What Is A Living?
(Note; this is a continuation of the post I wrote yesterday on 20 Books to $50k. It’s Part Two of Three, and it’ll help if you read yesterday’s post first.)
Amongst the hustlers, grifters and success stories of various authenticity, there are a lot of figures flying around. It seems that with fiction authors as well as any other genre of professional advice, that’s the case. Some people say you need to make six-figures a year, others that you can move to Cambodia and live like a king on $2,000 a month, and others will spend $90,000 on ads to make $100,000 and claim that’s a six-figure income.
Here’s my recommendation:
- You can call it “a living” if you make the median income for where you live
- Income is the income you have at the end; gross profit if you like. That’s how it works for employees.
- When projecting, you have to use as close to real figures as you can get
So, for instance, in today’s research, a lot of the people espousing 20 books to 50k used figures like, “If you charge $9.99 for a novel and make $7.10…” and that’s fine, except most novels aren’t charged at $9.99 for a digital copy. And if you’re using ads, obviously you don’t consider that part of your income because it’s not.
But let’s use some math for our figure. We’ll say $50,000 is the median income for the US. Depending on which figures you use, it’s not exact but it’s in the ballpark. For England, the wages are slightly lower, but we’ll use $50,000 anyway.
Average novel price is $4.99-6.99 as a digital sale on Amazon. For the sake of things, we’ll go with the higher price, subject Amazon’s 30% cut and then lazily round it to $5 as your royalty.
With one book, you have to sell 10,000 copies a year to hit $50,000. That’s a lot and you are very unlikely to achieve that with one book unless it’s some sort of runaway hit.
If you have 20 books, then each book has to sell $2,500 worth of books in a year. That’s 500 copies each. A lot more realistic, even at a passive marketing level with no ad spend.
We’ll talk about how you can make that easier on yourself. But first, let’s address an elephant in the room.
On Writing Craft
If you want to write 20 books as a concept thing to convince people you’re a Serious Author™ so you can make a living selling guides on how to write books, then your books don’t really have to be very good.
Let’s assume you’re a bit more of a high-brow, upstanding lady or gentleman, however, and you want to write 20 books that will sell fifty copies or so a month for years in perpetuity, thus making a noble living from your actual books and not selling the dream to others.
If that’s the case, then your books have to be good. They have to be good enough that people will read them, and preferably, so good that they’ll talk about them, recommend them and otherwise help continue the cycle of you selling your fifty copies a month. (Remember, that’s around two copies a day.)
Now, if you’re writing twenty, full-length novels, you’re getting a lot of practice in. So the good news is you’ll probably improve drastically as you do this challenge. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to bake this into the challenge by frontloading it with things you want to get better at:
- Writing scenes
- Writing dialogue
- Creating more memorable characters
As you go, you’ll inevitably find weaknesses. Make those a focus of the next book you write.
However, there’s also the direct response guy in me saying that, to go back to the challenge presented earlier in this section, we want our books to sell which means they need to be good and in terms of the publishing side of things, that means you want to write things that the audience want to read.
I differentiate that from writing to market. I consider writing to market to be picking what’s currently on trend and writing your version of that, copying the same style and beats. I don’t think that’s necessary. I do think that you need to have a deep understanding of what your target audience wants and how you’re going to use your writing to give it to them.
I’ll tell you more about this through example in the next article in this series, which I will post tomorrow.