Today, I thought I’d take a moment to look at the realistic vision of what it means to be an author. This is based off of my conversations with a brand new author I met early last year.

Like last time, I also made videos so if you would rather listen to my (beautiful) 😛 voice instead of read the text, you can. But I’ll keep the information less of a ramble in the text.

Pros and Cons of Traditional and Indie Publishing

Basically, the best route depends on your goals and comfort levels.

Pros of Going with a Publisher

1. If you want someone else to handle the cover, the bulk of the edits, the description, the formatting, and getting them on retailers for you, then going with a publisher might be your best option. When you indie publish, you have to either do all of these tasks yourself, or you will have to hire people to do this stuff for you.

2. It is also nice to have a publisher take on your work because it validates that your work in good in someone else’s eyes.

Cons of Going with a Publisher

1. You have to make sure your book fits what the publisher wants. The publisher has to stay in business, so they will think of your book’s marketability.

2. The book will probably take longer to get out there into the world because you have to wait on their timeline to get things done.

3. Issues with intellectual property rights may arise. What happens if the publisher goes out of business? How will you get your rights back? Can you take a secondary character in this book and use it in another one to self-publish? Can you go with another publisher? What formats will they publish for you? Can you share anything from your story online and share excerpts from it? Etc, etc

Pros of Indie Publishing

You control everything. You pick the cover, the title, the content of the book, description, timing of publication, where you publish, what format your book is in, etc. (I went into a tangent about Draft2Digital being a distributor.)

Cons of Indie Publishing

You control everything, and that can be overwhelming.

Regardless of how you publish, keep in mind that:

1. You will have to promote yourself because visibility is a pain in the rear to get.

2. Keep your expectations for money realistic. (This is where I give outdated information from a Wide for the Win YouTube video that is no longer available. It is now marked private. I have made another post which I am linking to below with more current information.) However, the fact does still remain that this is not a “get rich quick” endeavor.

3. Someone will hate your book. You can’t avoid it. Whatever you do, keep yourself professional when in the public arena. Any crying, yelling, etc should be reserved for private.

4. Some people will only want free books. Don’t expect that everyone will want to buy your books. And that is okay.

5. Focus on the people who enjoy your work and connect with them. Those relationships are the best kind in the world. Don’t underestimate the value in personal connections.

Author Income Surveys 2023 and 2024

A note before we get into the numbers:

Be mindful of how much authors are really earning. These results cover gross income, not net. This is an important distinction because net is what matters. If an author makes $100,000 gross a year but spends $80,000 on ads, virtual assistants, editors, taxes, and other things, that author is really only making $20,000 profit. On the other hand, you might have an author who makes $30,000 gross a year but only spends $10,000 on expenses. So that author also profits $20,000. Profits matter more than gross. Profits allow you to pay the bills and invest.

I didn’t ramble about that on the video, but I did mention how income isn’t always just from selling books on retailers like we assume. A lot of authors making good money are selling courses, doing Kickstarter campaigns, selling directly from their website, etc. So take the “book selling” portion of their business with a grain of salt. Some really are just making money selling their books, but some are adding other things into the “six-figure income” basket.

Here is the breakdown from the Draft2Digital Blog Post Episode 128, June 15, 2023 (https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/?s=EP128)

Just over 2,000 authors participated in this survey, and these authors spent at least 50% of their time with author-related duties.

The median revenue for 2022 was $12,749.

1/4 of these authors made $0-$1,000 a year.

43.8% of these authors made over $20,000 a year.

28% of these authors made $50,000+ a year with 1/5 of that number earning “six figures”)

Now for the survey Written Word Media conducted. This post was published on Oct. 24, 2024. (https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2024-indie-author-survey-results-insights-into-self-publishing-for-authors/)

This was a wider group of authors. I’m not sure of the exact amount. I might have missed that information in the post. I did participate in this survey. I am wide. I am not in KU at all. KU, for those who don’t know, is an exclusive program that Amazon set up for authors to make their ebooks only available on Amazon.

87.5% of authors in this survey have at least one book in KU.

Over 75% of the income reported in this survey were from authors who made their money on KU. I feel this skews the results a bit on how much authors are selling because KU is a library platform. Readers aren’t buying those books. Readers are borrowing them. KU pays authors based on pages read. Readers pay Amazon KU a subscription service and can access as many KU books as they want.

Here are the stats:

46% of authors make $100 or less a month.

17% of authors make $251-$1,000 a month

17% of authors make $2,501-$20,000 a month

It’s interesting that there’s a gap between some of those numbers, but I take it to mean they were statistically insignificant. Therefore, they weren’t worth mentioning. (Who knew that one day the three statistics classes I was forced to take in college would one day pay off because I actually understand this stuff.)

Authors whose goal is to make money, made more money. Authors whose goal is to write for enjoyment, made less money. I’m sure that shocked everyone. (I’m joking, of course.) It’s natural that authors who treat this more as a business have a better chance of making money at this thing.