The future of books
might be a throwback to the past
I recently tallied up my book earnings for the year.
I never bothered to track them before, in part because I’m just getting started and know it takes time to turn a profit, and in part because I had a day job, so wasn’t relying on that income to subsidize my embarrassing Domino’s habit.
($6.99 for a pizza, folks! Yes, it gives you stomach cramps, but that 20 minutes of pleasure is almost worth the pain.)
Turns out that all three of my fiction books combined earned: $3,039.82 in 2022.
Not much! (This doesn’t include what I spent on covers, editing, marketing, etc.)
According to Bookstat, there were 2.6 million books sold online in 2020 and 96 percent of them sold between 0 and 1,000 copies.
That’s a ton of competition and extremely few sales.
Knowing such things, one can’t help but question one’s life’s ambitions…approximately 23 hours a day.
This, combined with losing my job, led me down a rabbit-hole on the creator economy and the future of books, particularly