Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
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In short: Decent writing + hard work over time = reasonable shot at success.
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Yes, your post did acknowledge the possibility that a person isn't in it for the money, and that a person needs to define "win" to be something they are willing to work for, but you said it in a post that was all about the numbers. When you start to define winning by the numbers, you have to look at them clearly. Skipping the costs and the time factors involved is not a good way to do that. All I was trying to do was place a little more pragmatism around it.
People are making a success of independent publishing, I'm not denying that, but let's not get carried away and think that it automatically means any person that puts in the work and writes 20 books, has got it made. It doesn't work like that.
Some talent is required, but it's not enough on its own. Lots of work is required, there may be exceptions but you'd be better off checking the sky for pigs than relying on it. But there is more. You have to be writing in genres where the aggregation of a back list is useful. You have to be writing what people are currently wanting to read, and that changes over time. And luck plays a part as well.
You acknowledge that you can't help people that can't write. But the point is that (I assume) most people that publish something think that they can write. The numbers show that a very large proportion of these people are either wrong, or they have written something that most readers aren't interested in reading. So it's not just a matter of hard work over time, it's a matter of getting all the other bits right as well.
I believe the point to take away from your numbers is that working hard may be your best shot at success, but whether it's a reasonable shot is an entirely different story. From a purely statistical perspective, looking at the huge numbers of books that simply don't sell in any appreciable volume, it doesn't really look that reasonable. Now sure, many of those will be ones that haven't put in the work, but is it all? I doubt it.
This means that a writer who has defined their idea of winning around the numbers is going to have to take a look at how their own numbers are panning out. They may need to change what they're writing to match what's selling, they may need to come to the realisation that they can't write (in a way that matches their definition of winning). In short, by defining your success by the numbers you are changing what sort of writer you are. There's nothing wrong with that, but it should be acknowledged as part of the tradeoff you are making.