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Below the cut, I’ve written some things about self-publishing in general, along with my own experience with it, including how much money I make.
Revealing one’s income is generally considered to be bad and something you should feel bad about, especially if you’re female. But “can you earn a living doing this?” is a pretty basic question about a career, and the black box around it tends to make people swing between “No, never, it’s impossible” and “I’ll publish one novel and it’ll be made into a movie and I’ll be RICH!” So I’ll show you mine to prove that it is not impossible. (“One novel = movie = RICH!” isn’t impossible either because at least one person’s done it, but it’s not the way to bet.)
I’ve had a very good experience self-publishing. It suits me. This post reflects that. If you think it might suit you, or are just curious about it, click. If reading about other people’s money or anything mostly talking up the positives of self-publishing is going to annoy, anger, upset, or otherwise be bad for you, don’t click.
I started self-publishing in 2013. I’d come across a post by Delilah Fawkes in Something Awful about how she was raking in money by writing short erotica (3000-5000 words) and selling it online for $2.99, at $2.00 profit. I was in grad school for the second time and needed money, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Writing specific things in order to make money was not new to me. By that time I’d been writing professionally for almost 20 years. I’d written TV, short stories, poetry, comic books, plays, reviews, and a memoir. I paid for my first graduate degree partly by writing 15-second sound bites on health topics for an exercise show called Body By Jake. (“It’s a myth that carrots improve night vision. But they do contain over thirty separate nutrients, and a single carrot provides your entire recommended daily allowance of Vitamin A. If you don’t like them cooked, try blending them into a healthy smoothie!”) I wrote some things for love and some for money and some for both. Also, some to teach myself specific things about writing, some so I could put them on my resume, etc. There are many motivations to write.
My first month writing erotica, I made $7.00. But I persisted, writing in all kinds of erotica genres (yes, it has genres) and researching trends to decide what to write.
This was the time when Amazon was flooded with titles like “Gangbanged by the Centaur Clan” and “Human Cow Breeding School” and “Alien Tentacle Sex Party” and “Ravaged by Gay Vikings” so both the writing and the research were pretty hilarious. This one guy put out books with no image on the cover, just titles like “Horny Cheerleader Slut Fucked By Quarterback’s Ten-Inch Cum Cannon” and “Horny Housewife Slut Fucked By Pizza Delivery Boy’s Ten-Inch Cum Cannon” and “Horny Nun Slut Fucked By Priest’s Ten-Inch Cum Cannon.” He got so many outraged reviews saying that he’d copied and pasted the same text and just switched out the sluts and the cum cannon dudes (but sometimes not entirely, so the nun would suddenly appear on a football field), that Amazon eventually yanked his books.
I’m not going to reveal my erotica pen name, sorry. If you know it, please don’t share. It’s not because I’m ashamed of it – I’m not in the slightest – but because I work in a field where it could cause problems if some asshole decided to publicize my specific titles or send them to my workplace. (That job is unpaid and a labor of love. I earn my living writing.)
I discovered a couple things about myself while writing erotica. One is that I’m good at and enjoy running my own business. I found the business aspects, like market research, very enjoyable and fun.
The other thing is that I need to know that I have an audience. Previous to self-publishing, except when I was doing work for hire, I was constantly subject to writer’s block. I spent seven years working on a novel that I never even finished. It turns out that what I need to be able to write, and certainly to be happy writing, is the knowledge that at least some people will read and enjoy what I write. If there’s a chance that no one will read it ever, it’s very hard for me to enjoy writing or finish anything. I don’t just write for myself. I write for myself and for readers.
When I started self-publishing, even my absolute worst and least successful stories sold a few copies. Others sold lots of copies. The knowledge that I could write literally anything, and at least some people would read it, was incredibly freeing. I went from being the world’s slowest writer who never finished anything without an outside deadline to being fairly prolific with no deadlines at all, secure in the knowledge that I would never be shouting into a void.
2013: $40,000.
And then Amazon had a moral panic and extensively banned erotica, including a number of my stories. I decided to jump ship to something that was popular and that they wouldn’t ever ban, which was romance novels. I looked at what was selling well, and I considered what I personally enjoyed, and then I thought about where those things intersected.
This was not difficult. There’s a wide range of what I like to write and read, and a lot of it is commercial. I didn’t start writing fanfic until I’d been a pro writer for years, but writing to specification to give someone a Yuletide gift was right up my alley. I like writing to please people, including but not limited to myself. I like prompts. I like tropes. I like less-than-respectable genres. My heart lies with hurt-comfort and superpowers and secret experiments to create super-soldiers and gunslingers striding across the desert.
I saw that paranormal romance with werewolves was popular, “mate bonds” (soul-bonds) were popular, and military romance was popular. So I created a new pen name, Lia Silver, and launched a series of paranormal military romance novels with mate bonds and superpowers and secret experiments to create super-soldiers and hurt-comfort and PTSD (the area of my therapeutic specialty; also something I’m very interested in due to personal experience), called Werewolf Marines.
I really love those books and hope to write more in the series. They’re comfort reading I wrote for myself.
2014: $21,000.
Not the heights of the erotica heyday, financially speaking, but not bad under the circumstances. In general, your old books continue to sell, though at reduced rates, long after you publish them. But in this case, Amazon yanked some of my books and I pulled others myself to avoid further scrutiny of my account, so I lost that source of income. If those books had continued selling at normal rates, the total would have been higher.
I also published a YA novel with Viking. I’m not including the advance from that in the total above as that wasn’t self-publishing.
Meanwhile, I saw that a group of people I knew from Something Awful were doing something interesting. Much like “Carolyn Keene,” the group of writers who wrote Nancy Drew, they were publishing romance under the same pen name. On Amazon, it’s possible to set things up so each writer can publish the book they wrote themselves and have all the profits delivered directly to them, but all the books appear under the same name.
I was in an online group for self-published writers, largely but not entirely from FFA. I got together with some writers from that group and some friends who were not in the group at that time, and we created Zoe Chant, author of paranormal shapeshifter romance.
I expected Zoe to be just a fun project that would enable us to earn a couple hundred or maybe a thousand dollars per month. Right out of the gate, it was way more successful than that. Zoe’s first book (by me), “Bought by the Billionbear,” was a 15K novelette about a billionaire bear shifter who buys a date with the heroine at a bachelorette auction. It was basically a series of tropes I’d noted in bestselling PNR stories, with a sweet hero and heroine, plus lots of food descriptions because I like writing that.
It made $6800 in the first two months. (Books generally make the most money in the first two months.) I did about $50 worth of advertising on newsletters, but nothing on social media. I attribute its success to its keywords, cover, blurb, and the book itself being something people wanted to read.
Other Zoes were more or less financially successful, but no Zoe book has ever made less than $1600 in its first two months. Zoe quickly evolved a consistent style and themes, such as protective heroes who are also super-nice since we were all really done with alpha assholes. Any series is always written by the same author, for consistency, though we occasionally do crossovers.
I created a series for Zoe called Protection, Inc., about shifter bodyguards. Again, I looked at what I personally like, what Zoe readers liked, and where that overlapped. The result was equal parts action scenes, hurt-comfort, and romance; there’s formulaic elements to make the series feel consistent, but each book is a somewhat different genre – a backstage comedy, a modern fairy tale, “trapped in the evil super-soldier lab,” etc.
The first book made $12,000 in its first two months. I did some paid advertising on Facebook and in a newsletter, but no blog tours or other promotion on social media. I’m sure the advertising definitely helped it make as much money as it did, but mostly I think people liked the cover, blurb, concept, and the book itself.
2015: $57,000.
I continued writing Protection, Inc., along with some Zoe standalones and also non-Zoe books. I self-published the rest of the YA series I’d started at Viking.
Zoe’s books got longer and became more plotty and less porny, partly due to Amazon starting to pay authors per page read and partly due to Zoe writers gaining more confidence and ease the more they wrote. Myself included. My first Protection, Inc. book was 30K, my third was over 60K, and my fourth was 80K. I’d come a long way from “took seven years to not finish a single book.”
2016: $72,000.
I didn’t publish much in 2017 due to personal issues.
2017: $38,000.
I published Protection, Inc. # 5 and 6.
2018 to date: $59,000.
I have found that I like self-publishing more than I like traditional publishing. I enjoy the business aspects, and I enjoy being able to control most of what happens to my books. It drives me crazy to be forced to just sit back and watch as publishers make decisions about my books that I think are bad, like pricing the first book in a series higher than the subsequent books when it should be the other way around. Now I can arrange everything to my own satisfaction.
Amazon has its issues – boy, do they ever – but the problems I’ve had with them are ones that bother me less than the ones I’ve had with traditional publishers. For one thing, I’ve never had trouble getting Amazon to pay me what they owe me. For another, while they did refuse to publish some of my books, they did not have the rights to them, so they couldn’t hold my books in limbo indefinitely, not publishing them but also not allowing me to publish them elsewhere. Both not getting paid and getting my books stuck in limbo are problems I’ve consistently had with traditional publishers, and I’m not the only one.
I love being able to write literally anything I want. I enjoy writing Zoe Chant, I enjoy writing Lia Silver, I enjoy writing Rebecca Tregaron, I enjoy writing Rachel Manija Brown, I enjoy writing Edonohana, and I enjoy writing my secret pen names that I won’t name here. And I enjoy getting to write any or all of them, as I choose.
Self-publishing has become more respectable than it used to be, but it’s still looked down upon by lots of people. The same can also be said about every genre I write except poetry. But I’ve never cared about being respected by all. I’ve only ever wanted to write stories I enjoy and that please readers, and to always have readers. As far as my writing career goes, I am living the dream.
I have had the chance to help some people out with their self-publishing endeavors (also sometimes with their traditional publishing endeavors) and over the last couple years, I’ve seen several of them do so well at it that they quit their day jobs and took up writing full-time. Not everyone can do that, or wants to. But if you do want to, and are willing and able to do what it takes, it’s entirely possible.
A lot of people have opinions about self-publishing. They’re heavily influenced by their own experience, which is not universal. So, with the caveat that the same goes for me, here are some things I see often that I disagree with.
You need to flog your book on blog tours, tweet about it frequently, and generally push your book everywhere on social media to succeed.
You can do this if you like. But if you dislike self-promotion, you’re likely to do it badly, and then it won’t work for you. Personally, I would only do it if you enjoy it. I don’t do blog tours or other social media self-promo outside of my own spaces. Zoe has a Facebook page, but only started using it for anything but book release announcements this year. We have a Twitter, but only use it for book release announcements.
You need to be great at marketing and/or spend a lot on advertising to succeed.
Being great at marketing definitely helps, especially if you’re hoping to do this full-time. And being aggressively bad at marketing, such as to the point where your cover signals the wrong genre for your book or your blurb is an active turn-off to the readers who would like your book, will hurt. But there’s a big area in between. If you’re just looking to publish your writing, make some money, and get some readers, but not to write full-time, you don’t need to do any marketing or advertising whatsoever. You don’t even need a website.
If you only do one marketing thing beyond appropriate covers and blurbs, get a mailing list via MailChimp and link it at the end of your book, then use it to alert everyone who signs up when you publish a new book.
Nobody reads FF. Nobody makes any money writing FF.
There are some very popular FF writers, and some very enthusiastic readers. It also tends to be priced higher than either MF or MM, so writers get paid more per book. It can be a harder market to get a handle on than MM and MF; stuff like covers isn’t as codified as it is in those genres. But my FF did pretty well, and had I focused just on that and not gotten sidetracked by other things, I think I’d have a very nice FF career right now. I don’t think I’d be making Zoe levels of money… probably… but I’d be surprised if I couldn’t pay the rent.
I love FF and think it’s an underserved market. I have an upcoming project (not a group name) that I think will please those of you who enjoy tropey FF, and will also prove that there are more of you out there than many people think.
If you like FF, write FF. And drop me a link when you publish, because I probably want to read it.
You can write what you love, or make money, but not both.
If the only things you love to write are extremely uncommercial, and you can’t or don’t want to write anything else, then yes, that’s true. Otherwise, it’s not.
If you want to do both at the same time, look for the any overlap between what you love and what makes money. Tropey romance with lots of h/c sells, and I love tropey romance with lots of h/c, so that works for me. I find that the writers who don’t enjoy what they write on some level, even if it’s not 100% their personal passion project, often have their books not do very well, and then they burn out and quit. Writers who do enjoy themselves generally do better, as well as having a better time.
That’s not to say that you need to enjoy every minute of every book. Some books just turn out to be a slog, and you don’t know it’ll never get to be fun till you’ve finished them and it didn’t. I have gotten so sick of sex scenes that I’ve skipped them, put [sex goes here], and written them all last. But it’s good to generally like what you’re doing. I think a big reason Zoe has succeeded to the degree that she has is that, in general, we’re having fun and it shines through.
You can also write some books that are commercial and some that aren’t. This is a time-honored literary tradition, and one that continues to this day. (Though sometimes the books you think are commercial flop, and the ones you think are your non-commercial labor of love find a surprisingly large audience.)
If you want to succeed in self-publishing, you have to write romance
Fantasy, science fiction, mysteries/thrillers, and YA (mostly sf or fantasy YA) also have lots of readers. I don’t think it’s a good place for literary mainstream fiction, poetry, or children’s books – traditional publishing is better for those genres. Short erotica is not a great bet nowadays in terms of making money.
Writing crap for money is easy! Anyone can do it!
If by “crap” you mean “commercial books that sell well,” it actually isn’t, and not everyone can do it. It’s a specific skill that only a subset of writers have. If you’re not sure if you have it or not, the only way to find out is to try.
As for actual crap, it’s just as hard to write stuff you think is bad as it is to write stuff you think is good.
Nobody can break in now.
New writers break in every day. It’s not as easy as it was in the $2.99 erotica days, but it’s still completely possible. And the $2.99 erotica boom wasn’t actually easy either. Lots of people couldn’t do it. I personally find writing romance easier and more fun than writing erotica, because when you get down to it one orgasm is very much like another, while every “getting to know you” conversation is different.
If you have any questions, about my experience or self-publishing in general, feel free to ask!
Revealing one’s income is generally considered to be bad and something you should feel bad about, especially if you’re female. But “can you earn a living doing this?” is a pretty basic question about a career, and the black box around it tends to make people swing between “No, never, it’s impossible” and “I’ll publish one novel and it’ll be made into a movie and I’ll be RICH!” So I’ll show you mine to prove that it is not impossible. (“One novel = movie = RICH!” isn’t impossible either because at least one person’s done it, but it’s not the way to bet.)
I’ve had a very good experience self-publishing. It suits me. This post reflects that. If you think it might suit you, or are just curious about it, click. If reading about other people’s money or anything mostly talking up the positives of self-publishing is going to annoy, anger, upset, or otherwise be bad for you, don’t click.
I started self-publishing in 2013. I’d come across a post by Delilah Fawkes in Something Awful about how she was raking in money by writing short erotica (3000-5000 words) and selling it online for $2.99, at $2.00 profit. I was in grad school for the second time and needed money, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Writing specific things in order to make money was not new to me. By that time I’d been writing professionally for almost 20 years. I’d written TV, short stories, poetry, comic books, plays, reviews, and a memoir. I paid for my first graduate degree partly by writing 15-second sound bites on health topics for an exercise show called Body By Jake. (“It’s a myth that carrots improve night vision. But they do contain over thirty separate nutrients, and a single carrot provides your entire recommended daily allowance of Vitamin A. If you don’t like them cooked, try blending them into a healthy smoothie!”) I wrote some things for love and some for money and some for both. Also, some to teach myself specific things about writing, some so I could put them on my resume, etc. There are many motivations to write.
My first month writing erotica, I made $7.00. But I persisted, writing in all kinds of erotica genres (yes, it has genres) and researching trends to decide what to write.
This was the time when Amazon was flooded with titles like “Gangbanged by the Centaur Clan” and “Human Cow Breeding School” and “Alien Tentacle Sex Party” and “Ravaged by Gay Vikings” so both the writing and the research were pretty hilarious. This one guy put out books with no image on the cover, just titles like “Horny Cheerleader Slut Fucked By Quarterback’s Ten-Inch Cum Cannon” and “Horny Housewife Slut Fucked By Pizza Delivery Boy’s Ten-Inch Cum Cannon” and “Horny Nun Slut Fucked By Priest’s Ten-Inch Cum Cannon.” He got so many outraged reviews saying that he’d copied and pasted the same text and just switched out the sluts and the cum cannon dudes (but sometimes not entirely, so the nun would suddenly appear on a football field), that Amazon eventually yanked his books.
I’m not going to reveal my erotica pen name, sorry. If you know it, please don’t share. It’s not because I’m ashamed of it – I’m not in the slightest – but because I work in a field where it could cause problems if some asshole decided to publicize my specific titles or send them to my workplace. (That job is unpaid and a labor of love. I earn my living writing.)
I discovered a couple things about myself while writing erotica. One is that I’m good at and enjoy running my own business. I found the business aspects, like market research, very enjoyable and fun.
The other thing is that I need to know that I have an audience. Previous to self-publishing, except when I was doing work for hire, I was constantly subject to writer’s block. I spent seven years working on a novel that I never even finished. It turns out that what I need to be able to write, and certainly to be happy writing, is the knowledge that at least some people will read and enjoy what I write. If there’s a chance that no one will read it ever, it’s very hard for me to enjoy writing or finish anything. I don’t just write for myself. I write for myself and for readers.
When I started self-publishing, even my absolute worst and least successful stories sold a few copies. Others sold lots of copies. The knowledge that I could write literally anything, and at least some people would read it, was incredibly freeing. I went from being the world’s slowest writer who never finished anything without an outside deadline to being fairly prolific with no deadlines at all, secure in the knowledge that I would never be shouting into a void.
2013: $40,000.
And then Amazon had a moral panic and extensively banned erotica, including a number of my stories. I decided to jump ship to something that was popular and that they wouldn’t ever ban, which was romance novels. I looked at what was selling well, and I considered what I personally enjoyed, and then I thought about where those things intersected.
This was not difficult. There’s a wide range of what I like to write and read, and a lot of it is commercial. I didn’t start writing fanfic until I’d been a pro writer for years, but writing to specification to give someone a Yuletide gift was right up my alley. I like writing to please people, including but not limited to myself. I like prompts. I like tropes. I like less-than-respectable genres. My heart lies with hurt-comfort and superpowers and secret experiments to create super-soldiers and gunslingers striding across the desert.
I saw that paranormal romance with werewolves was popular, “mate bonds” (soul-bonds) were popular, and military romance was popular. So I created a new pen name, Lia Silver, and launched a series of paranormal military romance novels with mate bonds and superpowers and secret experiments to create super-soldiers and hurt-comfort and PTSD (the area of my therapeutic specialty; also something I’m very interested in due to personal experience), called Werewolf Marines.
I really love those books and hope to write more in the series. They’re comfort reading I wrote for myself.
2014: $21,000.
Not the heights of the erotica heyday, financially speaking, but not bad under the circumstances. In general, your old books continue to sell, though at reduced rates, long after you publish them. But in this case, Amazon yanked some of my books and I pulled others myself to avoid further scrutiny of my account, so I lost that source of income. If those books had continued selling at normal rates, the total would have been higher.
I also published a YA novel with Viking. I’m not including the advance from that in the total above as that wasn’t self-publishing.
Meanwhile, I saw that a group of people I knew from Something Awful were doing something interesting. Much like “Carolyn Keene,” the group of writers who wrote Nancy Drew, they were publishing romance under the same pen name. On Amazon, it’s possible to set things up so each writer can publish the book they wrote themselves and have all the profits delivered directly to them, but all the books appear under the same name.
I was in an online group for self-published writers, largely but not entirely from FFA. I got together with some writers from that group and some friends who were not in the group at that time, and we created Zoe Chant, author of paranormal shapeshifter romance.
I expected Zoe to be just a fun project that would enable us to earn a couple hundred or maybe a thousand dollars per month. Right out of the gate, it was way more successful than that. Zoe’s first book (by me), “Bought by the Billionbear,” was a 15K novelette about a billionaire bear shifter who buys a date with the heroine at a bachelorette auction. It was basically a series of tropes I’d noted in bestselling PNR stories, with a sweet hero and heroine, plus lots of food descriptions because I like writing that.
It made $6800 in the first two months. (Books generally make the most money in the first two months.) I did about $50 worth of advertising on newsletters, but nothing on social media. I attribute its success to its keywords, cover, blurb, and the book itself being something people wanted to read.
Other Zoes were more or less financially successful, but no Zoe book has ever made less than $1600 in its first two months. Zoe quickly evolved a consistent style and themes, such as protective heroes who are also super-nice since we were all really done with alpha assholes. Any series is always written by the same author, for consistency, though we occasionally do crossovers.
I created a series for Zoe called Protection, Inc., about shifter bodyguards. Again, I looked at what I personally like, what Zoe readers liked, and where that overlapped. The result was equal parts action scenes, hurt-comfort, and romance; there’s formulaic elements to make the series feel consistent, but each book is a somewhat different genre – a backstage comedy, a modern fairy tale, “trapped in the evil super-soldier lab,” etc.
The first book made $12,000 in its first two months. I did some paid advertising on Facebook and in a newsletter, but no blog tours or other promotion on social media. I’m sure the advertising definitely helped it make as much money as it did, but mostly I think people liked the cover, blurb, concept, and the book itself.
2015: $57,000.
I continued writing Protection, Inc., along with some Zoe standalones and also non-Zoe books. I self-published the rest of the YA series I’d started at Viking.
Zoe’s books got longer and became more plotty and less porny, partly due to Amazon starting to pay authors per page read and partly due to Zoe writers gaining more confidence and ease the more they wrote. Myself included. My first Protection, Inc. book was 30K, my third was over 60K, and my fourth was 80K. I’d come a long way from “took seven years to not finish a single book.”
2016: $72,000.
I didn’t publish much in 2017 due to personal issues.
2017: $38,000.
I published Protection, Inc. # 5 and 6.
2018 to date: $59,000.
I have found that I like self-publishing more than I like traditional publishing. I enjoy the business aspects, and I enjoy being able to control most of what happens to my books. It drives me crazy to be forced to just sit back and watch as publishers make decisions about my books that I think are bad, like pricing the first book in a series higher than the subsequent books when it should be the other way around. Now I can arrange everything to my own satisfaction.
Amazon has its issues – boy, do they ever – but the problems I’ve had with them are ones that bother me less than the ones I’ve had with traditional publishers. For one thing, I’ve never had trouble getting Amazon to pay me what they owe me. For another, while they did refuse to publish some of my books, they did not have the rights to them, so they couldn’t hold my books in limbo indefinitely, not publishing them but also not allowing me to publish them elsewhere. Both not getting paid and getting my books stuck in limbo are problems I’ve consistently had with traditional publishers, and I’m not the only one.
I love being able to write literally anything I want. I enjoy writing Zoe Chant, I enjoy writing Lia Silver, I enjoy writing Rebecca Tregaron, I enjoy writing Rachel Manija Brown, I enjoy writing Edonohana, and I enjoy writing my secret pen names that I won’t name here. And I enjoy getting to write any or all of them, as I choose.
Self-publishing has become more respectable than it used to be, but it’s still looked down upon by lots of people. The same can also be said about every genre I write except poetry. But I’ve never cared about being respected by all. I’ve only ever wanted to write stories I enjoy and that please readers, and to always have readers. As far as my writing career goes, I am living the dream.
I have had the chance to help some people out with their self-publishing endeavors (also sometimes with their traditional publishing endeavors) and over the last couple years, I’ve seen several of them do so well at it that they quit their day jobs and took up writing full-time. Not everyone can do that, or wants to. But if you do want to, and are willing and able to do what it takes, it’s entirely possible.
A lot of people have opinions about self-publishing. They’re heavily influenced by their own experience, which is not universal. So, with the caveat that the same goes for me, here are some things I see often that I disagree with.
You need to flog your book on blog tours, tweet about it frequently, and generally push your book everywhere on social media to succeed.
You can do this if you like. But if you dislike self-promotion, you’re likely to do it badly, and then it won’t work for you. Personally, I would only do it if you enjoy it. I don’t do blog tours or other social media self-promo outside of my own spaces. Zoe has a Facebook page, but only started using it for anything but book release announcements this year. We have a Twitter, but only use it for book release announcements.
You need to be great at marketing and/or spend a lot on advertising to succeed.
Being great at marketing definitely helps, especially if you’re hoping to do this full-time. And being aggressively bad at marketing, such as to the point where your cover signals the wrong genre for your book or your blurb is an active turn-off to the readers who would like your book, will hurt. But there’s a big area in between. If you’re just looking to publish your writing, make some money, and get some readers, but not to write full-time, you don’t need to do any marketing or advertising whatsoever. You don’t even need a website.
If you only do one marketing thing beyond appropriate covers and blurbs, get a mailing list via MailChimp and link it at the end of your book, then use it to alert everyone who signs up when you publish a new book.
Nobody reads FF. Nobody makes any money writing FF.
There are some very popular FF writers, and some very enthusiastic readers. It also tends to be priced higher than either MF or MM, so writers get paid more per book. It can be a harder market to get a handle on than MM and MF; stuff like covers isn’t as codified as it is in those genres. But my FF did pretty well, and had I focused just on that and not gotten sidetracked by other things, I think I’d have a very nice FF career right now. I don’t think I’d be making Zoe levels of money… probably… but I’d be surprised if I couldn’t pay the rent.
I love FF and think it’s an underserved market. I have an upcoming project (not a group name) that I think will please those of you who enjoy tropey FF, and will also prove that there are more of you out there than many people think.
If you like FF, write FF. And drop me a link when you publish, because I probably want to read it.
You can write what you love, or make money, but not both.
If the only things you love to write are extremely uncommercial, and you can’t or don’t want to write anything else, then yes, that’s true. Otherwise, it’s not.
If you want to do both at the same time, look for the any overlap between what you love and what makes money. Tropey romance with lots of h/c sells, and I love tropey romance with lots of h/c, so that works for me. I find that the writers who don’t enjoy what they write on some level, even if it’s not 100% their personal passion project, often have their books not do very well, and then they burn out and quit. Writers who do enjoy themselves generally do better, as well as having a better time.
That’s not to say that you need to enjoy every minute of every book. Some books just turn out to be a slog, and you don’t know it’ll never get to be fun till you’ve finished them and it didn’t. I have gotten so sick of sex scenes that I’ve skipped them, put [sex goes here], and written them all last. But it’s good to generally like what you’re doing. I think a big reason Zoe has succeeded to the degree that she has is that, in general, we’re having fun and it shines through.
You can also write some books that are commercial and some that aren’t. This is a time-honored literary tradition, and one that continues to this day. (Though sometimes the books you think are commercial flop, and the ones you think are your non-commercial labor of love find a surprisingly large audience.)
If you want to succeed in self-publishing, you have to write romance
Fantasy, science fiction, mysteries/thrillers, and YA (mostly sf or fantasy YA) also have lots of readers. I don’t think it’s a good place for literary mainstream fiction, poetry, or children’s books – traditional publishing is better for those genres. Short erotica is not a great bet nowadays in terms of making money.
Writing crap for money is easy! Anyone can do it!
If by “crap” you mean “commercial books that sell well,” it actually isn’t, and not everyone can do it. It’s a specific skill that only a subset of writers have. If you’re not sure if you have it or not, the only way to find out is to try.
As for actual crap, it’s just as hard to write stuff you think is bad as it is to write stuff you think is good.
Nobody can break in now.
New writers break in every day. It’s not as easy as it was in the $2.99 erotica days, but it’s still completely possible. And the $2.99 erotica boom wasn’t actually easy either. Lots of people couldn’t do it. I personally find writing romance easier and more fun than writing erotica, because when you get down to it one orgasm is very much like another, while every “getting to know you” conversation is different.
If you have any questions, about my experience or self-publishing in general, feel free to ask!
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