alt Hacker News> some authors have had good luck with self-publishing
Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?
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Asparagirl • yesterday at 5:06 PM
It’s not common, but it does happen. Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”, originally gave his work away for free online on his website. He only self-published to Kindle (for the lowest possible price setting, 99 cents) because some of his fans didn’t know how or didn’t want to manually install his home-rolled ePubs on their devices, and begged him for the Amazon/Kindle distribution.
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According to this survey:
"The median income of full-time self-published authors in 2022 was $12,800 from books and $15,000 total from all author-related activities. Full-time self-published authors who had been publishing since at least 2018 reported a median income of $24,000 compared to $13,700 in 2018, a 76 percent increase."
Traditionally published commercial authors made about $10,000 more.
https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...