a-whole-lot/
Now let’s look at indie musicians.
90% of all artists fail to make it big. 45.6 million tracks on Spotify had zero streams in 2023, and 158.6 million tracks received less than 1,000 plays.
In the Kindle store… we don’t know how many books there are, because if you don’t sell in long enough, Amazon delists your book rank. A book that sells 1 copy a day holds around 100,000 in the kindle store… but that’s only saying you’re 100,000 from the top, not how many total there are. Current estimate is that there are around 12 million ebooks on the Kindle store.
Which means that a book that sells 1 copy a day is doing better than 11,900,000 other books out there…
This business is hard.
Success is not the default. The Pareto Distribution is real.
And as always, there is an element of luck involved.
This isn’t to say luck is the only factor – it’s not, and the harder you work, the more product you put out, the more you learn, the more likely you are to get lucky. The vast majority of youtube creators put out less than 10 pieces of content. The vast majority of kindle authors put out less than 10 stories.
But to say “This person didn’t achieve the level of success they wanted in the time frame they wanted” is not to say that the person did something wrong.
They might just be normal.
They might even be better than average… but their goals were set for the equivalent of the Olympics.
Self-pub and indie-pub have allowed far, far more authors to make money, and far more people to make a decent living, than before… but that’s not the same as the “average” author, whether mean, median, or mode, making a decent living year after year.
So cut yourself some slack, and write the next story… but don’t quit your day job.
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Survivorship Bias”
This business is -so- hard one might almost suspect an arrangement…
That’s why I don’t check sales numbers anymore. I know it isn’t selling. I know it won’t sell. That’s fine with me.
I write my books for myself. If I publish a few, that’s so that other people can have a go too. I was told right off the jump that I’d have “dozens of sales” and that has proven to the true.
The few people who have bought my stories liked them, with the exception of a couple of Lefties who did me the favor of leaving 2* reviews. When a Lefty says he hated that the nerd gets the girl, that’s a +5 review to me. ~:D
I’d -love- it if they actually sold. That would be sweet. But if they don’t, and only a couple hundred people like them, oh well.
How is it an expensive hobby?
Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of writers would do better thinking of it as a hobby than career but as someone who also enjoys board games and card games….
Writing is WAY cheaper. You can buy paper and pens for pennies. There’s free word processors for any computer you use.
Writing is probably the cheapest hobby I can think of. The tools of it are now practically free, the only requirement is time.
The act of writing may be an extremely inexpensive hobby, but publishing, especially at a professional level, is not. Just as the act of playing a game is inexpensive, but purchasing the games and accoutrement so you can play anytime you want and get good at it is not.
Well, to be fair, publishing like most of life is always a money/time tradeoff. You can do everything yourself to a professional quality on cheap or free tools, but you’re going to spend a lot more time gaining enough expertise and doing it… by which I mean several thousand man-hours.
The person asking the question gave us 0, none, zilch, nada, nothing in the way of background information, so I have no way of knowing how much money the person he’s talking about spent. But I can take a guess that they probably had vellum to make publishing easier, and likely bought their cover art ($50-$5000/cover, depending), an unknown amount spent on research books and courses (covering both the story research and marketing/business research), and quite possibly, if they intended it to be a business from the outset, the cost of a business license, of a CPA, of accounting software… some people even pick up a virtual assistant…
And this is even before we get into marketing costs like advertising on Facebook, Amazon, Twitter/Instagram, producing booktok videos and instagram posts, swag, booth space at conventions and booth materials…
Advertising is not a single learning curve, but an entire toolbox of tools that each comes with its own learning curve, of varying usefulness when tackling a market whose attention is short and effectiveness of any time varies wildly even when used expertly.
Oh hey Dorothy (big fan of you and Peter), you make a fair point. Though there is a running gag in many hobbies about “crack being cheaper.”
And yeah. Time is always the dividng line. Absolutely an understatement there.
Thank you! Glad to have entertained!
Just to make you laugh:
At one point, I had an enlightening chat with a very interesting gent of checkered background. He patted his airplane (bought new, lovely bird), and said ruefully, “I ran the numbers. My cocaine habit was cheaper than flying.”
I nodded, and looked fondly my ancient but well-kept-up bird (We’d been making mutually appreciative noises at each other’s planes). “Slightly less likely to kill you, though.”
He made a rueful noise of agreement, and sighed. “Yeah. Now I have to take good care of myself and think everything through… don’t snort coke. Tears up your sinuses for the rest of your life, and then it’s hell to deal with the infections when you’re changing altitudes in large amounts.”
Every now and then, I wish I’d asked him for the raw numbers. Because when I look at what some folks spend on Warhammer 40K, I have to wonder…
My spouse one year checked the numbers between keeping my Luscombe 8A and her Irish Wolfhounds. The Luscombe was cheaper. Probably not every year, but that year, yeah.
Ah yeah. Warhammer isn’t for the faint of wallet.
I think tvtropes once had a running list of totals.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrackIsCheaper
I could probably do some calculations myself for my efforts which is why I’m like…. “of all my hobbies, writing is the cheapest.” LoL
I’ve seen the Warhammer 40K models for sale at a local comics/game store, and dear Lord. I keep wanting to see one of their ‘Titan’ models (the biggest in the game) just to see how far back my eyes would roll at both the price and the realization that there are fans willing to meet it. Do these people sell their own internal organs on the black market to afford them?
Lots of people are switching to 3D printing. There are some pirated models to be found, of course, but there are also lots of models out there from legitimate companies with deals like “at a $10 per month subscription, you get all the models we release that month”. E.g., One Page Rules makes high-quality minis, many of which could easily be played with Warhammer rules. (Wouldn’t be legal in tournaments, of course, since GW only allows official GW products in tournaments that they run, but far more people play for fun than play competitively).
I rather suspect, but can’t prove, that part of why GW’s prices have been going up the past few years is because they’re starting to lose sales to people 3D printing competitors’ models, and they’re trying to maintain revenue by charging more to fewer customers. Which might work in the short term, but isn’t sustainable long-term.
But yeah, Warhammer players who buy the official models tend to be people with high incomes (e.g., tech professions) and low(-ish) expenses (e.g., single or childless so they don’t have kids’ schooling to pay for, that kind of thing). Lots of exceptions exist, but there’s a reason why the demographic you meet at Warhammer stores tends generally to lean in one direction. The Youtubers I’ve seen who paint minis with their kids are also the ones I’ve seen talking about their resin 3D printers and how much cheaper it is to print a whole army than to buy the same number of models from GW. (You can pay the cost of the printer and still save money, if you’re printing model-heavy armies like the Human Defense Force — the One Page Rules name for the army that most closely matches the playstyle of GW’s Imperial Guard: lots and lots of troops backed up by tanks and artillery).
It’s also rumored that part of GW’s efforts is move WH to more of a franchise since 3D printing is going to cut into their profits so much.
Which is a shame since they could lean into it. I’ve seen websites where you can design your own models on them (for anything, not just WH) and buy a 3d printer file for like….$5 or less.
There’s a reason why One Page Rules (who make the game Grimdark Future, meant to feel like “Warhammer 40K playable in just one hour”) is taking off in popularity. They produce their own line of 3D printed models, and for $10 a month (I think) you can subscribe to their Patreon and get every model they produce during your subscription. (And they often put out 30+ models per month). Since each model costs between 50 cents and 2-3 dollars to print depending on size, if you’re doing any kind of wargaming where you field 40-50 models in an army than you’ll save money even taking the cost of a $500 printer into account. And many 3D printers can be had for a lot less than $500 these days.
And, of course, there’s always the possibility of being the sucker for a particular purchase.
The chap in question DID do something wrong … he entered a game without understanding the rules and with unrealistic expectations. In the self-publishing biz doing everything right doesn’t guarantee success, or even a fair chance, it just means you’re out there with your kite in the air in case lightning strikes.
A mistake is anything which would preclude receiving that bolt, or seriously diminish its likelihood: only flying your kite on sunny days, neglecting to incorporate wire into your kite-string.
There are things you can do to enhance your chances, too. You might fly a metallic kite, covered in foil rather than tissue, you could fly multiple kites at once, you could opt to fly your kites when the weather looks favorable for electrostatic activity. Still no guarantee your kite gets zapped.
Writing a great book doesn’t mean anyone will read even a page of it. But not writing ensures no one will read any of it. Indie publishing’s a lottery and you can’t play if you don’t buy a ticket or two. But unlike actual lotteries, your ticket doesn’t necessarily expire – it sits out there waiting for somebody to pick up one of your books, like it, and say ‘Gee, I wonder what else this person has written?’ or even tell people that this book by Unknown Author was loads of fun.
and BTW – all hobbies are expensive, in money, in time, or both. If nothing else they take time away from sitting and praying to [your deity here] for forgiveness of your sin, your failure, your miserable worthlessness.
TXRed as Moderator: RES, this is different enough from your second and a half comment that it is worth rescuing from the File of No Return.
Thank you – it got lost while I was logging in, having been an irregular poster here (a problem increasing alongside my years) and although I had the experience to copy it for pasting if log-in issues occurred … well, as you can see, somehow what pasted was the mono comment “expire” (which is not in my immediate plans as a thing to do.)
I realized I had scant chance to recreate the post and, believing it gone into the void, essayed a briefer summation of the key point.
Sigh.
‘preciative Rgrds,
RES
expire
Well, that certainly wasn’t what I intended to post…
Of course that chap did something wrong: he entered a game he didn’t understand, didn’t appreciate the rules of and failed to learn those rules. He thought that writing a good book and putting it out there was what the bookselling game was, as if fishing were as simple as putting a worm on a hook and dropping it into the water.
All hobbies are expensive, either in money, in time, or both. If nothing else they consume time you could have spent sitting and praying to [Your Deity Here] to forgive your sins/grant you favors/overlook your insignificance. Although if your deity is nonexistent that, too, becomes an expensive hobby.
Rgrds,
RES
and yet. Spotify decided to save themselves a bunch of money by not paying out when your track has less than a thousand plays…
So far my books are doing far better than I had anticipated, so I’m pretty happy. Not giving up the day job anytime soon though. 🤣
On the down side, I just trashed an entire chapter in Book 4 because I didn’t like where it was leading. Parts of it may return elsewhere though.
Left a couple of comments which, as usual, seem to have gotten spam-binned.
TXRed as Mod: They did. They are now free to roam. WPDE and so on.
My experience is making $3000-$5000 a year writing is pretty easy. I have earned at least that much since the late 1990s. Getting to $15K reliably is difficult. The choke point tends to be finding enough paying markets to reliably earn over $5000 per year.
For years my writing was demand-limited (paying markets) rather than supply-limited (words available from me). That was a big reason I never quit the day job. I simply could not sell enough to fill 60 hours a week of writing and could max out my markets weekends and evenings with plenty of time left for family. Besides, the day job – while stressful – was interesting. I was bumping along making $10K-15K and working full time.
Then 2020 came along and the day job left me. I also had a perfect storm of contracts and not enough time to write them. The previous year I had gotten to the point where the demand for my work exceeded the time available to write. (Even though it had expanded. The kids were grown and out of the house and my wife had died in 2018. I was filling the void by staying busy through writing.)
In 2019 I booked more work than I could finish in 2020 while working full time because I was afraid to say no when opportunity called. So getting laid off (I was working for an airline) proved a blessing by giving me enough time to meet my obligations. I delivered all the writing I had been contracted to do and slipped in another book because I had time available. I also landed several remote short-term tech writing gigs. I ended the year with more money in the bank than I started the year with. I think I hit $20K that year.
In 2021 I ended up back at NASA working full time. But I continued writing in off hours and had figured out my limits working full-time at a day job and writing weekends and evenings. I am currently making around $25K a year, word-limited rather than demand-limited. I suspect that is as much as many full-time writers get annually.
Yes, there are exceptions, but the pay distribution curve for writers resembles an exponential curve with the vast majority making $3K-$5K some making $2k-$50K and a small fraction at the far end (call it the 97th percentile on up) making from what a well-paid engineer or lawyer gets to what top tier professional athletes get. If I quit the day job and wrote full time I suspect I would top out at $35K. (Which with a pension and full 70+ Social Security would make for a comfortable lifestyle.)
My point is even getting to $20K/year was a 24-year slog. You don’t write with the expectation of getting rich. Some can argue it is a hobby, but at least for me it is a hobby that brings in as much as a serious golfer would spend in a year.
I made enough to put three sons through college (although that was a lot easier from 1995-2015 when my kids were in college – tuition had only gotten totally crazy in the last five years of that). It kept me out of the bars and at home, which my late wife appreciated.
It might have been easier to get started in the 1990s than it is today. I started out writing for magazines, and did not write a book until 2002. I don’t know how viable that rout is today.