Something personal about me you don’t know… I’m usually ahead of the curve. I don’t know why, my whole life I’ve had a weird intuition when it comes to a lot of things.
So it was a few years back now, when AI first came on the scene, that I immediately felt like I was punched in the gut by Mike Tyson. When I voiced this feeling, everyone shot me down, “Yeah 9 fingers per hand, OK, whatever.”
People still don’t want to listen, but this article isn’t about AI per se. It’s about me spending a good chunk of the year going deep into financials across the creative landscape and coming to face-to-face with numbers I didn’t want to see.
As an editor and consultant, people rely on me for advice. And I’ve spent a career trying to give them the best advice I could… the right advice.
Before we get into it, let me tell you what no other editor will tell you.
Writing for profit is one of the hardest undertakings imaginable right now. With millions of new pieces of creative fiction published every year, the odds of making just $10k on your:
- Unedited debut books are about 1 in 200.
- Professionally edited debut books jump to 1 in 40.
- Professionally edited with everything else in spades except a massive marketing budget, you can land around half those odds, 1 in 20.
The sad reality is, our society is based on a handful of platforms controlling the game entirely. And unless you have 6 figures to leverage as a marketing budget, you’re never likely to pull out a reasonable, sustainable living off your writing.
There are outliers, things going viral.
And you can leverage a series to increase your odds (more below)… but even then it’s no easy, guaranteed road to “return on investment” when it comes to creative fiction.
That’s reality. None of it is in your control except the quality of the manuscript itself.
When your odds are 1 in 20 at best, you simply can’t afford to hand the market a book that truly, wasn’t ready. Every detached theme, every flat arc, every misfire in your opening, every piece of missed potential, hands your slim odds back to the house. The writers who break through at those numbers aren’t relying on luck. They show up with a manuscript that survives reader reviews, Amazon/Google algorithms, and a million other authors peddling in the same genre.
And that’s what quality professional developmental editing does.
It doesn’t guarantee you beat the odds. Nothing and nobody guarantees that… but it does make sure you don’t beat yourself.
The State of Indie Publishing Right Now
Personal take: The only writers I’ve ever known making real money on Amazon or similar, are content farm writers. Writers that crank out quantity over quality. I’m talking 8 or 9 books a year and this is before AI.
Over the years I’ve always told folks the only way to make significant money in writing is with a large marketing budget. But this year revealed the numbers are way worse than I imagined. The reality is, today, you need to spend 6 figures, over $100k, to make $30,000 a year. (And yes, that’s obviously not sustainable.)
If you’re on social media much, the one constant among indie authors, is the complaint of gaining no traction despite ad spends.
Someone recently posted they spent $600/month on advertising and sold 80 copies total of their novel in 6 months. Adding insult to injury, 60 of those sales over the 6 months were from friends and family. Leaving only 20 organic sales across 6 months, or about $15/month at a $4.99 sale price.
While this is an unsubstantiated internet post. It checks out. (And that’s I’m posting).
$600/month x 175 = Just over $100k marketing budget for the year.
$15/month x 175 = $2625/month or $31,500/year.
The Author’s Guild cites self-published indie authors annual income at under $166/month ($2000/year). With zero-marketing authors under $1000 for the year, many at zero sales.
While there are a million variables and the actual data like the post above is shaky at best, we can extrapolate with 100% accuracy, that the environment sucks.
Why Bother writing in an Endless Sea of Competition dominated by Marketing Dollars?
Creative folks have always struggled with money. The more the world changes, the more it stays the same.
Where and what you spend your money on in your life is your decision and investing in your own writing, even if it’s not likely to show any return isn’t any less valid than anything else we humans tend to spend a lot of money on hoping to make money, with the deck stacked against us.
And I’m not talking “hobbies” here, I’m talking full-time passions. You probably don’t know it, but unsponsored NASCAR teams, the teams who finish dead last in every race, they pull in about $1 million a year… which sounds fantastic to us writers! Until we realize it costs millions every year to build out and run a NASCAR cup car.
Life isn’t always about the bottom line, it’s sometimes just about playing the game.
But when money’s on the line, you don’t want to eliminate your chance of financial gain. Nobody actually races NASCAR hoping to lose every race.
So let’s talk about how to do it right.
Positioning Yourself For Success
WRITE A SERIES.
I’m not a single genre writer guy myself. My long prose works include historic fantasy, samurai fiction, cyberpunk, Sherlock Holmes, and noir horror detective fiction. My comic writing is equally all over the place.
And while this is how I personally prefer to write, it’s totally impractical.
This is where the old advice, pick a genre and stick to it until you get traction, actually applies.
And if you want to position yourself for maximum traction, don’t just pick a lane… write a coherent series.
Real profit potential lies in converting visitors not to a single book sale, but purchasers of your entire back list.
I am a perfect example of what not to do. Someone landing on my site and purchasing one of my novels, even after they love it, my books are so far apart in genre, there’s no cross purchasing power. None of my books are related… not even remotely.
If we look back to the earlier example, the author was making about $31k a year on his book with a 100k ad spend. Well, if he had 3 more books, for an additional $93k in sales, that brings the gross income to $124k. Finally, 24k above the ad spend.
Of course, you can’t possibly convert every customer to buy each volume in the series, but on the other hand, that example was probably on the lower end of the spectrum. So while the numbers themselves are not definitive, the trajectory is.
More books, more sales, eventually, surpassing the marketing budget. The series makes this possible. The individual book, in all practical reality, does not.
QUALITY IS KING.
However you manage it, you’ve got to go above and beyond what everyone else is doing.
Far too many manuscripts hit my desk where the author’s attitude is “it just needs to be good enough.”
My answer here usually turns to tv shows that had huge built-in audiences and/or massive hype that failed: Halo, Shadow and Bone, Mindhunter, The Get Down, Paper Girls. Tons of streaming series don’t survive more than a season or two, not because they were bad, but because they were in fact, “just good enough,” in an environment where that bar of quality simply doesn’t survive.
And then, there’s always the flip-side, tv shows that came out of nowhere and became monster hits because their quality was off the charts: Breaking Bad, Squid Games, Stranger Things, The Bear, and MGM’s From to name a few. Ips that came onto the scene with no existing franchise support, no A-list cast, no massive marketing push, and no reason to succeed, on paper.
Your Strongest Foundation
The first is something I talk about everywhere on my sites. Story potential. I see it all the time, manuscripts land on my desk that tap only a fraction of their full potential.
If you don’t write to your story’s full potential, you’ll never gain traction. Period.
And while potential lives at both the story and execution level, I’m talking primarily story level here. Story potential IS the foundation and when you miss it, the degradations erodes everything that follows.
Your Personal Identity
Secondly, you’ve picked a genre. Now I want you to identify what you love most about that genre. Be as specific or general as you want. Notice my key word here, you. Don’t assess thinking what the readers love most, what’s most popular, or anything like that.
Just hone in on what you love about it.
Now ask yourself, from all the genre material you’ve read, how would you do each of those things better or differently?
See if you can identify one thing from your list that you feel could be your individual trademark. The one thing readers would repeatedly comment, “yeah this author delivers this “xxx” in spades every time. They’re really one of the best at it.”
Note that this thing doesn’t need to be unique in writing. For example, your thing could be “dialogue,” or maybe “fight scenes.” Both of these are common writing aspects. The point is, as an author, they’re of such importance to you, they become part of what defines your writing itself.
Being ahead of the curve.
Means you clearly see the environment up ahead. Sight allows you to adjust and pivot before the sharp turn arrives. Planned action toward a distinct outcome, instead of last minute response hoping with fingers crossed.
That intuition I spoke of earlier… my Spidey Sense is tingling again. AI is going to totally disrupt writing for a living and make a bad situation worse. But flooded markets always correct and when this one does the writers who invested in their craft, who took the time to establish a unique voice, learned how to properly structure a story and the ability to develop it to its full potential, these are the writers still standing when the dust settles.
Wait! What about Comics Specifically?
Interestingly, where the only real path in long prose is the series, comics looks to be the opposite. Where the path of least resistance is the stand along book, NOT the series. But this may be more to the practical costs of production than the writing itself.
I’m actually waiting to here back from Kickstarter and trying to crunch some more historic number data.
I’ll come back and update as soon as I have them. ▪
About the Author —
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Nick Macari is a developmental editor and story consultant with near 30 years across comics, games, novels, and screenplays. He’s the author of Storycraft For Comics, the Working Writer’s Guide to Comics and the creator of the SCAR system referenced in this article.
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