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Originally Posted by nwhitfield
One person wrote to me following the publication of the piece on RegHardware, saying that according to the Society of Authors, only 2-6% of published authors make enough money to make a living out of their work.
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That sounds about right. I know an assortment of published authors. A few actually make enough money to make a living at it. Most get part of their income from writing, and do other things for the rest.
Once in a while, a midlist author writing in spare time breaks through with a bestseller, and reaches a point of being able to write full time, but those are few and far between.
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Essentially, they are writing in their free time, and have a day job to pay the bills. And for those people, it's perhaps even more vital that there is someone else to take on tasks such as editing, marketing and so forth, otherwise they'll have even less time available to write.
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Yep. The most effective job of marketing I can recall by an author was by SF writer Wen Spencer, who used the advance from her first novel as a marketing budget to get her name and work out there to readers who might like her stuff. But Wen's husband was a well paid IT professional, so she could
afford to do that - the money didn't have to go to helping keep food on the table and a roof over her head. Most writers lack that luxury.
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Perhaps cutting out publishers would enable some of those people to make enough money to write full time - but I suspect it would be an incredibly small number of them.
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Vanishingly small.
The only folks I can think of that have a prayer of making any real money through self publishing already have an audience for their work gained through traditional publishing channels. New authors, starting through self-publishing, will be lucky to cover their costs.
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Dennis