My wife and I were discussing some random writing stuff yesterday, and I’ve decided to pass it along because it’s good to put things in perspective.

Let me start off by saying this isn’t meant to discourage or dissuade in any way. Rather, it’s meant to make sure realistic expectations are set. I’ve met a fair amount of people who aspire to write and publish, much like myself, and of those there’s always a select portion that believes writing is a lucrative career or source of income.

It can be.

Pretty much as likely as it is for any musician to be able to live off their income (by releasing solo albums/tracks). It’s the exception and far from the norm.

Now to the perspective.

I’ll use Minimum Wage from where I live, as that’ll be the easiest baseline. Essentially, we’re comparing this to working at a grocery store or similar.

At $8.55/hour working full time (40 hrs/week), that equates to roughly $17,000/year. Here’s how many book sales that comes down to. At about $3 (royalty) per book on average, you’d need to sell:

~5,650 books per year
~475 books per month
~120 books per week
~17 books per day

That’s to make less (typically) than a McDonald’s employee. The median income for a single individual is usually about double the minimum wage, so double all of those numbers and you have a ‘livable’ wage. (Obviously you can live off of minimum wage, as many people do it, it’s just not very comfortable). That all doesn’t factor in the fact that you may end up spending anywhere from $0 – $3,000 per book to release it, which comes to be another 0 – 1,000 book sales to cover that cost.

Again, I don’t want to dissuade anyone from writing – ever. Just be aware that if your goal is to make a livable wage off of it, it’s extremely difficult. For most writers, the general time for an author to sort’ve ‘take off’ and be recognized is 5 – 7 books, from the little research I’ve done. There are always outliers, of course. Some are successful immediately, others have 15 books out there with a collective total of 30 sales. There’s dozens of factors at play to be considered.

This is why anytime someone asks me, I say I write for myself and as a passion/hobby. Because I don’t think I’ll ever make substantial income from my books no matter how much I’d like to. And I’m fine with that. It would take me a tremendous number of sales to be able to quit my day job for writing. So, I write on the side as I love doing it.

If money is truly your main goal, there are alternatives that still keep you in the same realm – though often at the cost of your own creativity/freedom.

Magazine submissions often pay more for a single article than most people make from a self-published novel in an entire year. However, because of this, the chance of being selected is very low due to the high competition.

Ghost-writing services is something I’ll honestly never understand, but people do pay for it. It’s an option, but you lose essentially all of your creative input to write a story someone else wants while you sit in the background without your existence ever being known.

Editing is a fairly lucrative career for those with the technical skills to do it, but it is highly competitive and is really unreliable. You’re often required to bid for jobs and lose most, forcing you to drive your prices down lower.

If you’re looking for strictly profit, but not a livable wage, then honestly releasing eBooks of short story or poem collections can be a great way for trickle income. Through Amazon, you can publish an eBook completely free. If you’re confident in editing your own work and designing the cover – or have someone who will do it for you with the skills – then you can publish anything without paying a dime. To put it simply, if you do that and make a single sale, you’re now more profitable than I am

As far as traditional publishing, the rules are different, so I can’t really speak to that with total conviction. From what I’ve been told by a few acquaintances who went traditional, the up-front is usually between $2,000 – $5,000, with a 10% royalty rate (of profit after print costs, meaning probably about $0.25 – 0.50 per book). The royalty is withheld until you’ve ‘paid back’ the up-front payment you received, meaning at a $5,000 initial payment and $0.50 per book, you won’t start getting $0.50 royalties until you’ve sold 10,000 copies and re-paid the $5,000 they gave you.

A lot of newly-published traditional authors don’t ever make up the sales (you’re not required to give back the payment if you don’t make enough sales, usually). Meaning in order for them to get an income equivalent to that McDonalds job (~$17,000 per year), they would need to essentially land 4-8 releases per year. Let me tell you, writing 4-8 full-length novels in 12 months is not an easy task. Doable, but not easy.

So, all in all, it’s important to keep your expectations realistic. Otherwise, if you’re expecting to strike gold on your first novel’s release, you’ll be severely discouraged and stop writing. This profession is meant to be one of passion and effort over a long period of time. The best fact about books is once it’s out there, it’s there for good. After releasing multiple books, you may find that your sales from the previous entries are entirely self-sufficient and just bring in steady income – even if in small amounts.

Keep writing. The best thing that you can do for your chance of increasing your income stream is to release more and more content. Every book you release is another that a reader may stumble upon. Stack the deck with your content!