How many novels does it take to give up your day job?

Unfortunately, there is no good answer to this. There are authors who have published books in the double-digits who still have to maintain a day job.

You could sell your first book for a million dollar advance and start writing full-time; you could also sell your first book for $10,000 and never see another dime because it doesn't earn out. It's a numbers game with no clear answer.

I second what Chaos has said

Nope. There is no statistic. Some writers get very large advances for their debut novels, and are able to quit their day jobs right away. Others, as Chaos said, never are able to write full-time. Much depends on your book, and whether it falls into the right hands at the right time.

... there is a statistic relating to this. Have only seen it in one place so it isn't much publicized, possibly because of how depressing it is. The source was an old Writer's Market book or maybe a book on the craft by John Gardner. Not certain of the source, but it was reputable. I don't recall the precise figure, so don't put altogether that much weight in this pieced-together quotation:

5% of all published writers earn between 5-10 thousand a year, probably double that by now. (The rest earn less.) And of those 5%, only 1/2% or less actually earn enough to live off their writing.

So do not quit your day job, or make plans to do so. For while getting published is in the hands of lots of writers with sufficient drive and dedication, earning a living as a writer is another matter. Very few manage it.

kal-el said:

I mean (and excuse my ignorance here), surely most people who publish ten novels or more are able to write full-time? No?

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Probably not. The problem is that your income is lumpy depending on when your next book hits a milestone. You may make £20k one year if a new book comes out, but only £7k the next because you have nothing new coming out.
Most of the full-time writers I know of have: 1 - a supportive spouse and 2 - other ways of making money such as reviewing, writing non-fiction, teaching.

Damn few writers make a living on their fiction alone

The answers given here are correct, but don't think like this. This will not be you. Most published writers don't make much money because they are not good enough, their books don't sell well enough and they don't write enough.

If you go into this thinking you will be like this, you may very well end up like this.

You are going to make a killing because your books are going to be awesome and each one will make a ton of money, maybe not right away, but soon, once they catch on. You will be able to write for a living very early on because you have the talent, drive and ability to do what needs to be done.

As far as I'm concerned, that's the attitude to have.

Most people in the world fail and lead miserable lives. If we treat our life as a numbers game, it's terribly bleak, and yet, somehow, for most of us, it isn't.

A few authors have said that the test is when your royalties, not your advances, but your royalties, are enough to live on.

Now, since this is a risk assessment, that may be playing it too safe for some, but it was an interesting perspective for me.

~suki

In 2000 the Society of Authors did some research into the average income of authors in the UK: I discussed their report here, on my blog.

Five years later the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society carried out similar research. I discussed that report here, on my blog.

Here are a couple of quotes from my blog posts, to give you a flavour.

75% of authors earned under £20,000 in 1999. The average annual income was £16,000, while 5% (82) of authors polled earned more than £75,000. Only 3% (51) earned over £100,000.

Although the national average wage was £20,919 when the report was compiled, 61% of the writers polled earned under £10,000. 46% earned under £5,000, of whom 123 said that writing was their main source of income, while 14 had no other source of income at all.

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If you want to earn a living wage you’d be better off working as an electrician: their average earnings (mean/median) were £23,985/£23,251 compared to writers average earnings of £16,531/£4,000 for the same period.

In the five years from 2000 to 2005, the average reported income for writers dropped from £16,600/£6,333 to £16,531/£4,000.

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It's hard making a living as a writer. It can be done: but you have to be very good, very hard-working, and very lucky, to do it.

kal-el said:

Has luck really got anything to do with it?

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Heck, yeah. The harder you work, the luckier you will be, but there are still plenty of factors that you can't control.

justAnotherWriter said:

You are going to make a killing because your books are going to be awesome and each one will make a ton of money, maybe not right away, but soon, once they catch on. You will be able to write for a living very early on because you have the talent, drive and ability to do what needs to be done.

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This is nonsense.

Confidence is helpful--delusion is unhelpful.

All one can know is whether or not one has the talent, drive, and ability to have a sustained, successful writing career IF one gets the requisite lucky breaks. Nobody can know whether or not they'll get the lucky breaks.

That's why creating a day-job structure and a system of personal finance that supports you in making the time for writing is key. Pretending that you're so awesome you won't have to do that is a recipe for failure.

justAnotherWriter said:

Most published writers don't make much money because they are not good enough, their books don't sell well enough and they don't write enough.

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I agree with the bolded part. In order to have a good shot at keeping a steady income stream from your writing, you need to produce. Aim for one new book to come out per year. More, if you can swing it. You can't control whether the publishers will like the one book you write each year, so you'd best have a few ready to go, and enough ideas developed that you can put together a synopsis and be ready to jump into that book and finish it by your deadline.

Writing is hard work. If you end up doing it full time, successfully enough to maintain yourself, you will work your ass off at it. It won't be a cushy job. It won't be all the bliss of creating. You will not have the luxury of giving into "writer's block" or anything else that takes you away from your work for more than a few days.

Yes, it is true that most people who publish don't make a living at it. In many cases, I suspect that's because they don't want to make a living at it. It may take away all the joy from writing, to produce several novels per year and to chain one's self to one's writing desk until the product is completed. It may take away all the joy just to think of your writing as a product, as something that must be refined until it will sell in the market. But if you're doing it full-time, writing is a business. Your book is your product. You'd better deliver fresh product frequently, and on time.

I will be happy to keep my current career, or to write full-time. Either one. But if I do end up writing full-time, I expect it to be grueling work, and I expect to turn out a consistently better and better product several times per year. That's what it takes to support one's self from fiction writing.

You are going to make a killing because your books are going to be awesome and each one will make a ton of money, maybe not right away, but soon, once they catch on. You will be able to write for a living very early on because you have the talent, drive and ability to do what needs to be done.

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Do you? I'm not being facetious -- it's good for all writers considering a full-time career to ask themselves whether they have the skillset yet to come up with, draft, revise, and turn in multiple novels per year. I'm quite sure that anybody who really wants this career can develop that skill, but let's be realistic: Even with a great attitude, the odds are against your supporting yourself off of really high advances paid for relatively few novels. Much more likely you'll be coming out with one new book per year, and you'll have to keep a few in the wings, ready for development, at all times.

So...do you have the drive and the ability? How fast can you plot? How good are you at revising your own work? How attached are you to your own prose? Can you stand to hack out large swathes of it if it's not working out? Can you finish an entire novel, from first draft to polished and print-ready, in a few short months? You'll need to be able to do that. Start practicing those skills now, before your income depends on it.

As far as I'm concerned, that's the attitude to have.

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I agree that you won't get there without positive thinking and the kind of confidence that motivates lots of hard work. Be realistic, but don't be a downer.

Bubastes said:

Heck, yeah. The harder you work, the luckier you will be, but there are still plenty of factors that you can't control.

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I very much agree with this. Luck nearly always follows hard work. Not only hard work at writing, but at researching the market, choosing your allies, and hard work at understanding people well enough to make something that will appeal to a large number of readers.

There are a few uncontrollable factors, yes -- but those who "get lucky," say with earning advances in the millions of dollars -- usually get "lucky" because they worked hard enough at pitching their book that they caught the attention of a damn good agent who was savvy enough to arrange an auction between publishers who she knew would salivate all over themsleves for the book.

Hard work. Be smart and work hard.

I know of an author who didn't quit her day job until she'd gotten her third three-book contract. Call it realistic, call it lack of confidence, call it what you will but everybody's circumstances are going to play out differently in the writing business.

Lest anybody forget it, let me say it loud and proud: WRITING IS A BUSINESS. As with any business, you need a business plan but that plan isn't going to foresee every single circumstance. As with any business, you're taking a huge gamble. If you don't have some sort of contingency plan, you're going to fall on your ass and fail hard.

It might take you one book, or you might not be able to do it with a thousand books. It's like asking how many lottery tickets you have to buy before you win.

Libbie said:

There are a few uncontrollable factors, yes -- but those who "get lucky," say with earning advances in the millions of dollars -- usually get "lucky" because they worked hard enough at pitching their book that they caught the attention of a damn good agent who was savvy enough to arrange an auction between publishers who she knew would salivate all over themsleves for the book.

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Yes.

But for every one of those, there was someone who was just as smart and just as talented and worked just as hard and found an agent just as good--and whose book didn't get sold.

Or whose book got sold, but then got lost in the shuffle when the publisher was bought up by an international conglomerate. (This happened to me once.) Or whose book got sold, but then got lost in the shuffle when the editor died and was replaced by someone who took the line in a different direction. (I know two people to whom this happened, with two different publishers.) Or whose book got sold, with a release date of September 12, 2001 (I know someone to whom this happened.)

So what do you do when circumstances beyond your control sink your book? You work on your next book. Maybe you change to a pen name. You keep working. You get back in the game, and maybe this time the breaks will fall your way.

Bubastes said:

Heck, yeah. The harder you work, the luckier you will be, but there are still plenty of factors that you can't control.

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I very much agree with this. Luck nearly always follows hard work. Not only hard work at writing, but at researching the market, choosing your allies, and hard work at understanding people well enough to make something that will appeal to a large number of readers.

There are a few uncontrollable factors, yes -- but those who "get lucky," say with earning advances in the millions of dollars -- usually get "lucky" because they worked hard enough at pitching their book that they caught the attention of a damn good agent who was savvy enough to arrange an auction between publishers who she knew would salivate all over themsleves for the book.

Hard work. Be smart and work hard.

IceCreamEmpress said:

This is nonsense.

Confidence is helpful--delusion is unhelpful.

All one can know is whether or not one has the talent, drive, and ability to have a sustained, successful writing career IF one gets the requisite lucky breaks. Nobody can know whether or not they'll get the lucky breaks.

That's why creating a day-job structure and a system of personal finance that supports you in making the time for writing is key. Pretending that you're so awesome you won't have to do that is a recipe for failure.

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You're missing the point.

If you want to do something, you do it right. You aim high, you give it everything you've got and you don't let anything, especially doubt, stand in your way.

Believe you will succeed, and you will be giving yourself the best chance.

Doing is more important than believing, but motivation is very powerful.

The short answer is that one book can make you filthy rich, or fifty books can leave you living in poverty. There's a saying that it's easier to get rich off writing than it is to merely earn a living off writing. It's usually true.

But there's only one uncontrollable factor, and that's how much talent you were born with.

You can't control what happens with a given book, but you can control how many books you write, and how many different publishers have your books at any gven time. You can control how many books you write per year, whether it's one or five or eight.

You can also control what you write, as well. If you want to support yourself by writing, you can control whether you only write novels, or whether you write anything and everything that pays a buck, from noevls, to nonfiction books, to short stories, to articles, to screneplays, etc.

You can control your work ethic and your dedication. You can control how much time you spend writing, how much time you spend learning about the business, and how much time you spend playing games, surfing the internet, or visiting fourms, for that matter.

You can control whether you follow all five of Heinlein's Rules For Writing, which are sound, solid business rules. The single biggest reason for failure is not following one or more of Heinlein's Rules.

Dreaming is fine, but goals are better, and only hard work can turn a goal into reality.

Writing is a business, and not many succeed without treating it like a business.

But it does all come back to talent first, hard work second. Though smart work is what it really takes. Hard work alone is like trying to learn teh piano by simply banging randomly on the keys for eight hours per day. Smart work is practicing the scales, learning music theory, trying to lay actual music, etc.

You simply can't control how much or how little talent you have, and you can't control whether you'll be teh one to receive the next ten million dollar advance, but you can control everything else, and that's more than enough, if you do have the talent.

Great post, James!

justAnotherWriter said:

You're missing the point.

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No, I get the point you are trying to make. I just think your point is not valid.

Overconfidence does not lead to success. A combination of careful planning, hard work, clear-headed risk assessment, intelligent strategizing, and luck are necessary for success.

Overconfidence is generally a symptom of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and/or what sociologists call "optimism bias." Which can doom your enterprise and even kill you.

To quote Carl Sagan, "...the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

A blind belief in one's own competence, and an unrealistic optimism about the outcomes of one's work, aren't actually helpful.


Also, what James said upthread is absolutely true:

Dreaming is fine, but goals are better, and only hard work can turn a goal into reality.

Writing is a business, and not many succeed without treating it like a business.

But it does all come back to talent first, hard work second. Though smart work is what it really takes. Hard work alone is like trying to learn the piano by simply banging randomly on the keys for eight hours per day. Smart work is practicing the scales, learning music theory, trying to lay actual music, etc.

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And part of working smart is attaining realistic self-confidence. Self-confidence is good. Overconfidence is deadly.