andrewducker | Interesting Links for 16-01-2023

Part of me thinks that if AI can do it well enough that the readers don't care, then that's fine. Let publishers produce books-to-order, customised by whatever individual readers fancy having in their novels. It's not like the vast majority of writers ever made any money at it anyway.

But I hope it doesn't put people off of writing for fun. And I will feel bad for the few people out there who *do* make a living from it.

(And I suspect that it will be a fair while until those people are outwritten by an AI, and that once we reach that stage we will have other issues to contend with...)

Well, I make more as a romance author than I ever did as a senior software consultant for a top consultancy firm. 😉 And I could easily name ten authors just in my narrow sub subgenre who are making a lot more than me. And that’s not even getting into the _really_ lucrative genres like dark contemporary romance or thrillers.

There’s a surprisingly large number of people who’ve been quietly making bank as indie authors since 2010ish. Text AI is potentially a serious disruption to the current industry… but thankfully, a lot of us are pretty good at pivoting as necessary.

It’s an interesting topic from an indie author perspective as we stand to be disrupted by text AI, while simultaneously being able to get big benefits from both text AIs and art AIs. Cover art/illustration is a big expense for me, and I’m severely limited by available stock photos. Which puts me in the uncomfortable position of being able to benefit greatly from AI that’s going to potentially put some of my photographer/artist friends out of business. Ouch.

I would be very interested in understanding more - have you (or anyone you know) ever written anything public about the economics of it all?

Look up Mark Dawson, Lucy Score, Michael Anderle, Kevin J Anderson or Joanna Penn. They’re all very prominent indies who give frequent talks/interviews on the nuts and bolts of the industry. I’d put some links here but everything I’m easily pulling up is behind a newspaper paywall, alas (I know you have ways of getting around those!)

Cheers!

I'm mostly going on things that I've read about the income of authors like this which says that:

The median earnings for primary occupation authors (writers who spend more than half their working time writing) are £10,497 a year...
There is considerable inequality of earning power amongst authors, with the highest-earning 10% of writers taking home about 70% of total earnings in the profession. Meanwhile, most writers need a second job to survive, with just 28% of respondents making a living from writing alone without a second job.

Obviously there are some authors who do vastly better than that. I suspect there's a power law curve to earnings, as there usually is to such things.

Yeah, Mark Dawson did a somewhat bewildered reply to that, but it was in a private author group so I can’t link it to you directly. As far as anyone can determine, that study was either only looking at trad pub authors, or gathered data from a very skewed sampling of indies (since they definitely didn’t approach the places where the pros hang out!).

There was another researcher who was specifically surveying indies (I filled in the survey myself) but I’m not sure whether the results have been published yet. I’ll check…

Amazon’s own official figure is that there are over 1,000 authors making more than $100,000 per annum just through Amazon self publishing. We actually think that’s _considerably_ under reporting.

Of course, the overall figures are skewed because there are so very many people who _want_ to be an author, and even a lot who write full time while being supported by some other income source.

Cheers, that makes sense. I'm glad that more authors are making a living than I thought!

Interesting Links for 16-01-2023

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