@Jolly said in AL Bait:
Is that about the career length of a successful author? Or do we judge it by the number of books published?
I'm the wrong guy to ask. I'd say that the vast majority of authors today have day jobs. Not because they suck, but because for a whole lot of reasons, it's almost impossible to make a full-time living by exclusively writing books. That means people come and go to it.
Of those few "successes," though, much of the time, that success is attached to something—they're well known in their corner of the world, which is why they even got a book deal in the first place. Almost always, the schmuck who sold 18,000 copies of his novel in between his day job is fifty times the better writer than, say, Liz Cheney's ghostwriter. So what does that tell you about success in publishing?
Publishers are paying out less to fewer authors, leaving the unicorns the only ones left to get the marketing help and the earnings. And about that marketing: they're are also picking up a lot of bad habits from the music industry. If you have, say, six-digit legit followers in IG or millions on YT, you can get some kind of book deal reasonably easy. See a problem with that? How you get those followers has absolutely nothing to do with writing, and everything to do with how hard it would be for a publisher to market the work.
Anyway, I would honestly say that consistently paying a utility bill with your earnings is a legitimate definition of authorship success in today's world.
