Uncategorized – Page 84 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

A Letter to Mr. Bezos

Mr. Bezos,

I know you’re a busy man, so if it’s true that you read all the emails directed to this account, I’ll keep it brief.

I recently read an open letter written by Douglas Preston that encourages readers and writers to email you to let you know what they think about the hardball negotiating tactics in the contract dispute between Amazon and Hachette Book Group. I am an author who has published more than 20 books via Kindle Direct Publishing and is now making a living thanks to the ability that your company has given me to put my books in front of readers.

I think that you, Mr. Bezos, have done more to “defend literature” and advance books and reading than all of the Big 5 publishers combined. The big publishers are middlemen whose existence depends on inserting themselves between readers and writers and extracting as much value from them as they can. They are parasites who would rather treat authors like indentured servants and hold them as collateral than treat them as valued business partners.

For all of our sakes, I hope that you squeeze the bastards at Hachette until they beg you for mercy. The fact that Hachette is using their authors as hostages should not stop you from sticking to your guns. You are taking power from the monopolistic big publishers and putting it back into the hands of readers and writers everywhere, and we–the little guys–can see that clearly.

Stick to your guns, Mr. Bezos! Make the bastards squeal!

Joe

On Amazon, Hachette, and the future of books

I sincerely believe that this is the best time in the history of this planet to be a reader. There are so many great books coming out now–so many new authors who are writing stuff that is new and different and exciting. Because of the internet, it’s so much easier to find the book that you’re looking for. All the old barriers to distribution are coming down, so that authors from Australia or India or Japan are just as easy to find as authors from the US or the UK. Prices are coming down, too, and ebooks allow you to carry an entire library’s worth of books in a single device. Blogs and social media make it super easy to join book clubs, form fan communities, and connect with authors. It’s awesome.

I also believe that it’s the best time in the history of this planet to be a writer. The self-publishing revolution has thrown open the gates and made publishing as easy as clicking a button. Where before it was almost impossible to make a living, thousands if not tens of thousands of writers are quitting their day jobs and building lifelong careers, myself among them. We can write what we want, publish however we want, have as much creative control as we want–in other words, be in charge of our own business. And the terms of that business have never been better.

Before, our only hope of getting published was to sign away our rights, often for the life of copyright. Now, we can publish on every continent in the world and still retain all of our copyrights. Before, we were paid a pittance for our work, with payments and royalty statements that came late if they came at all. Now, we earn the lion’s share of the profit and get our payments every month like clockwork. No longer do we have to put up with publishers that infantalize us as tender, fragile “creative types” that need to be “nurtured.” We can build lucrative careers for ourselves with business partners who actually treat us with respect.

In fact, things have changed so much for the better that it makes you wonder how we put up with all that crap before. How many great books were never published because a slushpile reader never gave it a decent chance? How many writers gave up on themselves because of the crushing grindstone of rejection letters, or the nagging doubt that perhaps their writing was just unmarketable? How many unique and wonderful voices were whitewashed by revisions demanded from lazy agents or incompetent editors? How many promising careers were cut short because of the stupid mistakes of a publisher? How many authors resorted to suicide when the stress became too much to handle?

Make no mistake: the traditional big publishers are not doing anything to make things better for readers or for writers. In fact, to the extent that anything in the book world has changed, it’s in spite of the traditional big publishers. They have been dragged into this world kicking and screaming, conspiring illegally with Apple to raise book prices, collaborating with scammers like Author’s Solutions, clamping down on their authors with increasingly draconian contract terms and accusing Amazon–the company behind almost all of the innovation in the book world–with everything from destroying literature to taking over the world.

amazonhachette It’s in this context that one of the largest and most traditional publishers, Hachette Book Group, is now engaged in a nasty and increasingly public contract dispute with Amazon. The sturm und drang in the book world has been rising steadily, and with no resolution in sight, I expect that this tempest in a teacup will get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

From where I’m standing as a self-published author, it looks a lot more like an epic clash of daikaiju than a tempest in a teacup. The outcome will probably have an effect on my career, but there’s nothing I can do to affect it. Taking sides either way is more like joining a cheering section than doing anything constructive, so up to this point I’ve been content to follow it passively, without offering much in the way of commentary. However, that doesn’t mean that my position is neutral.

I’ve got to be honest–I hope that Amazon wins. Not because I self-publish through them, or because I’m in any way illusioned about them “being my friend.” I hope they win because I want to see Hachette get the bloody hell beat out of them.

In a world where disruptive technology has turned the publishing industry on its head, big traditional publishers like Hachette justify their existence by arguing that they serve as “curators” or “gatekeepers.” In other words, they claim to produce value by limiting reader choice, not expanding it, and preventing books from getting published, not from actually publishing them. They “defend literature” by obstructing it!

In fiction, the reader and the writer are the two most important players. Everyone else, from publishers to booksellers to agents to editors to distributors, is just a facilitator between the reader and the writer. Literature happens when a writer touches readers in a profound and enduring way. Anything that gets in the way between writers and readers is therefore a threat to literature. By putting up obstacles between the reader and the writer, Hachette is a far greater threat to literature than Amazon ever was.

Do I feel sorry for the Hachette authors that have been caught in the middle of this contract dispute? Yes–I feel sorry for them in the same way I feel sorry for a victim of domestic abuse. “He does so much for me,” “I’d be nothing without him,” and “he hurts me because he cares about me” are all variations of things that I’ve heard. Is it Amazon’s fault that Hachette’s authors are suffering, or does Hachette bear some of the blame? Remember, these authors have signed away almost all of their rights to their publisher, under terms and payment that pale before Amazon’s self-publishing platform.

So yeah, I hope that Amazon wins this fight. Or, more accurately, I hope that Hachette loses. I hope they get the living snot beat out of them. It may cause some pain for the authors that are married to Hachette, but Hachette is doing far more to hurt both readers and writers than Amazon ever has.

Towards a new measure of writing productivity

When I decided back in college that I wanted to write professionally, I made a point of tracking my daily word counts. I even made graphs with the data, showing both my daily count and a seven-day rolling total (some of you may remember how I used to post those graphs on this blog). Tracking my daily word count like that was very helpful when I first started out. It helped me to develop the discipline to write daily, and gave me the encouragement I needed to push ahead even when I didn’t feel like writing. It also gave me a lot of satisfaction to see how much I had written over time.

But then I started to notice some problems with that system. For one thing, it didn’t track revisions very well. I eventually decided to count progress on a revision the same as counting new words, but that meant that whenever I revised something, my word count shot up dramatically. Consequently, I focused more on revising old stuff than on writing new words, since that was the fastest way to boost my word count. Also, because I didn’t feel as much pressure to push forward, I sometimes spent months at a time on revisions that should have taken just a couple of weeks.

Then I went overseas, and everything about the old system threw me into a funk. Adjusting to a new culture can be difficult and exhausting, not to mention that it takes up a lot of mental headspace. These made writing extremely difficult, but because of the daily word count tracking, I didn’t feel like I could take a break. But when I tried to write, it didn’t come out well because of all the stress I was going through. Of course, the more I failed to meet my word count expectations, the worse I felt for it. The thing that had been such a great motivator at the start of my career now threatened to drag me down.

So I did what all good creative people do and abandoned the routine that wasn’t working. And it helped–it really did. Without all the useless pressures and misplaced incentives, I wrote a novella in little less than a month.

But then I started to feel lost. Without those word counts, I had no way of measuring my productivity. The pressures were gone, sure, but so was any sense of orientation. I had no idea whether I was writing as much as I could reasonably expect to, or whether I was falling behind. My daily rhythms would fall out of whack at the slightest interruption. The self-imposed deadlines that I thought would keep me in line instead gave me one more thing to procrastinate about–and I am a master of procrastination.

So I looked for other metrics that I could use to gauge my productivity. For a while, I tried using a timer, with the idea that measuring time spent writing would be better than measuring raw word count. That experiment ended in disaster. It added even more pressure than the word counts did, and drove me so hard to busywork that my creativity was almost stifled. For some people, the clock might be a good source of motivation, but for me it was absolutely horrible.

I looked around for something better than word count, and never really found it. Eventually, I learned how to do my work without a direct way to measure it. When writing is your calling, you can’t not write, so I learned how to listen to my own creative rhythms and nurture them. That worked pretty well when I was excited about a project, but when I ran into a block, everything took a hit. And even when everything was going well, I still felt kind of lost without a concrete way to measure my productivity.

Last month, I ran into a pretty big block with Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III). I had expected to finish that book by the end of May, but instead I ran into some problems and had to go back and rewrite a few chapters. That should have taken two or three days, but instead it took two or three weeks. And during those weeks, I figured that I needed to change things up a bit.

I decided to base my new system on word count, since that seems to be the most reliable and objective measure of writing productivity. Instead of measuring it quantitatively, though, I decided to set a daily minimum word count, and mark on a calendar the days where I reach it. For new words, that minimum is 2,000, and for revised words, it’s 4,000. That seems to work with my natural rhythms–just enough so that I have to push myself, but not so much that I put it off and procrastinate instead.

So far, the new system seems to be working. As soon as I implemented it, progress on Strangers in Flight took off, to the point where it should be finished in just a couple of days. This past week, my daily routine was thrown off a bit from getting Comrades in Hope ready for publication, but even while I was busy with formatting and uploading, I managed to get 2k words written (on the author’s note and a short story). That surprised me, and makes me wonder if maybe the next time I publish a book, I can still manage to keep my writing routine intact.

The really nice thing about having a concrete way to measure your daily productivity is that it helps you to separate your work life from your personal life. When you’re self-employed, the two tend to blend into each other a lot, so that you’re always wondering if you should be spending your time doing something work related. But by keeping a daily minimum word count, I can say to myself “all right, today’s work is done–time to go play” and not feel guilty about it.

The danger, of course, is that the daily minimum will become a ceiling instead of a floor, holding me back from being as productive as I could be instead of pushing me to do that last little bit. However, I think I have a way around that. On the calendar that I’m using to keep track of all this, I’ll mark down not only the days where I hit my minimum word count, but the days where I double (or even triple) it. That way, if I hit the 2k mark a little early, I’ll still have incentive to push farther. Besides, that 2k minimum isn’t set in stone. I plan to review it each month, and change it accordingly.

In any case, that’s my new system. If you guys want an update in a month or two on how it’s working, let me know–I’d be happy to share any insights I might have. But blog posts don’t count toward my daily word count, and since the rest of my afternoon is wide open, I’d better get cracking at it!

The need to read

So for the past couple of weeks, I haven’t been as productive at writing as I’d like. I could list off a lot of reasons, some of which would be legitimate, others of which would sound like (and probably be) excuses, but that would get tedious rather quickly, so I’ll spare us both the trouble. Instead, there’s one in particular that I’d like to focus on, and that’s the connection between reading and writing.

They say that if you want to be a writer, you have to write a lot and read a lot. Writing is important for obvious reasons, but reading is also quite important, though we tend to forget that. Reading is how we replenish the story well–it’s how we feed our imaginations, revisit familiar tropes and archetypes, find and spark new story ideas, and generally immerse ourselves in the world of story. For those of us who write fiction for a living, that’s vitally important.

At the beginning of the year, I made a resolution to read at least one book every week. That worked out well until about mid-February, when most resolutions die a horrible, miserable death. This one was no exception. For the past couple of months, I’ve hardly read anything, and I can feel it.

Here’s the thing: if I stop reading for a little while, I can still keep writing just fine. There’s no immediate effect. And if I don’t read anything for a long time, I can still push myself and get stuff done–it just takes more effort, and feels a lot more like work. Because of that delay, it’s hard to tell if there’s really a causal link between how much I read and how easy it is to write.

I definitely believe in that connection, though. I can feel it. And after going for so long without reading, I’ve found that my writing doesn’t come as easily as it used to. It feels more like a chore than something that I look forward to each day. I find myself getting distracted more easily, or procrastinating longer, or just flat out avoiding the work altogether. What’s more, when I do write, it doesn’t feel as satisfying. It feels like I’m doing just enough to get by, rather than putting out my best work.

And that’s the danger–that not only the quantity, but the quality of your work will suffer for not reading. It’s a trap that I don’t want to fall into, so I’ve decided to reverse it by picking up my to-read list and working my way through it. I started with a couple of David Gemmell novels, and they were both so good I finished them in just a matter of days. Boy, was it great to rediscover just how awesome a good book can be! It’s reading stuff like that that made me want to be a writer in the first place.

I don’t know if it’s limited just to reading books and novels. I know that I’ve found all sorts of excellent story material in movies, TV shows, animes, and other forms of storytelling media. Those probably have a positive effect as well. If you’re a creator, though, it’s probably more important to immerse yourself in the medium in which you do your creating. For writers, that means reading. Movies and TV shows can be great, but I doubt that they work as substitutes.

What do you guys think? Have you noticed a connection between what you read and how you write? I’m still trying to tease out the exact nature of the connection, so I’m definitely interested in hearing some other perspectives on the subject.

And just for fun, here’s a sampling of my current to-read list, in no particular order:

Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
Caszandra by Andrea K. Host
A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Existence by David Brin
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
Sackett’s Land by Louis L’Amour
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Sekhmet Bed by L.M. Ironside
Bloodstone by David Gemmell

Time to start reading!

“It was too short.”

This, by far, is the number one criticism I seem to get in my negative book reviews. I never quite know what to think of it. On the one hand, a reader wouldn’t say something like that unless they thought it was good, since if they hated the book completely they would say something like “it was blessedly short” (and yes, I have gotten reviews like that). On the other hand, some of them really get worked up about it, to the point where I doubt they’ll ever read anything I write ever again.

Just to be clear, I’m not opposed to negative reviews, and I’m not responding to any of my reviews in particular. As a matter of principle, I believe that reviews are for readers and not for writers. I don’t generally respond to reader reviews except in very rare cases, and never to tell the reviewer that they’re wrong.

With that out of the way, what does “too short” actually mean? I can’t speak for all readers, but for me, when a book is too short it usually means that something in the story itself felt unsatisfying. In other words, something felt undeveloped, or rushed, or cut short without ever coming to a conclusion (or, in the case of cliffhangers, at least to a natural stopping point). In other words, “too short” isn’t a function of words or of pages, but of the story itself.

I’ve read short books that felt like they fit their length perfectly. A Short Stay in Hell comes immediately to mind. That book is a thin novella, barely more than a hundred pages in print, and yet it comes together so masterfully that I honestly don’t know what else could be added to make it longer. I would love to have more time to explore that particular world, but as it is, the story comes together perfectly within its own length.

That said, there are other books that I felt were too short even though they did fit their own length. That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made is an example of an award-winning book–clearly well written, clearly well constructed–that left me unsatisfied because it felt too short. Here, though, it was less a problem with the story itself and more just that I wanted more time to explore the alien culture of the swales. I would love to read a full-length novel set in the same universe, if for nothing else than for the fascinating world-building.

This makes me wonder: are there certain forms of fiction that tend to get more ire from readers just because of the constraints of the form? Do some readers hate novelettes just because they’re novelettes, or serials just because they’re serials? Judging from my own reviews, that seems to be the case. Even if I wrote the best novelette in the world, they would hate it because it’s not a novel.

So what am I supposed to do when readers tell me that my books are too short? Should I set a minimum word count and not publish anything unless it goes over that word count? I really don’t think so, because that sounds a lot like padding. Instead, the only solution that I can see is to focus on telling the best story and to not even worry about the length until it’s finished (and even then, only to know whether to label it a novel or a novella).

In the case of series, sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether to bring a certain thread to a conclusion or to leave it unresolved as part of the overall series arc. Certainly, each individual story needs to have an arc of its own, even if it ends on a cliffhanger. I’m still learning as I go, especially when it comes to writing series. But it’s certainly a lot of fun for me, and I hope it’s fun for you too as a reader.

In short, there’s not much I can do other than keep telling stories as best as I know how, and learn what I can from each story in order to tell better ones in the future. If “too short” means that something was unsatisfying, I’ll do my best to learn from it. But I’m not going to pad my novellas into novels just to hit a certain page count. The story itself should determine its own length.

Z is for Slaying the Zombie Memes of Publishing

Being an indie writer is awesome. Without a doubt, self-publishing is one of the best decisions I have ever made, and has enabled me to build exactly the kind of writing career I have always wanted.

So it frustrates me to no end when people in the publishing industry try to discourage new writers from self-publishing the way that I did. What’s worse, they often justify their advice with information that has been debunked or opinions that have been shown to be unfounded. These “zombie memes” keep coming back as if the act of repeating them is enough to make them true.

Some examples of these zombie memes include:

Self-publishing is a bubble.
Ebook growth is stalling and will soon decline.
Getting visibility as a self-published author is impossible.
Amazon is evil because _______.
Amazon is destroying literature.
Self-publishing is destroying literature.
______ is destroying literature.
Publishers nurture writers.
Publishers are the guardians of literature.
Traditional publishers only publish high-quality books.
Self-published books are flooding the market with crap.
Only a handful of indie writers are making a living.
Self-publishers should not be called authors.
Ebooks shouldn’t be cheaper than print.
Publishing a book is harder than writing one.
Readers are reading the wrong books.
Publishers help authors navigate the digital world.
Agents help authors navigate the digital world.
There is nothing unethical about agents who act like publishers.
There is nothing unethical about standard publishing contracts.

Bullshit, all of it. Pure, unfiltered bullshit.

No matter how many times you kill these memes, they just refuse to die. Some people get a thrill at rehashing all the old arguments, but not me. I’d much rather leave the good fight to others, and quietly keep building my career while the naysayers all please themselves with the sound of their own voices.

Then again, perhaps that’s the key to slaying the zombie memes right there–successfully building your own career in spite of all the critics and naysayers. It’s a lot harder to believe all this crap when you see enough people succeeding in spite of it. The critical mass of indie writers is growing, and becoming a lot harder for the establishment to ignore.

This month, I sold over 700 books. I’m making enough on my books now that I don’t need a full-time or even a part-time job–writing is what I do full-time now. It’s still touch-and-go from month to month, but I’m living the dream, and because of the opportunities made possible by self-publishing, I have every confidence that I will continue to live that dream until the day I die.

The best way to slay a zombie meme is to create a competing meme that speaks even louder. That’s exactly what we in the indie movement are doing. And one day, when the zombie memes are finally dead for good, ours will be alive and thriving. It’s a new world of publishing, and never a better time to be a writer.

Y is for Yog’s Law

Anyone who was trying to break into publishing before the ebook revolution should be familiar with Yog’s law, which states:

Money should always flow toward the writer.

The purpose of the law was to keep new writers from falling into one of the many writing scams. Places that charged writers to publish were almost all vanity presses, and those that weren’t didn’t give writers access to the distribution channels necessary to make their work widely available. If you wanted to have a career, you had to go with a publisher, and the best way to tell if a publisher was legitimate was to look at how the money flowed.

Nowadays, with self-publishing, the line between writer and publisher has been blurred. An indie writer can expect to contract out work, sometimes to the tune of several hundred or even thousand dollars, in order to produce a professional product. In these cases, money clearly is not flowing to the writer. So what does this mean for Yog’s Law?

Some people have attempted to reformulate Yog’s law by drawing a distinction between the writing side of the business and the publishing side. While I think that that’s instructive, I’m not convinced it’s entirely useful. The distinction is not always clear, and even where it is, in practical terms it’s basically meaningless. You can just as easily fall for a publishing scam with your publisher hat on as with your writer hat.

So is Yog’s Law obsolete? Is it a curious relic of a publishing era that is passing into the twilight of history? In its old formulation, perhaps, but I would like to propose a new formulation that is perhaps even more relevant to today’s publishing industry than the old one ever was. That formulation is as follows:

Control should always flow toward the writer.

In the old days of publishing, writers had virtually no control over their careers. Publishers decided which books would make it to readers, which writers would get the attention of the publishing establishment, and how many books those writers could publish in a year. Authors had almost no say in their cover art, marketing, or any other aspect of the production and distribution of their work. In such an environment, the only assurance they had that their publisher would do a reasonably competent job was by seeing whether they put their money where their mouth was–hence Yog’s Law.

But today, writers do have control. We have a variety of publishing options today, and money isn’t the only factor in determining whether a path is legitimate. In fact, it may be one of the worst factors. Not only have advances gotten worse in the last few years, but the rights grabs have gotten so bad that signing a traditional book deal today basically amounts to selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. Yes, money is flowing to the writer, but the writer is still getting screwed.

Control means being able to have the final say on the cover art, the editing, or on an other aspect of a book’s production. It means that important stuff like the metadata or book description is not left to an entry-level employee that the author has never met.

Control means that no contract should be one-sided. It means an end to non-compete clauses of any kind. It means that rights reversions should actually have meaning, and that no book should be tied up for the life of copyright.

Control means that the bulk of the revenue should go to the person who does the bulk of the work. Bringing a book to market is not a challenge in the digital age, but writing a book certainly is. Publishers exist to serve writers, not the other way around.

Control means that a writer should know exactly what services they are paying for. If they commission work from a freelance editor or cover designer, they should be the one who directs that work, not a third-party who doesn’t also assume some of the risk if the project doesn’t work out.

By the standard of control flowing to the writer, most of the contracts coming out of New York fail miserably. That is not acceptable in an age where the New York publishers aren’t the only game in town. If a writer can make a living by going it on their own, then anyone who pays less than a living wage is basically running a scam.

Control should always flow toward the writer. Money used to serve as a proxy for control, but now that we have the real thing it’s no longer the best measure. Control, not money, is what you need to build a career.

Next A to Z post tomorrow

Sorry, no A to Z Challenge post today. I moved to a new apartment, and when I wasn’t moving I was spending time with my girlfriend … so yeah, not a great day for productivity. On the plus side, though, Lindsey Stirling’s new album just came out, and it’s pretty dang awesome.

Did I mention that I have ADHD? About that

Don’t worry, I’ve got topics for X and Y, and they’re both good ones. But for now, I think I’m going to go sleep in a private bedroom for the first time in over a year.

V is for Vanity Presses

There is a HUGE, HUGE difference between self-publishing as an indie and publishing through a vanity press. So huge, in fact, that the two are not even comparable. An indie author is a professional and an entrepreneur. A vanity press author is a victim of a scam.

A “vanity press” is a publishing company that caters to the vanity of anyone who wants to see their name on the cover of a book. They make their money not by selling books, but by selling overpriced services to naive and starry-eyed writers. If you have any self-respect at all, you should stay as far away from these companies as possible.

I am not an expert on vanity presses by any means, but here are some things that strike me as red flags that a company might be one:

They claim to be a “self-publishing” company (an oxymoron if there ever was one).
They use the phrase “published author” anywhere in their sales pitch.
They offer to publish your book on Amazon (you can publish your own book on Amazon).
They offer a “publishing package” that costs upwards of a thousand dollars.
They offer a “marketing package” that costs even more.
They require you to pay for your own editing and/or cover.
They have any sort of affiliation with Author Solutions.
David Gaughran has written a blog post lambasting them.
They require you to buy X number of print copies.
Their sales representatives won’t stop calling you.
They claim that they can get your book on Oprah.
They claim that they can get J.K. Rowling to review your book.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. If you have any to add, please do so.

The scary thing is that the big-name legacy publishers are not only in bed with these crooks, they’re openly fornicating with them. When Penguin Random House bought out Author Solutions, the largest and arguably the dirties vanity press in existence, they did nothing to clean up the company–in fact, they gave Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss a seat on the board! And other legacy publishers like Simon & Schuster responded by contracting with Author Solutions subsidiaries like Archway to do exactly the same way.

Vanity presses are scams. They exist to exploit the dreams and vulnerabilities of new writers, robbing them of their money and their dignity. They are extremely good at giving themselves the appearance of legitimacy, which has been made all the easier by the fact that the traditional publishing establishment has embraced them. You will find them at large publishing expos like Books Expo America. You will find favorable articles about them in venerable trade publications like Publisher’s Weekly. Their poison has infected the very heart of the legacy publishing industry.

At the heart of the indie publishing revolution is the idea that no one should come between writers and readers. Vanity presses violate that principle in every possible way–they are blood-sucking parasites with no respect for writers or for readers. For the sake of your career, for the sake of your books–hell, for the sake of your own self-respect–you should stay as far away from them as possible.

T is for Thousand True Fans

How many fans does an independent artist/creator need in order to make a living? That’s the question that sparked the idea of the Thousand True Fans. As the original blog article mentioned, the basic idea is that

a creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Sounds fair enough. But what’s a “true fan”? As the article describes it,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

The article goes on to crunch the numbers, showing that if each of these thousand true fans spends, on average, $100 per year on the creator’s stuff, that this adds up to $100,000 per year. If the creator is able to produce all that stuff independently, cutting costs and keeping a large cut of whatever it is they sell, then that can very reasonably add up to a living (or so the theory goes).

So how does this apply to writing? I doubt there are many readers–even true fans–who spend $100 a year on their favorite author. Maybe for the ridiculously overpriced hardcovers, but even then, most readers are so voracious that they can’t afford to spend that kind of money very often, even on their favorite authors. Also, most of us indies tend to price our books pretty low, to the point where we probably don’t publish enough books in a year to add up to $100.

Still, the basic principle of the theory still applies. Lindsay Buroker has an interesting take on it:

The gist is that you don’t have to be a mega seller. You just need X number of true fans (people who love your stuff and will buy everything you put out), and you’re assured that you can make a living at your art, so long as you to continue to produce quality material.

I believe, for an indie author, the number is probably around 10,000 rather than 1,000 (we only make a couple of dollars on a sale, after all). This is a large number, but, given that we can so easily get our work into Amazon, B&N, etc. where millions of eyeballs await, finding this many loyal readers isn’t infeasible, especially when you realize you can collect them over years, maybe even decades, so long as you’re in this for the long haul.

She crunches the numbers like this: if you publish two novels per year and price them at $5, at the standard 70% royalty you will make $60,000 per year if you sell at least 10,000 of each of them.

Lindsay Buroker has more experience with making a living on her writing than I do (she’s basically been doing it since 2012 or so, whereas I’m almost there but not quite). However, I think it’s possible to make a living with a lot fewer than 10,000 true fans, and perhaps even less than 1,000.

True fans are the key, but not because they’re the only ones who buy your books. For every true fan, there are lots of casual fans, and perhaps even more readers who buy one of your books but don’t necessarily go on to buy all the others. However, the true fans are the ones who will rant and rave about your book to all their friends and help to generate word of mouth. Thus, your true fans will help to bring in a steady stream of new readers, some of whom may become fans themselves. It’s this constant process that keeps a book selling for years and years, even after all the true fans have already bought it.

I doubt that I have more than a hundred true fans right now. I’ve met a few of them, so I know that they’re out there, but there’s only about a hundred people on my mailing list and only about a third of them click on the links in the new release emails I send out. However, I’m definitely more than halfway to making a living off of my books. It’s not just the true fans who are making that possible, but everyone between true fans and casual readers.

However, I do think that the Thousand True Fans theory is a useful way to think about things when you’re an indie author. For one thing, true fans make your income more predictable. If you know how many true fans you have, you can guesstimate how many books you’ll sell in the first couple of months after release, which helps to make your earnings more predictable. It also helps to give you a way to measure your career.

And let’s be frank–a thousand true fans is not very many. Even ten thousand is still a pretty low number when you consider how many hundreds of millions of readers there are. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the Thousand True Fans theory is that you don’t have to be a rockstar mega-hit bestseller to make a living–you just need a modest but dedicated fan base. From there, it’s just a matter of consistently producing new stuff and connecting with the fans well enough that they know when you’ve got something out.