CAN YOU MAKE A LIVING FROM BOOKS?
To be direct, the answer is YES, but it depends on a few factors.
However, if even before reading this post you’ve already convinced yourself, deep down, that it’s impossible, I’m not the one who will change your mind, so stop reading here and accept defeat. If you believe in your potential but think this goal is very hard to reach or don’t know where to start, keep reading and I’ll show you what I’ve been applying to my career.
Back to the factors:
1 – You have to decide whether you want writing to be your profession. If it’s just a hobby, you’ll hardly manage to live from writing alone. If you’re willing to release books your whole life and treat it professionally, you need to professionalize and, above all, be an entrepreneur.
That’s not to say writing books as a hobby brings little return. Some people make writing a casual hobby and still earn from it, but, as I said, they’ll hardly live from it alone. Especially as a writer in a smaller reading market, like Brazil.
2 – With your goals set and books planned for publication, you now need to decide how you want to publish. If you aim to publish with a publisher, you may achieve your dream of becoming a bestseller and living from books alone, but there’s a big catch:
With a publisher, it may take your whole life to reach your goal or, in the worst case, you may never reach it. The advantage of being published by a publisher is that you don’t have much work. The biggest work you’ll have is marketing.
Royalties paid to authors published by a publisher are usually very low, so you need to sell a lot of books to get a return big enough to live from books alone.
Now, if you publish independently, you keep the whole return, but be aware that you’ll have much more work. With self-publishing, you become your own publisher and can speed up processes a lot, such as exporting your books to the world, something you’ll rarely achieve with a publisher unless you have a hybrid contract and do it yourself, or pay a fortune for the publisher to do it.
But that's up to you.
If you publish with a publisher, whether through traditional publishing or by paying for publication, remember you’ll have the work of marketing, and the road to becoming a bestseller can be long, with you covering that cost.
But that’s not an absolute rule. If you have a lot of money and run a huge marketing campaign, you’ll certainly get a considerable return, but unfortunately that isn’t the reality for most people: having enough money to fund their career and get the expected return.
Many people’s reality is the same as mine. But I chose to be independent, even though I started with a publisher. It was a lot of work and still is, but I’m getting a very satisfying return, and I’m never giving up self-publishing.
My career became my business. And I'm the founder.
So, back to the question: can you make a living from books?
As I answered at the beginning: YES. But it depends on how you manage your career. Whether you’re published by a publisher or independent, you’ll have work either way, and if you don’t give up, you’ll succeed. But going independent, that success can come faster, as long as you gain enough knowledge to manage your career more efficiently.
I use my own career as an example. I invested in knowledge, and today I do everything a publisher does and much more. My books are published in Brazil and internationally in several formats, and best of all, the profit is all mine, which gives me a faster return that I can reinvest to accelerate my career’s growth.
I made many mistakes and got many things right, and at times it even felt like I was wasting time, but I didn’t give up, kept chasing my goals and I’m still chasing others. If you want to be efficient in your career and not waste time, gain all the knowledge you need to make your writing career your business.
Today I offer what I didn’t have at the start of my career: knowledge for those who want to follow the same path as me, master the publishing process and focus on what really works to turn a writing career into a business.
And you know the best part? I share all this knowledge for free, right here on the blog.
