Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
$100 a month isn't too bad for something you wrote 10 years ago and presumably made some money from during its original print run. You actually released it into the pirate community yourself, long before you put it on Amazon, so can you tell us if doing that hurt your sales in any way?
Also, presumably if you wrote something else a lot of the people who have already bought (or downloaded) that one would buy the new one soon after it was released, and after that it would make about the same amount?
So the secret to making a living as a writer would be to write more?
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Yeah, that's pretty much my attitude.
I don't think that releasing
Risen for free many years ago has hurt sales. People can find the free PDF version with a Google search, but PDFs suck on 6" ereaders. And really, there are enough people who consider $3 a cheap price that, if they're interested at all, they'll pay it.
I'd love to write more, but I work full time, more than full time actually, sitting at a computer, and when I'm off, I have stuff to do. If I could live on $100/month, quit my job and write more books, I could manage maybe one a year. So my monthly income would go up by about $100/month every year, with some kind of exponential increase as I got better known. After 15 years or so, I'd be making enough to pay my mortgage. Meanwhile...I have to pay that mortgage.
That's why I think that writing more books might be a retirement activity.
But again, I want to point out that I don't think piracy is the problem. It's the glut of books. The business is just very, very competitive and natural selection favors those who procreate (write) prolifically and those who do it (writing/marketing) very well and those who are lucky (right book/right time/celeb blurb/etc.).