Chronic Self-Publishing Syndrome.

My post this week relies on a year-old article in the Guardian about self-publishing authors. The article refers to a survey that was conducted by the Taleist website. One thousand self-published authors responded to an invitation to fill in the survey. So it is not a random survey of self-publishers, and therefore, its validity is open to question.   

I suspect a lot of those who responded would have been enthusiastic about self-publishing because of some success, while people who were not so successful, and had given up, would not have bothered. 

Still the survey has some interesting things to say what committed self-publishers earn. 

Money Earned By Self-published Authors in 2011. 

The average money earned by authors who responded to the survey in 2011 was, $10,000 dollars, a nice round number. Now before you say, that’s better than the dole and rush to start your mega-seller, that average figure is distorted by the sales of the top selling respondents. Ten per cent of authors who replied to the survey made 75% of the reported revenue from self-publishing. About half of the respondents made less than $500. A quarter lost money because their sales did not cover their publishing costs. 

Best Genres for Earning from Self-publishing. 

As expected, romance was the best genre for self-publishing. Romance writers who responded to the survey earned on average $17,000. Science fiction writers averaged $3,800, fantasy $3,200, and literary fiction $2,000.

Best Gender for Self-Publishing.

Sixty-eight per cent of those who said they could live off their self-publishing earnings were female. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that romance writers tend to be female. 

Editors and Cover Designers Help. 

Authors who engaged editors earned 13% more on average. Those who sought help with the cover design earned 34% more on average.

Writing Habits of Best Performed Self-Publishers. 

High earning self-publishers wrote on average 2047 words a day. The rest averaged 1557 words a day, which is only 25% less. I average about 360 words a day, last time I checked, so I have some work to do. Writing 2047 words would take me about six hours, and that is without doing much editing along the way. When I am redrafting the world count is very likely to be negative.

After writing their 2047 words, those high earners would then have to spending hours on social media marketing their books.

As a science fiction writer I also spend a lot of time keeping up with trends in the world so I can think about what the world will be like in the future. And then there is time spent reading fiction.

So to replicate the habits of a self-publishing high earner, I would have to spend an estimated 12 hours a day, every day of the week writing, editing, redrafting, marketing, reading and keep abreast of the field.

So if I was going to emulate the writing habits of these self-published writers, I would have no time for anything except writing and promoting my writing, too bad about my health. I wonder how many of the writers who responded to the survey were extremely unfit and unhealthy. I bet a few of them have since burnt out. Even Jack (pictured at the start) in The Shining knows that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." After many authors are found slumped dead over their keyboards, doctors might have to deal with a new medical condition: Chronic Self-Publishing Syndrome.

I would love to hear the average daily word counts of readers of this blog.

My Writing Week: Issue 3, Year 5

Hi all,

Best Place to Self-Publish a Book

For the past year or so I have followed a thread on LinkedIn that asked the question: What is the best place to self-publish a book? Here are a few things I have learnt:

• Createspace (Amazon) comes up as the best self-publishing platform. It is relatively easy to use compared to other platforms and not many authors seem to have problems with it.
• Smashwords rarely has a bad comment posted about it.
• Until recently, I had not noted any references to Apple’s ibooks. This is probably due to writers having to use Smashwords or Lulu to prepare their ebook before it can be sold in the ibookstore.
• Never use Publish America. It is a total rip off. The fact that it still exists means many writers do very little publishing research. Authors accuse Publish America of doing things like charging $350 for the placement of 15 copies of their book in Barnes and Noble. Many authors say they know they have sold books, but Publish America says they have not.  Publish America then seems to make it virtually impossible for an author to get the rights back to their non-selling book.

Typos

I am reading Hugo nominated author Ian McDonalds’ The Dervish House, published by Gollancz. Recently my reading was interrupted three times in thirty or so pages by typos. Twice a word was repeated and a word that should have been singular was pluralised. But in the hundred pages I have read since I have not noticed any more typos. Perhaps the proof-reader read those thirty pages on Friday, after a big night out.  

My Divine Writing

I wrote and submitted an article to DiVine magazine last week. It is about how I hid my Ulcerative Colitis from everyone. I will let the universe know when the article is published, which seems a bit odd when the article is about hiding my disease.

My Novel Writing.  

Much of my writing time last week was taken up with the Divine article. I had computer problems which always seem to happen at this time of year. I also spent a lot of time in the garden picking tomatoes and beans, watering and waging war on fruit flies. And then there was the cricket.

So I didn’t achieve my goal of 1000 words of the novel on any weekday. My best effort was 750 words on Friday. But, but, but…chapter thirty-four was so hard to write as the POV character kept on thinking up new evacuation supplies and activities for the crew to perform.

All up I added 1970 words to the now 70,900 word novel. This week I hope to do better.