Currency

Now that my novel is finally released, I’m obviously doing my best to get it out there and have people read it. That’s going to be a long, probably up-hill battle, as it is for many authors, traditionally published or not.

Because I am now retired and on a pension, I at least have the luxury of not needing the income from selling books to make a living. But that’s also true of many, many writers who have ‘day jobs’. Very few writers ever make enough money from their writing to live off the proceeds, and that’s been true forever, I think. Some do, of course, and some succeed spectacularly, like J. K. Rowling or Stephen King. These people, however, are in a tiny minority.

Even in the case of such writing super-stars, few if any of them succeeded quickly in reaching a point where they could support themselves by writing. If you haven’t already read it (and you really should), Stephen King’s book On Writing details his long struggles to get published and to earn enough from it to support his family.

In a way, I think a lot of authors or people who would like to be authors have it the wrong way around. Their real goal should not be money, but readership. The real currency of writing is readers, not dollars. Sure, if the readership is high enough, money should follow. But for myself, at least, I would be enormously happy if I can get a lot of people reading and enjoying my work. If I was offered a choice between being given $500 in hand or being assured of getting a hundred happy readers, I would definitely take the latter.

Why don’t I offer my books for free, then? If we’re talking physical books, then there are obviously production and shipping costs which need to be covered, so they simply can’t be free. What about ebooks, then? Simple. No one has any respect for something that costs them nothing, or almost nothing. Heaven knows, I’ve done that myself. I have thousands of ebooks in my Calibre library, most of which I’ll never read. If my ebooks were available for free, I’ll bet that hundreds, maybe thousands of people would download them and then never read them. And it’s readers I’m hoping for.

Which is not to say that I won’t offer discounts from time to time. Watch this space!