Interesting Links for 16-01-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once — How to Shoot a Sci-Fi Kung Fu Epic (on a Budget)

(tags:movies scifi MartialArts everything )

2. Text and data mining copyright exception proposal to encourage AI focus and innovation in the UK

(tags:UK ai data copyright )

3. Google's very expensive coders produce a security vulnerability in c/c++ every thousand lines of code. If you care about security then you shouldn't use them.

(tags:security programming memory )

Comments

[helen_keeble]

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!)

[andrewducker]

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.

[helen_keeble]

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.

[andrewducker]

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