I often speculated on the working lifespan of a full time indie author. I’ve come across comments going way back noting how the early stars of self publishing just disappeared, either giving up, or adopting new guises. The question is especially interesting because making a living as in indie publisher is often the stated dream of aspiring indie writers. But is it a sustainable career?
One size doesn’t fit all indie writers, so that there would be no hard and fast limit to a full time career in indie publishing, but we might be able to get some insight into the dynamics that play into a full time career by examining the career of Chris Fox, a full time, “six figure,” science fantasy author who has posted his earning on his Youtube channel since 2016. So let’s take a look a Fox’s career to date.
Back in January 2021 I posted a blog essay entitled “Life in the Fast Lane of Indie Publishing” which profiled the full time indie author Chris Fox and his approach to self publishing. You can read it here:
https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2021/01/life-in-fast-lane-of-indie-publishing.html
In that post I included the graph below that showed his Amazon ebook and paper back book income form 2019-2020. The red is income from his ebook sales, the blue from Kindle Unlimited page reads, and the sliver of grey being paperback sales. It does not include his income from audiobook sales.
Fox has often pointed out that one needs to publish consistently and constantly to maintain sales. With every new book release, one will see a spike in sales which tappers off after about three months. In the chart above I added the books Fox released in this time period so that you can seen the spikes that new releases generate – until they don’t. In 2020 he released 9 books, 5 of them in the last 4 months of the year. As you can see, these last releases did little more than sustain a flat sales level. I wrote in that post, “...he was basically treading water. You can blame it on 2020, or the election, or whatever, but if I were him, I’d be concerned.” It was looking to me like he was only preaching to the choir – writing books for his hardcore fans, while his more casual readers had moved on. So, should he have been concerned?
Well, he didn’t get around to posting his 2021 results until April, and when he did so, he did it in a different format so that I can’t compare his 2021 performance directly. But let’s have a look at what he did tell us.
First of all, let’s look at his output for 2021. He release 3 novel, each of which completed a series. Two of the science fantasy series ended with the sixth book series, and the other was a role play game lit book, the second in the series. He also released two box sets consisting of the first three books in those just completed series. Having wrapped up these series, he turned his attention to launching a new, 10 book series, in the epic/progressive/military/YA – teen coming of age fantasy genre(s). I would imagine these categories are so diverse so as to place the books in some sort of bestseller list in one or more of them. He also release one stand alone short story in this new fantasy series. The first book, Shattered Gods, was released on the 1st of August, with the second on the 31st December 2021.
Fox was very excited about his new fantasy series. He said that he has always wanted to write epic fantasy, after meeting and talking with Brandon Sanderson years ago, However, only now did he feel that he reached the point professionally where he could do so, and do it well. His Shattered Gods series are of the typically long, 1,000 page books epic fantasy trope, which are considerably longer than his previous books, and thus take longer to write and polish. In going this route, he will be releasing no more than three or four new books a year.
Changing genre is a somewhat risky venture. In doing so you risk alienating your hardcore fans, fans who simply want more of the same and may jive at something new, without the guarantee of attracting new readers. Fox, for a number of reasons decided to take only a half step away from his previous work. While these new fantasy books have the settings of traditional epic fantasy stories, he uses the same myth and magic system that he had invented for his science fantasy books – and for a role playing game that he has developed and is selling. In some ways, they are novelizations of his role playing game. Plus, he used the same style of cover art as his previous books making the break with his previous work not all that drastic. The question is, would they still appeal to his hardcore fans, while at the same time attracting both new readers and past readers back into the fold. That’s the context. What do the numbers tell us?
Below are his gross incomes from 2016 to 2021 along with a link to the Youtube video where he talks about them.
2016 – $170,000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evfuyy4XU78
2017 – $180,050 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ugpbxEXkWk&t=740s
2018 – $194,900 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoXOTj7Y54w&t=457s
2019 – $354,620 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoXOTj7Y54w&t=457s
2020 – $272,288 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67UCXxgFFSo&t=337s
2021 – $189,978 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsgSVvIqti8&t=324s
So the short answer is that, yes, his book business continued to slide in 2021. He had reason to be concerned. Because he chose not show the usual Amazon sales graph, we can’t see how each of the book releases fared in comparison to his previous years. We can, however, say that even with a total of 8 releases in 2021, and with the major launch of a new epic/progressive fantasy series, he was unable to turn the sales downturn around. In response, Fox did what every businessperson does in this scenario – he laid off workers and cut expenses. The worker being his wife. He was paying her to do his editing. He decided he could do that himself, though she still proofreads his books, for love. (Just like my wife.) He also took back certain other tasks that he had been farming out, like managing mailing lists and advertising. In addition, he raised the price of his books. He says that while he sells fewer books now, he is making more money than ever because of all these actions.
Drilling deeper, how did his launch of genre changing fantasy series fare? Fox posted income figures for that book. Shattered Gods launched on 1 August 2021 and by mid-February 2022 it had grossed $15,955 in royalties. Its price jumped around a bit over that time period, but if we take a ballpark average of, let’s say $2.50 royalties per copy sold or read, we can get a rough estimate of somewhat over 6,000 copies sold or read. However to launch that book, he spend $15,284 on advertising, which, along with cover art and other expenses, brought the final cost of that book to $19,506, so the book had not earned out six months later. However, Fox spend next to nothing on advertising for the two sequels he has since released, so that the series as a whole is in the black by $9,593 as of mid February. If anything, this should show you the scale, and the risks, one has to operate under as a full time indie author/publisher.
Looking at the data, are we seeing the fate of indie publishers? Authors who have to crank out books every couple of months to stay on the radar of readers, even as they risk boring all but their most hardcore readers with more and ever more of the same old thing? Does the winning strategy in the short run, doom them in the long run? So what’s Chris Fox’s take on this?
First of all, you have to know that he’s a motivational type of guy, so that that there will be no doom and gloom in his outlook. However, in his video, he talks about the need to develop more revenue streams. This suggest to me, that he is reading in his sales numbers, the handwriting on the wall. A best selling indie author is not a lifelong career.
More to the point, he talks about getting older and having less energy. He says that he’s not going to release a dozen books in a year anymore. He plans to launch three of his fantasy books in 2022, three more in 2023, with two in 2024, completing the planned 10 book Shattered God series. After that he talks about maybe doing only two books, or just one a book a year, as he spends more time on other projects and revenue streams. Unless the indie market changes radically in the next couple of years, he risks dropping out of sight by publishing only one or two books a year, even with his back catalog of books. One book a year is the traditional publishing pace, which doesn’t cut it in indie publishing. We’ll have to see how he fares.
It seems to me that fate of Chris Fox illustrates the two head threat to full time indie publishers – burnout. All but the most dedicated readers eventually burn out on formula stories written by the same author in the same style. And if you change formula and style, you risk loosing your hardcore fans without any guarantee of finding new ones to replace them. The second head is author burn out – running out of energy, ideas, and time. Chris Fox is the author of a book entitled “5,000 Words Per Hour,” so you know that he once had plenty of energy and ideas. So to hear him talk about cutting back to a couple books a year, is a sea change.
I have to believe that it would be very hard to sustain a full time career in indie publishing for much longer than 10 years – and for most people, likely years less. Fox started his indie career in 2014, so he's 8 years into it. Of course, if you hire out the writing, the editing, the cover design, and formatting, and turn yourself into a businessperson, maybe you could do it longer. Or maybe not.
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