How to Make a Living With Your Writing: Your publishing options and how the industry has changed
“The internet changed everything, and more than two decades after it arrived, it hasn’t finished changing things yet.”
Mike Shatzkin and Robert Paris Riger, The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know
Publishing has changed as the internet shifted business models to global, digital solutions, and the opportunities for authors have expanded alongside this transformation. This in turn has encouraged creative empowerment and a growing confidence in the ability to connect directly with an audience, resulting in a digitally enabled renaissance for independent creators.
Wind the clock back 15 years and the only way to reach readers was through an agent and a publisher, advances were often enough to live on, and authors didn’t need to do anything but write while someone else handled the marketing.
Perhaps that was only ever true for a select few, but it’s certainly not the reality for authors in the 2020s. While there is a route to market through traditional publishing, opportunities for empowered creators continue to expand as technology enables us to reach readers in more countries with more formats of our books.
It is no longer a binary choice to traditionally publish or self-publish. Many successful authors choose to selectively license their rights — by book, by country or territory, by language, and by format.
In the following chapters, I’ll outline your options around traditional publishing and self-publishing, also known as being an independent, or indie, author. But before we get into the details, it’s important to look at how the publishing industry has shifted, and how those changes have accelerated due to the global pandemic.
A global, digital and mobile reading audience
Many writers focus on selling physical books in their local and national bookstores with marketing in country-specific mainstream media. While that is worth pursuing as one aspect of distribution, it ignores the huge and expanding global market of readers outside your home country and digital opportunities to reach them.
The biggest market for English language ebooks and audiobooks is still the US, UK, Canada and Australia, but over the last five years, my percentage of revenue has shifted more into other territories. You can reach readers in 190 countries with ebooks on mobile devices and tablets with the click of a button, and audiobooks are moving into an increasing number of territories through an expanding network of audio-first options.
The rise of the hyper-connected mobile economy means that global readers are discovering books through apps. You might not use them yourself or even have heard of them, but you can reach readers there through the ebook and audiobook distributors. Many readers don’t live near a physical bookstore or want immediate consumption, so online retail drives entertainment, inspiration and education.
There’s also a demographic trend toward streaming over ownership. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+ for TV and film; Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal for music; Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, and Kobo Plus for ebooks; Audible, Storytel, and Scribd for audiobooks; with more subscription options emerging every year.
Of course, readers still love print books and buy a lot of them, but increasingly they purchase print online. Publishing Perspectives noted in August 2020 that, “In print books, Amazon has a generally recognized 50 percent or more of the American market.”
You can reach readers who purchase print online through Amazon KDP Print, and use Ingram Spark to reach physical bookstore catalogs, libraries, universities, and other print-on-demand services globally, as well as Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers with online sales in the US and UK.
If you want to make a living from your writing, then expand your horizons, because most of your income is likely to come from the rest of the world, not your local bookstore. There’s more detail on how you can reach readers globally in section 1.8.
Digital reading and online book purchasing have accelerated because of the pandemic
The global, digital, mobile business model proved its resilience when the pandemic hit. Many people found solace in reading as the world shut down and many indie authors, myself included, sold more books and reached more readers than ever before.
A McKinsey report in October 2020 noted that, “responses to COVID-19 have speeded up the adoption of digital technologies by several years — and many of these changes could be here for the long haul … Consumers have moved dramatically toward online channels and companies and industries have responded in turn.”
When physical bookstores shut down, readers bought print online or tried ebooks and audiobooks for the first time. Libraries accelerated the adoption of ebook and audiobook lending. Even readers in countries traditionally resistant to digital, like France and Italy, experienced growth in these areas, and book marketing moved online.
While there will certainly be a return to buying in physical stores once the pandemic is over, people’s behavior has shifted and it’s likely that digital adoption is here to stay.
The Maker Movement
“Makers are producers and creators, builders and shapers of the world around us. Makers are people who regard technology as an invitation to explore and experiment… If you want to make, there has never been a better time.”
Dale Dougherty, Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs and Our Minds
The Maker Movement represents a shift from faceless corporations churning out widgets in factories to the artisan creator producing individual work and selling it directly to consumers who want to support independent artists.
It encompasses physical maker spaces where people use 3D printing to prototype ideas, as well as those using open source code to create new programs and games, independent musicians, filmmakers and writers who use the internet to distribute, and those who make art to sell on Etsy or at local markets, plus so many more.
It represents a shift from passive consumption to a renaissance of creativity at all stages of life, empowering individuals to make and explore, to play and try new things, and for some, to change the way they make a living.
Consumers love to support independent creators because their work is more original and authentic and they know that their money goes to support the individual’s art, as opposed to propping up mega-corporations.
Consider your own purchasing behavior.
Do you listen to independent musicians or watch independent films? Do you enjoy drinking locally brewed small-batch beer, or buy artisan bread directly from a local baker instead of the supermarket? Do you buy vegetables at your local farmers’ market? Do you buy art and craft gift items from Etsy? Have you supported a creative project on Kickstarter or Patreon? Have you bought a book directly from an author?
The empowerment of the creator
These technological and cultural shifts put the power back into the hands of those creatives who choose to take hold of their careers.
You can write and publish what you want, when you want, and reach readers however you choose. Your career is in your hands. You can work with publishers to get your books into the world, you can work with freelancers and do it yourself, or you can choose a combination of both.
Award-winning and international bestselling author, J.D. Barker, spent over twenty years as a ghostwriter before producing suspense thrillers under his own name.
After initial success as an indie author with Forsaken, J.D. attracted traditional publishing deals, as well as film and TV options, and he now chooses his route to market per book, territory, format, and language. He shares his thoughts on publishing on the Writers Ink Podcast, co-hosted with J. Thorn.
J.D. is one of the most successful hybrid authors I know, so I asked him for his thoughts on how things have changed in the publishing industry.
“I remember when Stephen King published Riding the Bullet back in March of 2000, certainly the first ebook by a mainstream author. For a whopping $2.50 I downloaded all 33 pages and devoured it as I had everything else he’d written. He crashed the Simon & Schuster website with what seemed like a stunt.
Who knew. eBooks. eReaders. KDP, Nook, Kobo … the publishing world had been the same for a thousand years, then one day it wasn’t.
As you’re reading this, some pimple-faced sixteen-year-old kid is busy creating whatever will come next. While many in the publishing world see this as frightening, others see it as opportunity. I like to think the years I have in this industry put me in that latter group.
When I first started back in 1990, the talk was how readership was declining, book stores were going out of business, publishing deals hard to come by … yada, yada, yada. The truth is, as long as people want to hear a story they’ll need someone to tell it. How you get it to them is entirely up to you.
As authors, today’s publishing world offers more choices than ever before. You can go the query/agent/publisher ‘traditional’ route or (if you’re willing to do the work) you can get your words out there all on your own. To the end reader, the path you choose doesn’t really matter. Most will never know. As long as your story is a good story, that is.
Indie publishing should never be your ‘Plan B.’ I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me, “Well, if I can’t get a trad deal, I’ll just publish it myself.”
No. No. No.
That’s not what this is about.
If your writing isn’t good enough to get you a traditional deal, you need to hit the pause button and figure out why.
The authors who are successful in the indie world, the ones making a career out of it, could get traditional deals but choose not to.
In my case, I consider all options for each book and I go with whatever makes the most business sense for a particular title. I mix things up and take the ‘hybrid’ approach. Some of my titles are with traditional publishers, others are indie published through my own small press. Sometimes, I take it even further — I have several books that are indie published in some territories and traditionally published in others. Hybrid books within a hybrid model.
What’s going to earn me the most? What will get the book in front of the largest audience? What will raise my profile (and help me sell more books)?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Don’t be afraid to say no.
Don’t be afraid to walk away.
Nothing is carved in stone. Keep it fluid.
To succeed in today’s publishing world, you need to be nimble. You need to adapt.
We’ve never had more options than we do today, and that’s a beautiful thing.”
Questions:
• What are the opportunities for your book/s if you consider the market to be global, digital, and mobile?
• What are some shifts to digital business that you’ve seen or read about due to the pandemic?
• How has your own reading and purchasing behavior changed over the last decade?
• How do you currently support independent creators in the way you choose to purchase?
• How could you embrace the Maker Movement as part of your own creative journey?
• Do you consider yourself an empowered creator? How could you move further toward this in order to expand your creative potential?
Resources:
• Free To Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing our Schools, Our Jobs and Our Minds — Dale Dougherty
• Makers: The New Industrial Revolution — Chris Anderson
• Writer’s Ink Podcast with hybrid author J.D. Barker and indie authors J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon. Conversations with traditional and indie authors around the publishing industry — WritersInkPodcast.com
• The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know — Mike Shatzkin and Robert Paris Riger
