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Post by ameliasmith on Aug 5, 2015 15:48:26 GMT -5
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Post by vrabinec on Aug 5, 2015 15:57:23 GMT -5
No riches? Crap. These people who make loads of money at this make it look so easy, I just figured that...
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Post by Daniel on Aug 5, 2015 16:15:50 GMT -5
No riches? Crap. These people who make loads of money at this make it look so easy, I just figured that... Don't be discouraged. The riches are there. All you have to do is follow one of the many paths to success as explained by the experts who have already done it themselves. It takes hard work, but success is pretty much guaranteed if you just do as they say. |
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Post by Becca Mills on Aug 5, 2015 23:46:57 GMT -5
Yikes. Is there anyplace where the data is aggregated? No way can I digest a 1600-line spreadsheet!
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Post by ameliasmith on Aug 6, 2015 5:43:54 GMT -5
I'm aggregating it a bit, but probably not the way HH would have. I used the spreadsheet program to help digest it, and yeah, it's a lot of data.
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Post by ameliasmith on Aug 7, 2015 22:16:47 GMT -5
Well, here it is. ameliasmith.net/an-analysis-of-the-author-earnings-survey-data/ My blog kept reverting this to an earlier version so I figured I'd better hit "publish" before I turned in for the night. My bar graphs are not the best, but I'm very new at this level of spreadsheet wrangling. Let me know if you have any suggestions before I mention this over at KBoards. My brain is mush. |
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Post by Suzy on Aug 8, 2015 10:08:51 GMT -5
Amelia, as this your blogpost, I have to move it to the blog section.
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Post by lou on Aug 10, 2015 9:50:03 GMT -5
Amelia, I linked it off kboards and responded there. Great stuff.
I'm curious, if you don't consider answering this too personal...after posting at kboards, how many hits did you get on the blog post? It seemed so interesting and pertinent to me, I was hoping you got hundreds more than usual. (or thousands, or whatever would be a meaningful bump for you.)
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Post by ameliasmith on Aug 10, 2015 13:12:11 GMT -5
I got 249 hits on Saturday and 138 on Sunday. My average is about 20-30... so nothing to make the masses of unwashed writers too jealous! The big news is that I've been invited to be on Lindsay Buroker's podcast, which is super exciting for me, as it's one of the ones I follow regularly. The post has fallen off the radar at KBoards and we'll see if it shows up anywhere else.
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Post by Becca Mills on Aug 10, 2015 14:22:05 GMT -5
I got 249 hits on Saturday and 138 on Sunday. My average is about 20-30... so nothing to make the masses of unwashed writers too jealous! The big news is that I've been invited to be on Lindsay Buroker's podcast, which is super exciting for me, as it's one of the ones I follow regularly. The post has fallen off the radar at KBoards and we'll see if it shows up anywhere else. Wow, that's great about the podcast!  |
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Post by lou on Aug 10, 2015 15:14:12 GMT -5
That's terrific!
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Post by Deleted on Aug 10, 2015 15:44:13 GMT -5
I got 249 hits on Saturday and 138 on Sunday. My average is about 20-30... so nothing to make the masses of unwashed writers too jealous! The big news is that I've been invited to be on Lindsay Buroker's podcast, which is super exciting for me, as it's one of the ones I follow regularly. The post has fallen off the radar at KBoards and we'll see if it shows up anywhere else. That's so cool. I watch her every week. It's a great podcast. Congrats on you the invite  |
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Post by scdaffron on Aug 10, 2015 15:44:13 GMT -5
Congrats on the podcast! That's exciting. I also thought your blog post was really interesting and I'm impressed you combed through the data. Spreadsheets make me want to throw up. I was curious though what your conclusions were as far as your own career. Do you feel like you learned anything that might help you going forward? I mean, everyone always says "write more books" so that probably wasn't a new insight for you |
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Post by ameliasmith on Aug 10, 2015 17:11:09 GMT -5
Oh, gee. As far as my own career I'm swinging back and forth between feelings of futility and guarded optimism. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that all of those people with tons of books who aren't making any money are actually doing everything right. I mean, there is so much that you need to get right, from the story to the blurb and covers to the more active marketing, that it's practically impossible to get everything just right, especially not on the first or third or fifth try. And some people really are too bull-headed to recognize where they need to improve. I'm hoping I'm not one of them.
Right now, I'm feeling like maybe I can make a go of this, especially in the delicate interval between when my kids need lots of attention and when I'll be up to my neck in elder care issues with my parents. I'm hoping for a gap of a couple of years, maybe even a decade and a half, where I can really focus on my work more wholeheartedly.
And yeah, I'm super excited about the podcast. I've never been on one before!
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Post by Daniel on Aug 10, 2015 17:20:49 GMT -5
Have fun with the podcast! And congrats on the invite.
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Post by scdaffron on Aug 10, 2015 17:43:26 GMT -5
Oh, gee. As far as my own career I'm swinging back and forth between feelings of futility and guarded optimism. This is so me The more I think about it, the less sure I am that all of those people with tons of books who aren't making any money are actually doing everything right. I agree. I've read about so many people who had big success right out of the gate and pretty much said, "I have no idea what I did" or "I got lucky." Until later, when they decide they are brilliant, share their brilliance all over KBoards for a little while, and then finally proclaim that are now "ready" to sell a course for $5000 where they'll be happy to sell their secrets to the rest of us. I might be a tiny bit cynical though. |
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Post by Daniel on Aug 10, 2015 19:06:17 GMT -5
The more I think about it, the less sure I am that all of those people with tons of books who aren't making any money are actually doing everything right. I agree. I've read about so many people who had big success right out of the gate and pretty much said, "I have no idea what I did" or "I got lucky." Until later, when they decide they are brilliant, share their brilliance all over KBoards for a little while, and then finally proclaim that are now "ready" to sell a course for $5000 where they'll be happy to sell their secrets to the rest of us. Now, see, I read Amelia's comment the other way. I thought she was talking about the authors who have tons of books but DON'T have success. And that the reason they don't have success is because they may not be doing things right. I don't think that releasing tons of books guarantees success, and I don't think doing everything right guarantees success. I also don't think releasing tons of books AND doing everything right guarantees success, although I believe it increases the odds. |
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Post by scdaffron on Aug 10, 2015 20:02:02 GMT -5
Hmm, I read it that successful people aren't necessarily doing everything right, e.g. Hugh Howey had ugly covers to begin with. If I read that wrong, never mind Amelia |
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Post by lou on Aug 10, 2015 23:34:43 GMT -5
I don't think that releasing tons of books guarantees success, and I don't think doing everything right guarantees success. I also don't think releasing tons of books AND doing everything right guarantees success, although I believe it increases the odds I know I have very little experience in indie publishing compared to most people here, but I learned through listening to the experts and still repeat to others over and over: good blurb, professional cover, get it in the right category, try to get a bookbub ad, publish more than a couple books, ideally in a series. Brand your books and have a mailing list, linked in all your books. Be prepared to wait three years to build momentum. There you are, the keys to success as learned on Kboards and various indie blogs over the last few years. And yet my bad homemade covers for Gray are doing fine for me so far, and they were meant to be a stopgap measure only. (I was driven to do my own after having bad experiences with artists on the first book and being unable to find something right among premades.) So now I wonder, hmm, have I been giving out bad advice all along? Is there perhaps some appeal to an amateur--but not outright ridiculous--cover? Like readers hope they're finding a hidden gem...? Or is that every other PA novel looks much the same and mine at least looks different? I haven't figured it out. I don't know if anyone can figure it out. You might argue that these books would do much better with a great $500 cover, and maybe you're right, but there's really no way to run that experiment from the beginning to see if that would have been true. (Unless you have some quantum-universe-jumping doohicky you've been hiding away and can lend me.) I was intending to upgrade them, and now I'm half-afraid to because it's working okay like this. Oh, and the title really sucks, too, and I know it. So go figger. Why am I making a living wage at this after just a year? Why, despite all I've done "wrong?" Sorry if I rambled off topic, amelia, but I really do puzzle over this, nearly every day. I am saying "I have no idea what I did" and "I didn't follow all the rules" and "I got lucky," and I mean it. I really appreciate your trying to quantify what makes for success in your blog post. |
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Post by Becca Mills on Aug 11, 2015 0:16:31 GMT -5
I agree. I've read about so many people who had big success right out of the gate and pretty much said, "I have no idea what I did" or "I got lucky." Until later, when they decide they are brilliant, share their brilliance all over KBoards for a little while, and then finally proclaim that are now "ready" to sell a course for $5000 where they'll be happy to sell their secrets to the rest of us. Now, see, I read Amelia's comment the other way. I thought she was talking about the authors who have tons of books but DON'T have success. And that the reason they don't have success is because they may not be doing things right. I don't think that releasing tons of books guarantees success, and I don't think doing everything right guarantees success. I also don't think releasing tons of books AND doing everything right guarantees success, although I believe it increases the odds. You guys remember SM Reine's thread about how there are no "bad" books, but there are very "niche" books? To the degree that, in some cases, a book's audience might be, you know ... your Mom, and that's it? I think some of the folks who write 20 books but don't see any movement are in this situation: they're producing work that's very, very "niche." Either they're writing something that's not commercial and will never have significant appeal, or their potentially commercial work has some feature(s) that turns off a large majority of readers (unclear sentence-level writing, bad covers, flat characters ... could be anything). All that said ... gosh, it's hard to look at Book A and figure out exactly why it's "not commercial." It's hard to look at Book B's terrible cover and figure out if/why the cover is the problem, when Book C has a cover that's even worse and is selling like hotcakes. It's like the explanation is simple at its fundamental level, but we rarely see the fundamental level. We see some mixture of various traits and half-problems that's very hard to unravel and "fix" -- if the writer even wants to fix whatever it is. |
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