Tacit Knowledge — Writing a Book describes how the publishing industry doesn’t work the way people would like to think it works:
Fact #1: Millions of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book, or are planning to write a book.
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Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA. But not all that much better.
Technical pause here: there’s an important-to-understand distinction that needs to be made between “book publishing” generally and “trade book publishing,” which is what most of us think of when we think of book publishing — i.e., the biz that creates the books that fill up the local bookstore. Book publishing generally is a fairly substantial industry, and most of the money in the field — two-thirds, if I remember right — doesn’t come from “trade book” publishing. It’s generated by the sales of products many of us almost never think of as books: medical reference books, atlases, textbooks. This end of the biz operates in the semi-rational way many businesses do, with similar profit margins and incentive structures. There’s real money to be made here, other words. You can get rich writing and/or publishing textbooks, for instance — but it’s a very competitive industry.