The claim of the title turns out to be significantly narrower when you get into the text. Still, it offers some good points. The following is perhaps what’s most relevant to Hacker News.<p>> In this, as Elle has pointed out before, the economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.
The assumption of one book per five years isn't reasonable for a full-time writer making their living off of writing.<p>Most full-time authors that I know of write more like a book per year. Averaging more than one per year isn't uncommon. They also have a large back catalog of books that each trickle in some royalties to supplement what they're making off of new books.
Title does not follow through with article.<p>The author defines "making a living" as making 4x the median salary, and further ONLY considers authors of books. There are MANY ways to make an actual living wage off of writing that have nothing to do with book authorship. Blogs, newsletters, journalism, opinion columns, and screenwriting, for example.
I'll add to that and say that a very large portion of the best authors likely built an online audience long before they published any books. It was the existing fame that made their books sell rather than a book making them famous.
Oversupply jobmarkets are brutal and exploitive towards the naive and try to keep that naivete going to guarantee an Oversupply of exploitable workers sticking around in a steady stream. Up next an interview with Scarlett Weinstiensson.<p>Writing, music, game design, acting, fashion. All the nice things attracting all the bad people to profit from humanity needing all the nice things to make life bearable.
I don't think that's accurate. At least, I personally know a few people who make their living by writing. I don't personally know any billionaires.<p>But the thing the successful authors I know have in common is that they don't use only one way to publish and sell their writing. None of them only write books, for instance.<p>What they do is take a piece of writing they've done and repackage and sell it in a number of different forms in a number of different places. Sections of a book can be published separately on web sites, for instance. When I've talked with these authors, it becomes clear that selling the same writing multiple times in multiple channels is a key part of making a living doing it.
Making a living <i>from book sales alone, by writing books</i> is as rare as a billionaire.<p>Still. Quite sad to think about.<p>Of course, many writers use writing as part of a greater hustle, and there are of course also movie deals and other adaptations.<p>And this excludes journalism, tabloids, copywriting, technical writing, writing for hire, short-form writing, screenwriting, playwriting, and many others.<p>In fact, I think writers focusing exclusively on books is quite rare. I expect there are many more people making a living through writing <i>alone</i> than there are billionaires.