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Originally Posted by Moejoe
So you've got to write two books a year AND sell 20,000 copies of each one to make a living? Not only do you have to have those two books published in a market that is steadily taking less and less chances on any kind of midlist, but you've got to sell 20,0000 copies. And you have to do all this in a market where 195,000 new books are produced each year, a lot of those in competition with yours and also a new front of 'free' and 'indie published', heavily discounted' authors also competing against your 'priced' merchandise.
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The 'free' and 'indie published' authors are not a real concern. They don't sell anywhere near enough copies to matter, for the most part. Even Boyd Morrison could sell 10x at least what he's selling in ebooks if he could actually get in print.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
And let's address the 20,000 copies theory while we're at it. You're highly unlikely to get anything more than 10,000 - 15,000 on a print run if you're a midlist or new author,
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This is simply not true if there is demand for 20K copies. And again, that's only in the first year.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
and after your advance you'd then need to sell a further 8,000 books (if the advance is in the $5,000 region) before you even start earning. Your mythical 20,000 copies sold at $0.60 profit is not what's going to happen in reality.
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Your math makes no sense here. If you got a $5K advance, you'd start earning more after 8,333 copies. And I deliberately presented a scenario without an advance to show what you could actually earn. Obviously if you can't sell enough copies to earn out your advance, then you're still ahead $5K. So yes, if you can only sell 2 books a year and you're not even good enough to sell 8,000 copies each, you'll only make $10K.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
Especially now with more and more alternatives available, and more competition coming along every day.
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Yes, there are alternatives. They won't make as much as traditional publishing, currently. That's why people still traditionally publish.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
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Why are you quoting URLs I've read, which support my position, not yours? His first novel -- his FIRST novel -- sold only 10K copies. As his craft improved, a later novel sold 30K. He also was able to selling many more copies of his FIRST novel after he started offering the ebook FOR FREE, and after the later novel, 1632, became popular and people went back to buy his previous work.
Again, as I said, it's hard to make much money off your first couple of novels. It improves from there, unless your stuff is simply not worth publishing, in which case you shoudl confine yourself to your artistic-soul-pleasing happy free Internet writing.
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Originally Posted by Moejoe
Now, I hope with all my heart that any writer who seeks the traditional route of publication can make a steady living from their writing. I really do. But I believe that approaching writing as a for-profit game in the first instance is a grand delusion when faced with the actual market and the odds stacked against the author. Why not forget about the money, write because you love to write, and then everything monetary or good that comes afterwards is a bonus on top of what you already get from writing?
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Because with a little elbow grease, my monetary bonus becomes much larger if I actually get my work published the traditional way rather than -- whatever it is you're proposing (it's not exactly clear). Yes, economics are changing, but it hasn't changed yet. Even if one accepts your premise that even good writers can't make a living writing, that doesn't at all justify the notion that the economics of the industry should change such that nobody can make a living writing.