16 MORE Harsh Truths That I Forgot To Add Last Time

Source Credit

Original Author: BedivereTheMad

Original URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1kq184h/16_more_harsh_truths_that_i_forgot_to_add_last/

---

First of all, thank you for all the attention my last post got. I’d like you all to know that I am doubling down on all my points from the previous post. Yes, all of them. No, prose doesn’t matter as long as it’s readable (a lot of people seemed to have missed that qualifier). Yes, an off-market story will most likely flop. Luck isn’t real. Luck isn’t real.

Anyway, after I posted it, I realized that I had missed a couple points that I meant to put on here, and I was also recommended a couple more to add, so I am making this followup post. You may notice that there is a bit more focus on Amazon and post-RR stuff this time. I don’t know where I was going to go with that, but you have noticed correctly. There is more focus on Amazon and post-RR stuff this time. I don’t go too much into detail, as I have no firsthand experience with Amazon yet, so all my information is secondhand. However, I did double check it with successful Amazon authors, so it should be pretty solid.

Now, before I get down to business, a few admin things:

Who am I?

Some of the people who read my last post seemed to think I was just some schmuck coming in to shit on all of your efforts. I am just some schmuck, but I am a schmuck with a name.

I am Sir Bedivere the Mad, author of Bunny Girl Evolution on Royal Road. I am approaching 8000 followers on the site. You may notice if you check my story that my Patreon is really low relative to my story’s size. Yes, yes it is. I fucked up a little bit. I learned a lot of important lessons in the process, but it wasn’t enough to save my Patreon conversion.

That being said, all of these harsh truths I post are vetted by many other successful authors, and the lessons I learned have been put to the test, and they have passed the test.

Disclaimer

A lot of people seemed to either misinterpret, or straight up skip my disclaimer before, so I’m making it bigger this time and more explicit so that it is very clear what I am talking about.

What do I mean by “successful”?

When I say “successful” I mean “sets you on the road to becoming a full time author” successful. So, when you see me say “you won’t be successful writing off-market,” what I mean is that you won’t be making enough money to go full time if you’re writing off-market. And, as an American, full time for me is quite a high bar. If you’re just writing as a hobby, and have no plans to try going full time, you can ignore the points about being successful. I think you should still read the post though, because it contains other things too.

Now, to put some numbers on that, let’s do a bit of quick math. To go full time in America, we’re going to say you need $36k/year. Of course, it varies by region, lifestyle, and family, but for an author living alone in a cheaper area, $36k/year is enough to get by. $36k/year is about $3k/month.

To earn $3k/month, you need to have about 375 $10/month Patrons (it’s not 300 because between Patreon’s cut of the pie and taxes, you only get around $8 per patron). If you have 10% Patreon conversion (something only the top 1% of the top 1% can do), you still need to have 3750 followers to achieve that. If you have a more normal conversion, say 3%, you need 11250 followers. If you have poor conversion (like me), closer to 1%, you need 37500 followers, which is more than Beware of Chicken, the current biggest story on the site.

As you can see, even if your conversion is incredible, you still need to write on-market enough to reach almost 4k followers to make an (American) living wage. It’s a bit easier with Amazon though.

One kind of decent way to calculate Amazon earnings is with ratings. We can estimate that for every 1 rating on Amazon that a book has, it earns $20. This is absolutely *not a hard and fast rule, and the actual values vary widely*, but it’s close enough for our purposes here.

So, assuming 1 rating = $20, then you need to be getting 150 ratings on your books per month to sustain yourself. That’s assuming you’re self-publishing, of course. If you have a publisher taking a hefty chunk of that, the numbers will need to be higher.

While 150 ratings/month doesn’t seem like a lot, it does add up. That means that in a full year, you need to get 1800 ratings on Amazon. Now, if you look at a lot of the big stories in our genre, 1800 ratings on a single book is rare-ish. It’s not super rare, but most stories that go from RR to KU don’t hit that. They can hit it in 3 books though (e.g. B1 900 ratings, B2 600 ratings, B3 300 ratings) and that’s still fine.

It’s also important to point out that audio earns a lot in our genre. Once again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but from my observations, audio sales generally tend to more or less mirror ebook sales. I will reiterate in case anyone wants to disagree that this is not an absolute rule, and that it varies greatly, especially when you take into account the wildly different royalty numbers by different publishers, but from what I’ve seen, it tends to average toward ebook and audio making roughly the same amount of money (with high royalty %) and about half what ebook makes (with low royalty %). Anyone can feel free to correct me if they’ve seen more data. This estimate is based on a small sample size of those who were willing to share their earnings with me, so it is very possible for it to be skewed.

Anyway, for our purposes, that means that if you have an ebook and an audiobook that are performing roughly the same, and you get good royalties, you only need 75 ratings per month, or 900 ratings per year to go full time in rural America. Double that if you’re with a publisher (50% ebook royalties is relatively standard, so you need twice as many ratings to make the same money).

So, therefore, when I say “success” or any variation of that word in my harsh truths, this is what I’m referring to. These are the numbers. Anything below these numbers is not a success. Anything above these numbers is technically a success, though the closer you are to that line, the thinner your ice.

Of course, I am completely aware that success is subjective, and that not everyone lives in America like me. You may live somewhere that $300/month is plenty, in which case you only need 38 patrons, or 15 ratings/month (180 ratings/year), which I would say is doable even for very off-market. If that’s your goal, great! That’s awesome. But if you want to aim for the American full time salary, that is what these harsh truths are aimed at.

TL;DR: Success = puts you on the road to making a living as a full time author in America

Big following vs small following

These numbers are loosely based on the above definition of success, but here’s just my personal metrics for big vs small on Royal Road:

<2k followers: Small. If you have less than 2k followers, you are either writing off-market, you didn’t market your story at all, or you have something on-market, but failed in the execution somewhere.

2k+ followers: Solid. Reaching 2k followers means you’re fairly competent as an author, but, as above, you are lacking in either on-marketness, marketing, or execution

5k+ followers: Big. If you reach 5k followers, that means you’ve done something right. You either hit the market well, or you wrote off-market very well.

10k+ followers: Very big. If you have 10k followers, you nailed the market and execution.

And here are my metrics for big vs small on Amazon. Big disclaimer on these because Amazon success isn’t as immediate as RR success, so these numbers are for when it’s been about a year since B1 has launched, and assuming you’ve launched at least 3 books in that series in that year:

<2k ratings (ebook only) or <1.5k ratings (with audio): Small. If you have less than 2k ratings across your series in a year, that is small. As defined above, going much less than this is below the bar for full time writing.

2k+ ratings (ebook only) or 1.5k+ ratings (with audio): Solid. If you have more than 2k ratings across the series in a year (or 1.5k with audiobooks), you’re doing pretty well. Not huge, but you’re getting by.

5k+ ratings (ebook only) or 3k+ ratings (with audio): Big. If you hit 5k ratings across your series in a year (or 3k with audiobooks), you’re making good money.

10k+ ratings (ebook only) or 7k+ ratings (with audio): Very big. If you manage to hit 10k ratings or more in a single year, you’re doing really well. For reference, Hell Difficulty Tutorial came out on Amazon almost exactly a year ago, and it is currently sitting at \~12.5k ratings overall.

I believe Ultimate Level 1 is last year’s biggest series. It came out 15 months ago and has \~27.5k ratings overall.

Note: these (with audio) numbers were suggested by MelasD.

Another disclaimer on these is that they’re not firm. As I said above, ratings aren’t an exact indicator of sales, so you can make a comfortable living with a “small” series, and you can barely scrape by with a “solid” one.

Now, without further ado, let’s get to the fun stuff.

1. Amazon is where the real money is

There is far, far more money available on Amazon than there is on RR. I’ll use Zogarth as a reference because he so kindly keeps his earnings largely public. He currently makes $76k/month on Patreon (it’s actually a little more than that due to people cancelling and joining and whatnot, but idk what that number is). That’s a lot of money. That’s enough for most people to live comfortably for the year. And he makes that every month from Patreon alone.

He makes more than double that from Amazon.

2. Yes, KU is worth it

In our genre, literally 90% of money from ebooks on Amazon comes from KU. Probably more, because a lot of those ebook sales come after readers who buy the ebook after they have already finished reading on KU. Not going on KU is shooting yourself in the foot.

3. Your patrons don’t disintegrate when you stub

The only thing stubbing does is move your influx of new readers from RR to Amazon. All your existing readers are unaffected. If you’re still growing well on RR, this can lose you some potential earnings, but if you’ve stagnated, you lose literally nothing by going to Amazon. And even if you haven’t, as mentioned above, the KU audience is way bigger than the RR audience. To use Zogarth as an example again, his Patreon has gotten 4x bigger since he stubbed.

4. Not all publishing offers are good

I’m sure you have heard of vanity presses. Those are bad. Definitely don’t sign with those.

However, I am not talking about vanity presses. There are non-vanity presses who also give bad offers. You can see if the offer is bad by checking:

If the contract is bad

If the publisher has little to no track record of success (as defined above)

If the authors signed by the publisher don’t vouch for the publisher

If any of these are true, the offer is probably not one you should take. Especially because of Bonus Harsh Truth #5

5. Self publishing is 100% viable in this genre

While generally not true for traditional fantasy and sci-fi, self-publishing is actually a totally viable option in this genre, and many would argue that it is the better option. For example, MelasD, author of Salvos and many other stories, exclusively self-publishes, and he is one of the highest-earning authors in the genre.

6. You shouldn’t be asking for advice on Reddit or on big public Discord servers

Note the wording in this truth. You shouldn’t be asking for advice on Reddit or big public Discord servers. Public internet spaces have a great strength, and a great weakness, and both are the same: anyone can respond. That means that you have a chance of having very successful people giving you very good advice. That also means that you have a chance of very unsuccessful people giving you very bad advice. If you’re a new writer, it can be hard to tell the difference, especially when your sense of scale is non-existent, and what you see as “successful” is actually on the lower end of the success spectrum.

If you want good advice, don’t make posts asking for it. Don’t ask things like “would you read this?” or “is this cover good?” or “Can I do X?” or anything like that. Find a guide post that already exists from an actually successful author that knows what they’re talking about. They’re all over the place. You just have to go looking for them.

7. If your advice comes from someone with little to no following, there is a very good chance it is very wrong

In keeping with truth 6, if you do find yourself reading advice in a public internet space, you should always check who it’s coming from. If it’s coming from Salty Sam who has 3 stories, all dropped with less than 300 pages and a total of 9 unique followers across all 3, there’s a pretty good chance that the advice is wrong. After all, if Salty Sam actually knew what made stories successful, wouldn’t they have used that to make their own stories successful?

8. If that advice comes from someone with little to no following, and authors with bigger followings disagree, that advice is almost definitely wrong

This is just a continuation of that previous truth, but I wanted to make it separate because I’ve seen some weird stuff being said on this subreddit, and also reddit in general. For some reason, some people seem to have it in their head that successful authors are trying to sabotage them, or that successful authors are actually less reliable sources of information than unsuccessful ones. This is obviously absurd and delusional, but I’ve seen it around, so be aware that if someone is disagreeing with a successful author on how to be successful, odds are, they’re wrong.

9. Successful authors do know what they're talking about (or at least, they know better than the unsuccessful ones)

Successful authors don’t always know everything about success. However, they do know at least 1 thing that works, because it worked for them. Unsuccessful authors don’t even know that. So maybe you shouldn’t listen to a successful pure fantasy author’s advice on writing a successful sci-fi story, but if they’re telling you what worked for them for their fantasy stories, you should probably listen.

10. You shouldn't be giving authoritative advice on things you have not experienced firsthand

This is the other side of the coin from truths 6-9. You shouldn’t listen to unsuccessful people on how to be successful, but you also shouldn’t be the unsuccessful person giving bad advice. It’s totally fine to parrot advice. For example, you can say “Oh, SerasStreams recommends that you post 20k words immediately and then have enough backlog to do daily chapters for a month for your launch,” but you shouldn’t give that advice as if it’s your own.

If you’re not qualified, the moment you change that statement to “You need to post 20k words immediately and have enough backlog to post daily chapters for a month,” you’ve stepped onto a slippery slope. If you give secondhand advice like that, you sound very authoritative and reliable, which means that if you have any misunderstandings about the advice (which you absolutely will), those misunderstandings get passed on to whoever you tell.

11. 99.999999% of your readers don't give a rat's ass if your cover is AI

It’s true. A lot of them probably don’t even notice, and most of the ones who do notice don’t care. You won’t lose any significant readership by using an AI cover. And if you’re unsure about this because you’ve seen people in the subreddit saying things like “Oh, I never click on covers that are AI” or “If I see a story using AI art in an ad, I avoid it like the plague,” please refer back to truth 6.

12. No, LitRPG is not favored by the algorithm

This is an odd rumor that I’ve seen going around. Yes, LitRPG will generally do better than non-LitRPG, but that’s the audience, not the algorithm. The algorithm does not take tags into account. That’s just straight-up fact, confirmed from the mouth of the dragon himself.

13. The ideal time to launch your Patreon is before you launch your story on RR

I’ve seen people asking weird questions about when the best time to launch Patreon is. The answer is ASAP. If it’s not up by the time your story goes live, you’ve fucked up. Not irreparably, but the later you put it up, the more money you lose. Sure, some people can get away with starting it later, but there’s literally no point in delaying the Patreon launch. All the people that sub when you launch it 2 weeks late would also sub if you had it launched from the start.

14. Originality for originality’s sake is an exercise in futility

Just because another story has a similar premise to your idea doesn’t mean you should give up on that premise to find a more “original” one. If anything, finding out that someone else already did that premise should be encouraging, since that means that there’s already a market for what you want to write.

It’s impossible to be fully “original” in the base premise. You will always be taking something from someone else. The originality comes in the execution. As long as you’re not plagiarizing, your story will be plenty original. Don’t waste your time trying to find an “original” premise because it will take forever, and when you do find it, it will probably be off-market. There is usually a good reason that nobody has tried it.

15. If you think the on-market stuff is stupid… you’re in the wrong market

Fairly self-explanatory, but the disclaimer is especially applicable to this one. If your goal is success, but you don’t like the market, you’re in the wrong market. If you know you’re in the wrong market, and you’re just writing for fun, great! I wish you the best of luck. But if you dislike the genre, or you look down on it, or you only like the concept but think that the execution is always poor, and you’re for some reason still expecting any kind of success, stop. If you dislike it, you don’t understand it well enough to write it, and if you try to “subvert” it to write something “better,” you will just turn away your whole audience.

16. To a reader, your intent does not matter; your execution does.

Thanks to u/SanderleeAcademy for this one. Please note all the asterisks, because this one has a lot of them. Here is the original comment from u/SanderleeAcademy:

Quote: We all have intentions when we craft a scene a certain way, or develop the profile for one of our characters. However, the reader doesn't know our intentions. They CANNOT know. All they can know is what we end up putting on the page.

Quote: So, if we intend a character to be a certain way and the reader, instead, reacts differently ... the READER is right and it's our fault they didn't read the character the way we intended. They will always read a character, scene, plot, or story as a whole the way we executed it.

Obviously, there will always be idiot readers who skimmed something important and fundamentally misunderstood a core part of the story. You can ignore those readers. However, if multiple readers are coming to the same misunderstanding, or one reader that you know can be trusted not to skim comes to an odd conclusion… that’s on you, not them. 90% of your readers aren’t dropping out because your story is too advanced or complex for them or anything like that. They’re dropping because you failed in the execution.\*

Another asterisk there because if you’re writing House of Leaves or something like that on Royal Road for some reason, that doesn’t apply to you, and if you’re doing that, you’re probably not expecting any kind of success

…Right?