Dear O'Abby: Is it Worth it?

Dear O'Abby,

I'm in a writing group and we're currently doing NaNo which means we get together at a local coffee shop a couple of times a week to write.  After we were done the other night, we started talking about where the books we're currently writing will end up, and we ended up talking about Amazon and the cost of e-books.

Things went dark pretty fast, let me tell you! 

Basically, we ended up breaking down how many e-books you need to sell on Amazon per month to make the minimum wage.  It works out at over 3000.  3315, to be precise, if you're selling your e-book for .99c which I've found to be the best price for my shorter, NaNo-length stories.  And of course, I only get .35c of that cover price.

I guess my question is, is it worth it?  We're all out here kicking our asses to write 50K words in November, but realistically, even if everything falls where we want it to, the chances of making any kind of living out of this is minimal.  Are the seven plus hours a day I'm devoting to this project a waste of my time?

Yours Truly,

Figured

Dear Figured,

The short answer to this is no.  If you're writing because you want to make a fortune, or even a living, the odds of being able to sustain yourself on book sales alone is extraordinarily low.  Which is why there are not a lot of writers who rely solely on writing novels to make a living.  I wrote a bit about it here a few weeks back.

But if you're anything like most of the writers I know, writing isn't something they do to make a living.  It's something they love to do, something they have to do.  Every time I get a royalty statement from my publisher I sigh and wonder why the hell I bother losing sleep every day so I can find time to write, yet somehow I'm still up at 5:30am every day and at my keyboard by 5:32am.  

It's frustrating, I know.  Putting in all those hours of work for so little return.  And then reviews from readers that tell you they tore through your book in a single afternoon.  Great that they enjoyed it and found it so engrossing they couldn't put it down until they'd finished, but that book was one, two, ten years of my life to create.  Couldn't they take the time to savor it?

But back to your question...  The price of e-books isn't something you can really influence.  Readers have decided the value they put on this experience, and as you've discovered, .99c is the price point they are most comfortable at for the kind of book you are producing.  If you price the book higher, you will make more per book purchased, but you may sell a quarter as many units.  I imagine you've experimented with this, if you're an indie author, and this is one of the benefits of being an indie author - you're in control of the price.  Although, you have to price your books at $2.99 or more if you want to be part of Kindle Unlimited.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself why you're writing.  If it's a chore and you don't enjoy the process and it's not making you the kind of money you want to be earning, then you have to wonder why you're doing it.  Waiting tables is probably more lucrative.  But if you love to create and can't imagine living without spilling the stories in your head onto the page, then I'm afraid you're a writer.

X O'Abby