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Old 02-15-2014, 07:53 PM   #8
gmw
cacoethes scribendi
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VydorScope, you show only the income. What about the costs? To do it right there are costs involved - editing, covers, marketing. These effectively swallow all the early income from your books.

Then there is that oh so simple jump from 1 book to 10 books (sorry, but that's the way it reads in your post). There may be people out there with the talent to write 10 readable books in a year, or even a couple of years, but I'm not one of them. It has taken me almost four years to produce three books (the third isn't out yet but should be soon).

And whatever way you cut the numbers, it's an absolutely lousy per hour rate for the work put in. Short of being both lucky and talented enough to make it big, publishing (independent or traditional) isn't going to replace your day job any time soon.

Yes, making some money is possible, people are doing it, but it's not only about hard work - your books aren't going to sell a copy a day if you earn a reputation for writing crap while getting the volume out there.

It seems to me that thinking too hard about the numbers is not a good thing for most of us. Better, assuming you are doing this because you enjoy writing, just to get on with writing - that is, after all, the only way you're likely to get the back-list of titles required to have the numbers come to anything meaningful.

This isn't meant to rain on anyone's parade, it's an attempt to be pragmatic. A lot of books do not sell anything like a copy a day, so that trip to Disney could be a long way off. If you're pushing yourself to write and write and write, and skipping out on the rest of your life until it feels like the worst job you've ever done, then you're missing the point entirely.
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