Constant Cash: How Indie Novelists Can Create Long-Term Income

T.R. Harris
The Startup
Published in
6 min readJul 8, 2020

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Results May Vary, But This Is How Much I Make When I Publish A New Book.

Photo by Shane on Unsplash

I’m a self-published (indie) novelist. I’ve been doing it for going on nine years, and I have to tell you it has changed my life — for the better.

And the question I hear quite often is how much do I make off an individual book, and can it be duplicated with future volumes?

The answer is: See below and maybe. Of course, it depends on a variety of factors, including your skill level, the genre you write in, and how well you craft your stories. I know people who make well over a million dollars per year writing independently-published novels while others make a couple of hundred dollars a month. I’m sure that if you’re a writer on Medium, you’ve experienced the same swings, if not in these dollar amounts.

In this article, I’m going to give you real numbers from an actual, full-time author. Not a James Patterson or Dan Brown, but your regular, run-of-the-mill guy who writes novels for a living.

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T.R. Harris
The Startup

I'm a full-time novelist with over $1.5 million in career royalty earnings. Follow me for more articles on how to make a living as a writer.