The Business: A Ghost Writer's Look At The Changes In Publishing

Professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec wrote a Twitter thread on what he sees as the future business model for writers going forward. His focus is in non-fiction, so keep that in mind when reading this.

Here's what the future of writing books looks like👇

Thread🧵

— Joshua Lisec | The Ghostwriter (@JoshuaLisec) February 23, 2022

Rather than have you click through, here's the rest (w/ some editing for clarity):

Every book is a product funnel. For example: a $19 book leads to a $49 masterclass, which leads to a $199 video course, which leads to a $499/month program, which culminates in a $9,999 service.

It's a $9 sale VS $16,254 in sales.

Authors who pay the big bucks to get their book done right the first time (Ed: such as by using a ghostwriter) would rather earn $16k than just $9.

Nonfiction niche-ification intensifies. Expect authors to apply their methods to specific audiences with unique problems. For example: my client Grace Smith and her trilogy hypnosis for weight loss, hypnosis for sleep, and hypnosis for stress relief.

Not writing 10-20+ novels? Not Going To Make It.

The best chance you have at making money writing fiction is writing a loooooot of it. Applies to nonfiction, too, if that's your thing and you only want to write books (no courses, coaching etc). Expect groups like #20BooksTo50K to go mainstream.

Your self-published book will be made into a movie. This is no joke.

The Martian, The Celestine Prophecy, Legally Blonde, Still Alice, Eragon- all self-published, all made into movies. All you gotta do is sell a whole lotta copies first.

Every author is a publisher.

What do writers think about? Writing. What do publishers think about? Selling that writing. Profitable publishing is 80% persuasion and 20% everything else. Put on your marketer's hat (or hire someone to) if you want to sell lots 'o books. (Ed.: Learn To Sell.)

n TradPub, "Get Woke Go Broke" is not a thing. They sell books they want to be read. The Great Awokening will continue until sales improve. Or not. Because that doesn't matter. We are this close to pro-paedo picture books for children. Also not a joke.

Author advances plummet till they go negative. AKA, you have to pay big publishers an advance to publish your book. We've already seen TradPub do this with "hybrid imprints." For example, you can pay self-help press Hay House to publish your book through their spinoff Balboa Press.

Learn something new? Disagree with every prediction? Retweet or quote tweet the 1st tweet to let your people know.

There's already one author that many of you know that's taken up this advice, and that would be Adamn Lane Smith. He's stopped, for now, his fiction writing to focus on building up his work as an Attachment specialist in therapy and he's built himself a sales funnel via Gumroad--likely following Joshua's model--to great effect so far.

And if you know Yakov Merkin, you know that he's gone hard on the fast-publishing series method that #20Bookto50K pushes with plenty of reported success to date. In short, Joshua isn't wrong and isn't omitting details. Adam's sales letters are getting better, and Yakov's slowly improving his sales game also. So are Brian Niemeier's, and both he as well as Jon del Arroz have turned to livestreaming to attract and retain audiences that they can convert into readers and bring them into the sales funnel. David Stewart has done the same thing, and it's working for him also.

Then there's Nick Cole & Jason Anspach, who make all of them look like pikers. First Galaxy's Edge, then Forgotten Ruin, and now using that which they built to get other military veterans-turned-authors into the game via the Wargate Books imprint.

Like it or not, what's going to be required to succeed is not what the OldPub fossils and the maggots feeding on its corpse want you to believe. You cannot avoid doing your own marketing anymore. You cannot avoid thinking like a publisher, at least part-time, anymore. You cannot avoid being front-facing, even in a virtual sense, anymore. The days of just writing the manuscripts, then revising and rewriting the edited manuscripts, is over; you have to take on the jobs that the publisher used to do--to edit, promote, etc.--and that means you're spending more time than just what you do writing.

But, as Joshua shows, you can make the return on that time spent far more profitable now than was ever the case heretofore. There is one other thing to consider, which Joshua neglected to mention: you can do this from anywhere with a reliable Internet connection. There is no need to be in London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, or even to spend postage on correspondance to someone--an agent or editor--based there. You can--and more of you should--consider moving to a location where your costs are lower so your revenue goes farther, be it internally or to expatriate entirely.

If you think that's absurd, go talk to the RPG Pundit; he moved from Canada to Uruguay and lives very comfortably on his tabletop RPG writing alone. So long as the Internet remains live, this remains true, and so does all the other changes in publishing that makes OldPub deader than the dinosaurs. Exploit this, profit, and thrive.