How publishing a book can change your life, Part 1: Money

I’ve read a couple of Substack posts recently (and heard from editors, and writers) about how difficult the current publishing landscape feels to authors publishing books this year. Sales are down, the market is risk-averse, fewer places are covering books at all, one book gets all of the coverage while the other 100 published that week get nothing. And then I read Charlotte Shane’s eye-opening and really honest interviews with several writers about how they felt after publishing their books and thought…

Is anybody actually enjoying this?

(‘This’ being ‘publishing a book.’)

I often think that during the best parts of my job, I’m helping someone’s dream come true.¹

But it is true that the dream is often quite different from reality.

Today is the first of two posts about the realistic ways that publishing a book can change your life. First up is how publishing a book can change your life financially. Secondly, I’ll write about how publishing a book can change your relationship with your life goals. How publishing a book might change one emotionally will be discussed throughout both, because it can be a rather emotional process. But I do think that setting oneself up with more realistic expectations and reframing the process as one of celebration can be useful.

First I do highly recommend starting with Charlotte’s post:

“The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Published”

As well as Andrea Bartz candidly writing about her sales figures (with links to other authors’) and Alicia Kennedy on money made through publishing & writing.

Now, on to the financials: