I wish biographies spent 10x as much time on the “struggle years” and 1/10 the time on the “now they are rich and successful and donating to a bunch of charities” years
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That’s probably one of the reasons why I loved the Wright Brothers biography so much. It was a masterpiece.
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Replying to @Austen
If authors could make 10x-100x what they do from books, that might be possible. Author income surveys vary quite a bit, but even among people published by major publishers, very very few exceed more than a few $10k per year of work on a book.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Austen
A good example, comparable to results in other surveys is this. Median for traditional publication is less than $10k per year. Less for self-publication. It's a miracle books are as good as they are.pic.twitter.com/5ZAkM71ebG
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @Austen
Ebooks/etc for technical authors have a much healthier curve, although for the amount of risk/business savvy ventured doesn’t earn a huge premium over software engineering. (Can be done from anywhere though, which many friends take advantage of.)
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My impression is that meat-and-potatoes execution on the playbook, and it is a playbook, gets about one $40k launch for a book which took 6 to 16 weeks to write.
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As nearly as I can tell, the issue is one of quality. In most areas, a good book will take a 1-5 years of fulltime work to write. My guess is that for
@Austen's original wish to be fulfilled requires on the high end of that, usually 3+ years.1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
Of course, the books you're talking about can be very useful, & written quite quickly. But they're not the Wright Bros bio...
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @patio11
I have a hypothesis that the future of writing is self publishing. If you can eliminate the 80-90% a publisher captures it’s relatively easy to sell enough copies to make, say, $100k/book. (I self published my book and made more than 99% of authors)
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