Thanks for the reply. Let me refine the question. Would you put out your hard earned dollars to buy a novel about a strong woman who was once married, but then lives her life without a romantic involvement?
That all depends on whether there is rising action, conflict, climax, and conclusion. Otherwise it's Chick Lit and I'd use it for toilet paper.
Seriously, if you want to make money writing fiction, get a job as a lawyer or politician. You will make more money that way.
Fiction writing is one of THE HARDEST industries.
I don't have all then numbers, but fiction sales are about 1/3 or less of overall book sales. (consider re-sales of classics, cook books, how to books, psychology books, text books, etc. and the actual number is probably less)
Fiction sales do not
normally outpace sales of self help books.
A book can take as little as a month (although it probably takes longer with edits and re-writes) and up to a decade or two to write.
Romance book sale advances can be as little as $1500(?) (I cannot find the source, darn it....!) for probably three to five months of work. Rarely do book advances for first-time authors garner more than five figures. There are the few million plus advances out there, but that happens maybe once a year or so.
IF you are lucky enough to get published. The steps involved include some or all of the following: story idea, pen to paper or fingers to keyboard/typewriter, re-writes, edits, more re-writes, query agents or publishing houses still accepting new writers, agent finds publishing house or publishing house pulls your manuscript out of a slush pile and the beta readers pass it along to an editor who likes it enough to want to sign you so they tell you to get an agent, agent and publishing house (and you) haggle over contract, you sign contract, you get advance or other monetary compensation for your work, book goes through more edits and re-writes, typeset, final proof galleys, print production run, marketing, shipped and put on book shelves...
A lot of work. But you could skip the agents, the editors and...self publish.
Vanity press and self-published books do not rely on publishing house marketing campaigns and
commonly sell less than books published by larger houses.
from
http://www.writing-world.com/publish/selfpub.shtml
If you discover that you can produce your book for a per-book cost of, say, $3, and market it for $14.95 retail, it's easy to envision huge profits from that $11.95 profit margin. Unfortunately, self-publishing involves many costs besides the actual production cost of the book itself; if you're not investing in ongoing marketing efforts, for example, you won't be selling books (or making profits). In addition, a large number of your books may be sold at deep discounts (up to 60%), which seriously reduces the profit-per-book.
Disadvantage: money up front. You are paying to play. Then you have to market yourself in order to guarantee sales.
All that work to make...$15,000 or less (someone help me here, relying off memory of a prior thread) a year
The point is: Don't write something because you
think it will sell better than something else. Write a cook book in that case. Write because you
love writing. That way if you make less than you think you should be making you are at least doing something you feel proud of.
