A good article - but I think you have left out a very important revenue stream -- Kickstarters. I've run a number of them and I've earned around $950,000 from them. Fees are just 5% to Kickstarter and 2.9% (+ $0.30) for CC processing so that kind of direct selling leaves a lot of margin for authors.
Can I ask how big of an audience contributed to that $950,000? (Was it from 1,000 contributors, 10,000?) And where that audience follows you (is it Twitter, a newsletter, etc.)? Thank you so much.
The $950,000 was spread over multiple KS's and of course there are duplicate backers (although I should note that about 65% of the backers on my first KS were new readers to me and not existing fans.I can't say off the top of my head how many unique users there are but I could pull some numbers on that. As for audience follows - I have a lot of subscribers to my newsletter but on many occasions the KS don't get announced there (because I only send one or two a year. For instance on my most recent KS there was no newsletter announcement (although I will send a newsletter allowing for "late backing" and that should bring in a good number more orders.
- KS #1 - 861 backers
- KS #2 - 1,750 backers
- KS #3 - 2,075 backers
- KS #4 - 2,553 backers
- KS #5 - 3,120 backers
- KS #6 - 3,574 backers
- KS #7 - 822 - but that wasn't for a book it was for slipcases of an existing title and since that Kickstarter I've sold 3,000 of those slipcases and almost all those orders are singles.
- KS #8 - 3,6,92
- KS #9 - 3,799
- KS #10 - is a "sister KS" where two are closely related and it had 4,1,57, although there is some cross over.
I should also note that for most KS I have "after the KS" late backers. For instance for my most recently fulfilled KS there were 3,799 backers but with "late backers" that number rose to 4,651 when all was said and done.
I do post KS's to Twitter - 13.3K followers so not very much - I have no instagram or Tik Tok following.
Yes. My first Kickstarter had 862 backers, my most recent 3,692. I've run 9 of them so far. I usually pick up a few hundred more backers "after the fact" through BakckerKit of Pledgebox - those are systems I use to fulfill the Kickstarters and they have a way for people to pre-order through their software. I don't have a very big audience through social media (such as Twitter (11,900) and Facebook (971)). Those aren't venues I use much. I'm more active on Goodreads (85,387) and my newsletter list is around 20,000. But I email very infrequently (1 - 3 times a year).
MJS!!!!!!!!!!! Riyria is my favorite fantasy series of all time!!
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my little article. You are right, I didn't talk about Kickstarter. The scope of this article is small compared to how large the landscape is for earning revenue as an author. But thank you so much for sharing your stats! I'll have to dive into Kickstarter and other crowdfunding models in a later article.
Now pardon me while I completely freak out that you even read my newsletter. Thank you for being here.... (from a big fan who is a big fan of your female characters.)
Glad you have enjoyed the stories. The reason I brought up Kickstarter is you talked about "the creator economy" and whether it could work for fiction authors. - And I think it's an important tool in that toolbox. I'll also add that authors (whether traditional or self-published) should do some direct-selling to readers. Not only do you make more money per sale (the "middlemen" can take 50% - 90% off the top), but it leads to more engaged readers because of the personal attention.
You are writing good content - so yeah, I'll continue to read your newsletter. If you enjoy my female characters, you really must pickup the Legends of the First Empire series (if you've not read those books already). They are set in the same world as the Riyria tales but they occur several thousand years before the time of Royce, Hadrian, Arista, and Thrace/Modina). The Legends series has a large ensemble cast and the most prominent characters are women.
Adding it to my list right now. Thank you! (Fantasy tends to not do great with female characters in my experience, unless you go to YA, so I really appreciate that as a reader!) And you are right, personal attention makes a big difference. I did after all, call my entire family to tell them that you commented on my article and it completely made my day (my dad and sister both read Riyria too so luckily I had people who were just as excited as me.) And now I'll definitely grab Legends of the First Empire.
I definitely plan on doing some direct selling as part of my subscription period, and I plan to write follow-up articles on other alternative book funding methods so I will include the data you provided about Kickstarter (as well as some of the other Patreon and Kindle Unlimited success stories). Thank you so much for sharing your experience with me!
Oh you should love Legends - while Riyria has some great women in it (Arista, Gwen, Thrace/Modina) it is a bromance so the men have a bit more focus. I went "the other way" with Legends - wasn't intentional I originally planned for an ensemble cast with equal number of men and women - and while I did do that the women were SO MUCH more interesting than the men, they definitely are in the spotlight and the men are taking a bit of a back seat - a decision that not a small number of male readers have chided me for.
You are very welcome for the shared experience sharing - I only recently found substack and plan on doing some of my own soon.
If you want to know more about Kickstarter then go over and check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smiths' blogs. (Best to focus on KKR, but skim read DWS.) They talk about kickstarter a lot and even have a course about how to use kickstarter.
KKR and DWS have always been a good resource regarding publishing. I've backed a number of their Kickstarters - not so much because I wanted "the book" but because I wanted to support them.
I'm kinda banking on this for my pen-name account where I share transgressive fiction short stories and serialised novellas/novels. Not sure how well this will work for my kid's stories though. I'm giving away short stories for free and hoping that if people like those, they'll be willing to stump up a bit of cash for the full length books. I'm pretty bullish about Substack and will invest most of my marketing efforts here. Will be interesting to see how it all turns out...
Well said! A recent visit to Chateau d’If of Count of Monte Christo fame had me thinking the same thing: 19th Century newspapers were essentially acting like a well-paid Substack.
There’s a lot of crossover between the publishing and music industries on this problem: it seems that they expect the creatives to do the marketing for them. If musicians and writers are the ones who build the audience on platforms, what do they need the publishers and record labels for exactly?
If you’re an extremely prolific writer—that is, a modern pulp fiction author—you can get to the end zone, theoretically, via a high volume of publishing instead of a high volume of sales. You control publishing, so you can publish 100 shorts stories in a year and by Year 5 have 500
stories (i.e., 500 ebooks and 500 print books) and easily sell 20 copies of each per year at $2/a pop royalty. You’d make $40,000 (more if you consider some stories might be “hits” and sell 100 or more copies a year). This is doable and fun if, of course, you love short fiction and want to be a new pulp author.
Wonderful article. I am in the process of trying to publish the traditional way and it has been disheartening. Luckily I have a professional job to pay the bills. I can't imagine people making a living this way given all the content out there now and the mediocre stuff that does make it's way through. Possibly serialized fiction content could work here on Substack, tbd. Best wishes to everyone!
This was a fascinating and insightful read, thank you so much. You’ve got the cogs turning in my brain in a week I was already considering the apparent loss of serialisation after reading about Dickens. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating.
I will go on record as saying a) The Count of Monte Cristo is probably my favorite book of all time, and b) I have been in love with serials (as a writer) for a long time and I'm glad they are making a comeback. From serial fantasy to sci-fi, noir, adventure and even erotica, I have totally fallen in love with the free-wheeling form of the serial. I even told a short story in the form of a three-part serial just because I liked how digestible that was. This, as they say, is the way.
I'm still writing novels just because I want to, but I have zero expectation that anyone will buy them. I just want to write them.
The biggest problem as I understand it is the Royal Road was an excellent platform for your work to be pirated on.
There was an piece of BBC radio 4 that talked about Hybrid publishing, they worked out that the cost was between £4,000-10,000, and sold on average 67 books. This is mainly because Hybrid do not do marketing.
I self-published using Amazon KDP in 2020, and sold, yep 67 books. Why Amazon? Well the incentive of a free ISBN number, to buy one separately costs £10. True I get 70% royalties off each sale, and print on demand is useful.
Strangely enough I got my first library royalties through this year £16.75, from four local libraries I gave a free copy of my book too.
Writing stories is easy for me, marketing is hard.
A good article - but I think you have left out a very important revenue stream -- Kickstarters. I've run a number of them and I've earned around $950,000 from them. Fees are just 5% to Kickstarter and 2.9% (+ $0.30) for CC processing so that kind of direct selling leaves a lot of margin for authors.
Can I ask how big of an audience contributed to that $950,000? (Was it from 1,000 contributors, 10,000?) And where that audience follows you (is it Twitter, a newsletter, etc.)? Thank you so much.
The $950,000 was spread over multiple KS's and of course there are duplicate backers (although I should note that about 65% of the backers on my first KS were new readers to me and not existing fans.I can't say off the top of my head how many unique users there are but I could pull some numbers on that. As for audience follows - I have a lot of subscribers to my newsletter but on many occasions the KS don't get announced there (because I only send one or two a year. For instance on my most recent KS there was no newsletter announcement (although I will send a newsletter allowing for "late backing" and that should bring in a good number more orders.
- KS #1 - 861 backers
- KS #2 - 1,750 backers
- KS #3 - 2,075 backers
- KS #4 - 2,553 backers
- KS #5 - 3,120 backers
- KS #6 - 3,574 backers
- KS #7 - 822 - but that wasn't for a book it was for slipcases of an existing title and since that Kickstarter I've sold 3,000 of those slipcases and almost all those orders are singles.
- KS #8 - 3,6,92
- KS #9 - 3,799
- KS #10 - is a "sister KS" where two are closely related and it had 4,1,57, although there is some cross over.
I should also note that for most KS I have "after the KS" late backers. For instance for my most recently fulfilled KS there were 3,799 backers but with "late backers" that number rose to 4,651 when all was said and done.
I do post KS's to Twitter - 13.3K followers so not very much - I have no instagram or Tik Tok following.
Yes. My first Kickstarter had 862 backers, my most recent 3,692. I've run 9 of them so far. I usually pick up a few hundred more backers "after the fact" through BakckerKit of Pledgebox - those are systems I use to fulfill the Kickstarters and they have a way for people to pre-order through their software. I don't have a very big audience through social media (such as Twitter (11,900) and Facebook (971)). Those aren't venues I use much. I'm more active on Goodreads (85,387) and my newsletter list is around 20,000. But I email very infrequently (1 - 3 times a year).
MJS!!!!!!!!!!! Riyria is my favorite fantasy series of all time!!
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my little article. You are right, I didn't talk about Kickstarter. The scope of this article is small compared to how large the landscape is for earning revenue as an author. But thank you so much for sharing your stats! I'll have to dive into Kickstarter and other crowdfunding models in a later article.
Now pardon me while I completely freak out that you even read my newsletter. Thank you for being here.... (from a big fan who is a big fan of your female characters.)
Glad you have enjoyed the stories. The reason I brought up Kickstarter is you talked about "the creator economy" and whether it could work for fiction authors. - And I think it's an important tool in that toolbox. I'll also add that authors (whether traditional or self-published) should do some direct-selling to readers. Not only do you make more money per sale (the "middlemen" can take 50% - 90% off the top), but it leads to more engaged readers because of the personal attention.
You are writing good content - so yeah, I'll continue to read your newsletter. If you enjoy my female characters, you really must pickup the Legends of the First Empire series (if you've not read those books already). They are set in the same world as the Riyria tales but they occur several thousand years before the time of Royce, Hadrian, Arista, and Thrace/Modina). The Legends series has a large ensemble cast and the most prominent characters are women.
Adding it to my list right now. Thank you! (Fantasy tends to not do great with female characters in my experience, unless you go to YA, so I really appreciate that as a reader!) And you are right, personal attention makes a big difference. I did after all, call my entire family to tell them that you commented on my article and it completely made my day (my dad and sister both read Riyria too so luckily I had people who were just as excited as me.) And now I'll definitely grab Legends of the First Empire.
I definitely plan on doing some direct selling as part of my subscription period, and I plan to write follow-up articles on other alternative book funding methods so I will include the data you provided about Kickstarter (as well as some of the other Patreon and Kindle Unlimited success stories). Thank you so much for sharing your experience with me!
Oh you should love Legends - while Riyria has some great women in it (Arista, Gwen, Thrace/Modina) it is a bromance so the men have a bit more focus. I went "the other way" with Legends - wasn't intentional I originally planned for an ensemble cast with equal number of men and women - and while I did do that the women were SO MUCH more interesting than the men, they definitely are in the spotlight and the men are taking a bit of a back seat - a decision that not a small number of male readers have chided me for.
You are very welcome for the shared experience sharing - I only recently found substack and plan on doing some of my own soon.
If you want to know more about Kickstarter then go over and check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smiths' blogs. (Best to focus on KKR, but skim read DWS.) They talk about kickstarter a lot and even have a course about how to use kickstarter.
KKR and DWS have always been a good resource regarding publishing. I've backed a number of their Kickstarters - not so much because I wanted "the book" but because I wanted to support them.
I'm kinda banking on this for my pen-name account where I share transgressive fiction short stories and serialised novellas/novels. Not sure how well this will work for my kid's stories though. I'm giving away short stories for free and hoping that if people like those, they'll be willing to stump up a bit of cash for the full length books. I'm pretty bullish about Substack and will invest most of my marketing efforts here. Will be interesting to see how it all turns out...
Well said! A recent visit to Chateau d’If of Count of Monte Christo fame had me thinking the same thing: 19th Century newspapers were essentially acting like a well-paid Substack.
TOTALLY
There’s a lot of crossover between the publishing and music industries on this problem: it seems that they expect the creatives to do the marketing for them. If musicians and writers are the ones who build the audience on platforms, what do they need the publishers and record labels for exactly?
Good question!
If you’re an extremely prolific writer—that is, a modern pulp fiction author—you can get to the end zone, theoretically, via a high volume of publishing instead of a high volume of sales. You control publishing, so you can publish 100 shorts stories in a year and by Year 5 have 500
stories (i.e., 500 ebooks and 500 print books) and easily sell 20 copies of each per year at $2/a pop royalty. You’d make $40,000 (more if you consider some stories might be “hits” and sell 100 or more copies a year). This is doable and fun if, of course, you love short fiction and want to be a new pulp author.
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you.
Yes it is.
Wonderful article. I am in the process of trying to publish the traditional way and it has been disheartening. Luckily I have a professional job to pay the bills. I can't imagine people making a living this way given all the content out there now and the mediocre stuff that does make it's way through. Possibly serialized fiction content could work here on Substack, tbd. Best wishes to everyone!
its way* autocorrect ugh
This was a fascinating and insightful read, thank you so much. You’ve got the cogs turning in my brain in a week I was already considering the apparent loss of serialisation after reading about Dickens. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating.
I will go on record as saying a) The Count of Monte Cristo is probably my favorite book of all time, and b) I have been in love with serials (as a writer) for a long time and I'm glad they are making a comeback. From serial fantasy to sci-fi, noir, adventure and even erotica, I have totally fallen in love with the free-wheeling form of the serial. I even told a short story in the form of a three-part serial just because I liked how digestible that was. This, as they say, is the way.
I'm still writing novels just because I want to, but I have zero expectation that anyone will buy them. I just want to write them.
The biggest problem as I understand it is the Royal Road was an excellent platform for your work to be pirated on.
There was an piece of BBC radio 4 that talked about Hybrid publishing, they worked out that the cost was between £4,000-10,000, and sold on average 67 books. This is mainly because Hybrid do not do marketing.
I self-published using Amazon KDP in 2020, and sold, yep 67 books. Why Amazon? Well the incentive of a free ISBN number, to buy one separately costs £10. True I get 70% royalties off each sale, and print on demand is useful.
Strangely enough I got my first library royalties through this year £16.75, from four local libraries I gave a free copy of my book too.
Writing stories is easy for me, marketing is hard.
In a society that no longer reads, of course you are correct
Very insightful! Perhaps the greatest hope for us authors is precisely platforms like Substack.
Not sure why I was recommended a 3 year old article! Wow it's like looking into the past. hello 3 years ago. How are the masks working for y'all ?
Amazing article and promising that authors will finally have a space take their careers to the next level. In time, of course 😊 nothing is instant
Good information. I'm not sure what nonfiction niche would persuade people to part with $9 a month for one writer?
Probably business related. That audience has more money at their disposal.