Penning a Bestseller Not as Profitable as It Might Seem
March 29, 2013
So you wanna be a professional writer? You might not want to make Amazon’s bestseller list your marker of success; author Patrick Wensink lets us in on how little his place on that roster did for him financially in Salon’s, “My Amazon Bestseller Made Me Nothing.” In fact, as he tells it, making less than one would like on literary success is a burden most authors must bear.
After Wensink’s novel, “Broken Piano for President“, garnered media attention and joined such entries on Amazon’s bestseller list as “Hunger Games” and “Bossypants,” some folks assumed he was suddenly raking in the dough. He writes:
“I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.
“But the truth is, there’s a reason most well-known writers still teach English. There’s a reason most authors drive dented cars. There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.
“Even when there’s money in writing, there’s not much money.”
Wensink reports that, before taxes, he made just $12,000 on the 4,000 copies Amazon sold of his popular book. He isn’t complaining, he says—it is much more than he has made on any single project in the past.
And that is exactly the problem; I suppose I’ll have to find another way to make my millions.
Cynthia Murrell, March 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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