Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Cast_No_Shadow posted:

how much would you say your success is down to writing ability,

Some. I was a C student in high school in English but I've learned a lot and I also hire editors to look over my books.

quote:

publishing consistancy

a lot

quote:

and luck

There has been some luck, yes, but I don't think you get to the top of two different genres via luck alone.

quote:

(or something else)?

Thinking analytically and paying attention to data has helped me the most. Look at the Top 100 list. Write a similar book. Make friends. Be willing to spend time and money to help them out. Pay attention to algorithms (this is the Internet Marketing hat). Don't pay attention to bald negativity.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


EngineerSean posted:

Thinking analytically and paying attention to data has helped me the most. Look at the Top 100 list. Write a similar book. Make friends. Be willing to spend time and money to help them out. Pay attention to algorithms (this is the Internet Marketing hat). Don't pay attention to bald negativity.

Where do you source your data from? I'm at the point where I know (or at least hope) that my writing chops are there, but I have absolutely no idea how to assess sales figures for different genres- say, for instance, I'm writing a love story- straight women age 30-54 seems to be the demographic to shoot for, but that's apocryphal; how would you go about actually substantiating that in order to make an informed decision about what market to study and target?

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
Take a look at the 20th bestselling book in a genre and also the 100th bestselling book (never look at the #1 book because that could be an outlier). Take the ranks of those books and use them as the denominator for the equation (100000 / sales rank). That's an estimate but a decent one for number of sales (edited to add: per day) that you can expect from a decent selling book from the genre.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-New-Adult-College-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/6487838011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_158568011
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Contemporary-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158568011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_6487838011
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romantic-Suspense/zgbs/digital-text/158574011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_6487839011
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-LGBT-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/10886541011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_3_158566011

Also look at who's rocking the boat in all of romance

http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Romance/digital-text/158566011/ref=ntt_dp_kar_B00OS6RR0I

edit: you can play this game with erotica or really any genre very easily

EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 20:18 on May 25, 2015

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
In order of importance:

Luck. Persistence. Talent a far far distant third.

Really, what this takes is the ability to juggle the attitude of a professional creative. Produce top quality work in sufficient quality without burning out. And get lucky that the right audience will find you, and have the foresight to leverage opportunities when they come your way.

Random (non-romance) genre fiction tips:

1. Write series of novels.
2. Publish regularly. Every three months, every other if you can swing it.
3. You cannot really judge if a series is successful until the 3rd (sometimes 5th) or so is out.
4. First book free as soon as the second is released, but aim for 1-5 ASAP.
5. If a series isn't working, end it, try something else.
6. Start a mailing list as soon as you can. This is your primary marketing tool. Post regularly, 2-3 times a month, or you will be forgotten.
7. Your covers should "fit in" with the other covers in your genre. But be better.

Following these tips has garnered me a liveable (hah) income with no day job.

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 22:08 on May 25, 2015

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
I had my first real-reader sale today. And she posted a Five Star review to Amazon and Goodreads. One part that really made the review for me was, "The heroine's reaction to the conflict 100% was what I would have done. She was so realistic, and I really related to her pain."

Now I'm dealing with second book nerves.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


This is incredibly useful, I really appreciate the tips. The one other question I have is pretty exceptionally stupid, but from a business perspective which do you prioritize: interests, or market? Taking the romance example, what I'm best at writing isn't romance, it's military sci-fi and noir detective stories. However, those are both pretty niche markets, and since my aim is to try and (eventually) build up a sufficiently large fanbase to make this cover cost of living while I run another business, I feel like I'm obligated to look at the best-selling genres (romance, erotica, possibly triceratops porn) and focus on studying what's done well and emulating that.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
I really wish that I had the mentality where I could fake interest in Romance well enough to convincingly write it, but I can't. I tried, briefly, never published any, and it's pretty laughable. But then again, I'm not making so much money that if I really wanted to be making a good money steady income I wouldn't do better with a 9-5 cube warrior job.

I write speculative fiction because that's what I want to do for a living. Like, physically do 40-60 hours a week. I don't want that desk job, and I don't want to write something I'm not enjoying. The writing is the quality of life I'm after. I might be scraping by in an oversaturated niche (steampunk mysteries), but my life is sitting around, researching Victorian pseudoscience, and telling stories about it.

But hey, I have a few hundred fans on my mailing list and more signing up every day. Some of them might even follow me when I finish this series up and move on to whatever comes next. As long as I can pay the rent and save a little bit each month, I'll be happy.

(What I did starting out was make up like a half-dozen pen names in different niche genres and start publishing short works to see which sold best and what I could see myself doing. I would not recommend this method. Just write whatever you can live with devoting great chunks of your life to.)

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 00:37 on May 26, 2015

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


When you guys say mailing list, is this an amazon/kindle thing? Or is it a literal, independent mailing list you advertise on your catalog pages/website?

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
I use Mailchimp. I promote it on my website and the back of my books. There's an incentive to join in the form of a free novella segment from the second book in the series; I've got about a 50% open rate, which is fairly good for author mailing lists.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


Registering a mailchimp account on the strength of the name alone.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Omi no Kami posted:

This is incredibly useful, I really appreciate the tips. The one other question I have is pretty exceptionally stupid, but from a business perspective which do you prioritize: interests, or market? Taking the romance example, what I'm best at writing isn't romance, it's military sci-fi and noir detective stories. However, those are both pretty niche markets, and since my aim is to try and (eventually) build up a sufficiently large fanbase to make this cover cost of living while I run another business, I feel like I'm obligated to look at the best-selling genres (romance, erotica, possibly triceratops porn) and focus on studying what's done well and emulating that.

psychopomp has kind of steered you in the wrong direction while also letting you know that it's the wrong direction (no offense intended to psychopomp). Romance as a whole sells six times as many books than science fiction as a whole. If your dream is to write fiction, and you choose to write science fiction simply because it's your favorite, you can assume that you'll work just as hard for one sixth the money that a similar romance author will make. If your dream is to write science fiction and nothing else will do, then there's nothing you can do. Write what your muse dictates, I guess. I think most people who write a ton of different stuff can tell you that the same concepts (character-driven story, dramatic hooks, etc) are what sell across all genre fiction.

Battlestar Galactica wasn't the best show on television because of pew pew laser beams.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


That's about what I concluded as well- I didn't know the exact figures, but the OP specifically mentioned that all of the goons he knew who made a living off of it were principally romance guys, so I figured there was something to it. :)

I know that amazon divides romance and erotica into separate categories, and the latter basically walls you off into its own space- when you say that Romance as a whole sells whatever amount, is that romance, erotica, and erotic romance, or strictly fade to black, PG-13 romance?

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Omi no Kami posted:

but the OP specifically mentioned that all of the goons he knew who made a living off of it were principally romance guys, so I figured there was something to it. :)

Well this one is kinda misleading, we know people making a living off of writing romance because that's our industry. There certainly exist people making a living writing all genres. John Scalzi just got a $3m trad publishing deal off the strength of his self pubbed science fiction, for instance.

quote:

I know that amazon divides romance and erotica into separate categories, and the latter basically walls you off into its own space- when you say that Romance as a whole sells whatever amount, is that romance, erotica, and erotic romance, or strictly fade to black, PG-13 romance?

Erotica is separate from romance, erotic romance falls under the heading of romance. What was considered erotic romance just five years ago would mostly be looked at like straight-edge romance nowadays.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


That makes sense, thanks for the clarification!

And I don't know if John Scalzi should count- didn't he build his reputation on traditionally published, mass-market paperbacks before self-publishing was a thing?

Mr. Belding
May 19, 2006
^
|
<- IS LAME-O PHOBE ->
|
V

psychopomp posted:

I really wish that I had the mentality where I could fake interest in Romance well enough to convincingly write it, but I can't. I tried, briefly, never published any, and it's pretty laughable. But then again, I'm not making so much money that if I really wanted to be making a good money steady income I wouldn't do better with a 9-5 cube warrior job.

On an intellectual level I understand this, and enough people say it that I know that it has to be true. But, it takes me back to a weird conversation I had with someone who explained to me how much he loved sci fi. He complained that books in school never really caught his attention, but outside of school he read some sci fi, and he learned to actually enjoy reading. I thought that was strange, because the stories he was telling me about weren't hard sci fi where he was interested in the speculation or the science. They were just normal-ish stories but they had aliens or laser beams. In fact he said that Pitch Black was his favorite movie, which is a run of the mill "badass kills everyone" story. When I asked him why it was so good compared to something like Taken, he said, "because it's in space."

To me stories all have the same shape. And no matter what I'm writing I wrestle with the same questions. What are my characters doing? Why? Is it interesting?

I suppose the answer to that last question (at least for some people) is, "Yes... but only if it's in space."

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
Sure, I don't actually know either way. SSuccesses exist in self publishing in all genres, it is just heavily weighted toward romance and erotica.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011

Mr. Belding posted:


To me stories all have the same shape. And no matter what I'm writing I wrestle with the same questions. What are my characters doing? Why? Is it interesting?

I suppose the answer to that last question (at least for some people) is, "Yes... but only if it's in space."

I don't get it either. I can write speculative fiction, thrillers, mysteries, historical fiction, horror, but I can't wrap my head around the romance genre. I can write books with strong relationship subplots (including romantic relationships), but as a primary through-line? Just doesn't work for me. At least not in a marketable way, and that'd be the point.

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 04:20 on May 26, 2015

Pinky Artichoke
Apr 10, 2011

Dinner has blossomed.

EngineerSean posted:

Well this one is kinda misleading, we know people making a living off of writing romance because that's our industry. There certainly exist people making a living writing all genres. John Scalzi just got a $3m trad publishing deal off the strength of his self pubbed science fiction, for instance.

I thought of you guys when I heard about Scalzi's deal yesterday. My understanding is that it's based on the strength of his sales for Tor and he's only dabbled a little with self-publishing, but the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden that Scalzi "back lists like crazy" even though he hasn't written any breakout hits sounds like the ideal situation for a self-published author.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
As of today I have finished my first month of self publishing and made just over $60. I published one stand-alone, 10k word short, and a three-part series of 10k-word shorts. I just released a bundle for the full three-part series today, and I did a better job stuffing keywords for it and categorizing it correctly.

What I learned in this month:

-'Erotica' is more like 4-6k words of exactly what you'd expect with little to no story.
-Anything with actual story lines, regardless of how explicit, is actually erotic romance.
-Erotic romance needs to be longer than 10k words.
-I was actually writing erotic romance, but labeling it as erotica.

I've started a novella that I plan to make 30k words. I'm modelling it after a top-20 seller. I'm going to try to pop out two novellas a month minimum rather than four 10k shorts per month. 10k is an awkward length for erom primarily because it's too long to be just a sex scene, and it's too short to let the relationship breathe. I thought I'd get around that by making it three parts--so that the end product basically ended up being a novella--but that doesn't work when people have to buy the stories one at a time.

I've been studying the top sellers a lot, and super short stuff dominating the charts is rare. There are very specific genres that super short erotica targets, and those shorts tend to sell for a much shorter period. If you are really good at writing in one of those categories and can shoot them out fast like Sean does, it's worth trying for.

Trying to waffle between novella-length and super short length kind of screws you. I was asking $3.00 for my 10k-word shorts, and that is going up against the best sellers list which asks the same price for something three times longer with hundreds of five-star reviews. I listed everything on Kindle Unlimited, which is where most of my money came from, and only a few people bought (as in paid $3.00 each for, not KU borrowed) parts II and III of my series after getting part I during the free promo.

In total, I had 752 people download Part I of my story while it was on free promo, and only ten people went on to either borrow or buy parts II and III. That seems really lovely, and it makes me feel like I definitely didn't do things properly. I mostly blame the 10k length, because it rushed the story and made the pacing on Part I probably feel quite weak. I also don't know how many people just download books while they are free, and throw them into a "backlog." Like maybe 750 people downloaded it, but only 100 actually read it? No idea. I modeled my storyline after a very high ranking seller in the same genre, but I did 10k per part instead of 30k per part like she did. It's hard to model after a best seller when the lengths are so different.

I'm hoping that doing a novella at 30k modeled after a best seller, length included, will get me much stronger results next month.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


Is there a convenient, comparative list anywhere of how well different genres sell, both in unit volume and $ sales? I know romance is far and away the largest, but what's second/third/fourth/fifth?

I want to get into self-publishing as a hobby/possibly a supplementary income but have a hard time grasping the idea of writing romance long-term.

And an unrelated question: how exactly does tax work on Amazon? I imagine you're legally a freelancer and get taxed as such. In my case it's probably even more complicated, as I am a US citizen but have my residence abroad (in Germany), and haven't set foot in the US in over two years. I'll be writing in English, but will my location mean my English books will pop up on the German-language store and not be visible in the Anglosphere?

Edit: and a third unrelated question. Is there any weird logic you guys follow when coming up with pen names? I once heard somewhere that there are specific syllable combinations that seem to be more memorable and "marketable" in English (three-syllable first name, two-syllable last name), but that's probably bullshit?

Drone fucked around with this message at 10:33 on May 26, 2015

Ghostwoods
May 9, 2013

Say "Cheese!"

Drone posted:

And an unrelated question: how exactly does tax work on Amazon? I imagine you're legally a freelancer and get taxed as such. In my case it's probably even more complicated, as I am a US citizen but have my residence abroad (in Germany), and haven't set foot in the US in over two years. I'll be writing in English, but will my location mean my English books will pop up on the German-language store and not be visible in the Anglosphere?

Edit: and a third unrelated question. Is there any weird logic you guys follow when coming up with pen names? I once heard somewhere that there are specific syllable combinations that seem to be more memorable and "marketable" in English (three-syllable first name, two-syllable last name), but that's probably bullshit?

You choose which territories your books go into, on a book-by-book basis. I'm not American, but my understanding from US pals in Europe is that you have to declare the income to the IRS as you would any regular freelance income back home.

The three-syllable-two-syllable thing was an idea of Aleister Crowley's. He claimed "Jeremy Taylor" was the most memorable name in the English language. I don't believe he had any research backing it up, and anyway, that was 70 years ago, or so. Just pick something that (a) doesn't sound dumb and (b) doesn't conflict with a better-known author (because otherwise, people will never be able to find your work).

Yooper
Apr 30, 2012


Omi no Kami posted:

Taking the romance example, what I'm best at writing isn't romance, it's military sci-fi and noir detective stories. However, those are both pretty niche markets, and since my aim is to try and (eventually) build up a sufficiently large fanbase to make this cover cost of living while I run another business, I feel like I'm obligated to look at the best-selling genres (romance, erotica, possibly triceratops porn) and focus on studying what's done well and emulating that.

My genre is mil scifi and I do pretty well. Now it's not romance levels of income, but in the year and a half I've been writing I've : paid off my student loans, paid off my car loans, spent a week partying in Reykjavik with EVE nerds, spent a week fishing in Alaska, and kept my wife happy by not having our savings drained from all that poo poo. On the flip side I write every single morning, evenings, lunch breaks, etc.

The biggest thing, and this goes with all genres, is to produce quality content and produce it often. I see a lot of people bitch that they can't get traction, yet they only have one piece out there. This isn't a trad pub model anymore, it's an SEO model, whether we like it or not.

Like voting, write early and write often.

Fake edit : Link to genre breakdown : http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishings-share-of-the-kindle-market-by-genre/

Yooper fucked around with this message at 14:19 on May 26, 2015

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Basically everything Yooper said.

Publish your top quality work as often as you can manage. Chances are you won't make as much money as you would if you were writing romance, but you can still manage a liveable income.

Workaholism helps.

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 14:53 on May 26, 2015

fruit loop
Apr 25, 2015

EngineerSean posted:

Take a look at the 20th bestselling book in a genre and also the 100th bestselling book (never look at the #1 book because that could be an outlier). Take the ranks of those books and use them as the denominator for the equation (100000 / sales rank). That's an estimate but a decent one for number of sales (edited to add: per day) that you can expect from a decent selling book from the genre.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-New-Adult-College-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/6487838011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_158568011
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Contemporary-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158568011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_6487838011
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romantic-Suspense/zgbs/digital-text/158574011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_6487839011
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-LGBT-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/10886541011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_3_158566011

Also look at who's rocking the boat in all of romance

http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Romance/digital-text/158566011/ref=ntt_dp_kar_B00OS6RR0I

edit: you can play this game with erotica or really any genre very easily

Is "sales rank" something different from the rank of the book on the top 100 list?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Sales rank is your rank among books in the entire store. If you look at the Top 100 list of the entire store, you'd see exact correlation with sales rank. When you start digging deeper into specific genres, the correlation between Top 100 and actual Sales Rank tells you about the relative popularity of the genre / type of book / whatever. For example, if you look at romance and see that 80 of the Top 100 are in the actual Top 100 in the store, that more or less tells you that romance is HUGE. If, on the other hand, you look at the Cozy Ethnic Cooking Mysteries Featuring Sassy Protagonists genre (please god make this a real thing), you might see that, barring a few outliers, most of the books in the Top 100 have sales ranks 10,000+. This tells you that the genre is much smaller and doesn't get as many sales in general.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


Am I correct that for marketing purposes I'm best off using one pen name per genre, so somebody who's looking for more sappy love stories like the one they just read doesn't trip over a bloody sci-fi extravaganza?

Pinky Artichoke
Apr 10, 2011

Dinner has blossomed.

I do wonder how much the scifi and fantasy stats in that link are polluted by Taken By My Badboy Step-Brother Alien Werewolf Vampire material.

Yooper
Apr 30, 2012


I gave it a quick glance and 7 out of the top 100 Scifi bestsellers are Romance/SuperRomance. There was also some Michael Crichton and GRRM, along with titles that are such bestsellers that they top multiple lists. It'd be tough to break it down exactly, but if you removed the multi-genre ones, and the romance, I think Scifi would look even smaller.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
No matter what your interest is, it's really hard to work against that kind of lack of demand.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


So romance is huge... how "big" are gay-themed romances on the self-publishing medium? I know that traditionally, gay romance/erotica on the internet have a pretty high straight female readership (which is how slash fiction got its start and why it's so massive), but does that carry over onto Kindle Store stuff as well? I'm interested more in the romance side of it than the erotica side.

Ghostwoods
May 9, 2013

Say "Cheese!"

EngineerSean posted:

No matter what your interest is, it's really hard to work against that kind of lack of demand.

Good point... Earlier on this page, Sean posted a back-of-beer-mat method for estimating demand in a sector.

I had a few spare moments just now, so I decided to amuse myself by having a quick look. So I grabbed sales rank for #20 and #100 in a few genres, averaged them, and divided them into 100k for a rough guestimate of how many copies a day the genre is likely to offer for a hit book.

To further marginalize my data, I looked at Yooper's link to edwardrobertson.com's info on %age of sales going to self-pub by genre, to have a go at factoring in how the fight against the big labels might affect things. The end result is really rough guess at how many copies a top-performing self-pub effort could realistically hope to sell a day.

Double it for approx. $ income off a $2.99 pricepoint, obviously.

This is the opposite of scientific information. This is one tiny nibble of data, prepared in a half-assed manner by someone you don't know. Still, it might be of interest...

Contemporary Romance == 520 * 49% == 254
New Adult Romance == 200 * 49% == 98
Fantasy == 165 * 49% == 81
Science Fiction == 111 * 56% == 62
Romantic Suspense == 121 * 49% == 59
Thrillers == 245 * 11% == 27
Mysteries == 183 * 11% == 20
Suspense == 177 * 11% == 19
LGBT Romance == 27 * 49% == 13
Crime == 35 * 11% = 4

I find the Romantic Suspense 'result' a little surprising.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
Wow is it really 11% for Mysteries and Thrillers? I mean I'm not really doubting it if it came from Author Earnings but wow, that seems super low. Wonder how much James Patterson skews that?

edit: also consider that different books sell at different percentages at different retailers, but remember that pretty much all successful self publishers get over 50% of their sales from Amazon.

EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 19:04 on May 26, 2015

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Drone posted:

So romance is huge... how "big" are gay-themed romances on the self-publishing medium? I know that traditionally, gay romance/erotica on the internet have a pretty high straight female readership (which is how slash fiction got its start and why it's so massive), but does that carry over onto Kindle Store stuff as well? I'm interested more in the romance side of it than the erotica side.

Lesbian romance doesn't sell well, gay romance sells quite well. I don't know percentages here but there are definitely some people making a lot of money. In fact, several people have made serious money on the M/M/F style of romance, where two guys are into a woman and also into each other. I haven't read one so I can't tell you how it works (I know how sex works here but can't really wrap my head around the romance) so you'll have to read some to see if it's for you.

Yooper
Apr 30, 2012


Ghostwoods posted:


Science Fiction == 111 * 56% == 62


I can confirm, that's a drat close number. Awesome work man, it's cool to see the numbers out front.

Ghostwoods
May 9, 2013

Say "Cheese!"

Yooper posted:

I can confirm, that's a drat close number.

Huh. Very interesting to hear that. Thanks for sharing.

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

How does humour tend to do? Or is that one of those genres that's not so much a genre as a way of approaching a genre (I.E GRRM vs. Terry Pratchett, Iain M Banks vs. Douglas Adams).

Sales almost entirely unaffected by BKnights promo. Going to crack down on keyword research and cover redesign this week.

Yooper
Apr 30, 2012


Interesting article about the Hardy Boys and series writing : http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/hardy-boys-nancy-drew-ghostwriters/394022/

quote:

Still, there are some unexpected benefits. Ghostwriting seems to teach writers to intuitively balance making books and making a living. Though Leonhardt wrote in an age of typewriters and snail mail, writing for an assembly line arguably equipped her with the basic insights of writing for the Internet age. “To be a successful writer in today's world, you have to be obsessed,” she says. “With the marketing, the promoting, the querying, coming up with ideas, being able to deal with all that rejection. And understanding that this is a business—not just a creative endeavor.”

Some really interesting insight in that article.

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
Is everyone in this thread purely working a writing assembly line to make money?

Blue Scream
Oct 24, 2006

oh my word, the internet!

Mrenda posted:

Is everyone in this thread purely working a writing assembly line to make money?

This thread focuses on mainly the business side of writing (and as such I have found it very useful), but that doesn't mean people here don't care about telling a good story, or developing realistic and interesting characters. Writing is hard and monetary rewards are uncertain at best, so anyone who approaches it as a purely mercenary venture has bad ideas and should feel bad. I'm pretty sure most people here really enjoy writing (when it doesn't also make us all :suicide: ) and want to produce quality work. I've read some great stories by goons.

The thread is about how self-publishing works, not the writing process itself.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Mrenda posted:

Is everyone in this thread purely working a writing assembly line to make money?

lol

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply