@DJ_CUTY Don’t take it personally, and don’t be so overly sensitive. I disagree with your plan, so I say why; anything less than that is patronising, deceitful, and counterproductive. Insincere support pointlessly flatters egos, - and that is just silly.
@Drazen
There are plenty of authors who are not only living off this career, but living extremely well. It’s not outlandish for me to want to be an author. But I guess you’d rather I do something I don’t want to because of your misplaced sense of judgement.
@DJ_CUTY No, I simply wished to inform you of the very palpable risks, and the very low odds. You’d be taking a large gamble doing this, and you don’t seem to realise it.
However, if you are going to condition every comment with either a provocative slight, or an erroneous comment on my person, then despite disliking not replying to messages on principle, I shall simply step aside, rather than give you fuel for more noxious remarks.
Well, I’m hoping to making a living as a writer someday. Novels and such, but then again I’d write even if it was just for me.
Sadly, these days most of my time is taken up by my contingency plan, ie, university.
@Drazen
I know the risks 0.0 I calculate them everyday. I don’t need you to tell me. I think you have serious issues. Please go get them addressed instead of venting them on me. You act like you’re a victim but all you got what you wanted- a response. If you really wanted to “inform me” you would have done so in a manner like the others did, not a transparently negative one.
@lilli04
yepp:P darn those side projects.
A senior artist whom I consider a mentor said one time that being an artist is both a blessing and curse in doing something fun for a living. A direct quote, "It’s a blessing because it’s fun, but it’s a curse in that being fun, a whole lot of people spend a lot of time doing it, and that’s the key ingredient to doing something well.”
As a concept artist for videogames (10+ years flight time) I wouldn’t call myself an all-knowing insider to the publishing industry at this point, but from what I can gather so far (including that one post about the royalty figure of a supposedly best-seller book somewhere on the other thread), I can say that writing and doing art are naturally very close in terms of creativity. Partly thanks to digital distribution, among other things, the scene has become so awfully saturated today. So you kind of get the idea of what it’s gonna take to set one foot in the door, get the notice you deserve and whatnot. Promoting your own work is a lot of effort if you go the indie route.
That being said, I cannot see myself working “normal” weekday job that has little to nothing to do with creativity. Although it’s tempting to say that the income from such scenario would probably be better - still, not to say that you cannot be the next great author and financially successful at the same time - I’d probably kill myself after only a few years in because of all the unhappiness from working, to quote from above, a “shitty” job.
If you really want to do it, go for it and let nothing stops you. You’d hate me if I say YOLO but there’s some truth in it.
@DJ_CUTY I have vented nothing; you are the only one turning this charade of a discussion into a personal assault. I assume you feel that you can say whatever you like about me without fear of reprisal, and project whatever faults and misgivings you possess onto an anonymous online figure - its pathetic, in all honesty, and more poignantly it’s a flagrant violation of the basic civil conduct rules of this forum.
I do not hide my criticism behind superficial benedictions, - but even if blunt honesty has been mistaken for an insult, that does not justify your directed attacks. I have asked you to stop with the personal remarks several times now, and yet you continue to make them.
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@FcA
haha xD! Yeah I mean I could always slave away at a retail job that “might” pay better, but it probably won’t and I would be miserable. I love doing this, so even if it doesn’t make me a ton of money, I’ll still do it. Though I do hope that it will make a lot of money, haha.
There is a certain value to doing what you enjoy instead of what makes a secure living, but it’s always nice when the two coincide. My best friend is a writer (still waiting for that coveted book tour) and it’s not an easy career choice. A lot of rejection is involved, but having optimism and confidence (and an unwavering sense of perseverance) seems to be the key to it all.
It’s true that that there’s little chance for someone to make a decent living off of being an author, but it obviously can be accomplished. You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t try, anyway.
@CS_Closet
Yepp! Well I’ll be sure to tell you guys the numbers when my book comes out:P
@DJ_CUTY, while Drazen’s blunt appraisal of your odds of success was no doubt unpleasant to read, it was not a personal attack. He was clearly making an estimate of the odds in general, not yours in particular. It was not phrased in an insulting way.
By contrast, your response to him has consistently been quite personal, and you’ve kept coming back to it even when he’s tried to drop the topic. He’s right that this goes against the civil conduct rules of the forum. Please stop.
And as someone who also has implausible dreams of making real money off writing, I wish you all the best. I mean, like lolli04 said, go to college, keep your other options open… but keep the dream alive.
Thank you, @Havenstone. I shall nevertheless henceforth abstain from posting on this thread, to mitigate the risk of any more unpleasantries flaring up.
I noticed JK Rowling and Harry Potter has been brought up a couple of times in this discussion.
An interesting demonstration of the difficulty of the publishing business is her latest book. She wrote “The Cuckoo’s Calling”, a crime novel under a different name, Robert Galbraith. Despite the fact it received good reviews in the press, as no one had heard of the author, it only sold 1000 copies and many high street book shops didn’t even stock it. As soon as it became know who the actual author it was, it sold like hot cakes. Still, it just shows that you can write a great book but if no one has heard of you, no one cares.
I’m hopefully having a story published soon but I personally don’t think I’ll really make any money from it. Put it this way, I’d be extremely surprised if I have to pay taxes on my income (in the UK you have to earn £9440 per year before paying tax).
Edit: Not just extremely surprised. Bloody blown away.
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I should also say that one of CoG’s goals is for people like @DJ_CUTY to be able to make a living by writing for them… as Jason explained (in a thread I can’t currently locate), they offer a better-than-usual royalty rate because they want to help authors succeed. The intent is for someone who works full time (and thus puts out 3-4 games a year) to be able to live off CoG alone.
So, more power to you, sir.
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I think it should be possible to live off Choice of Games if you can create that amount of input.
That’s one of the things I love about Choice of Games, that they say “yes” to publishing almost anything. That they don’t say “no” that they’re trying to help. That they’re making dreams reachable.
@Havenstone
I’m aiming to release about one gamebook a year (after my initial release) but that’s because of the sheer scale of my books:P they’re about 300K words as opposed to the 50k so I think it’d generate about the same revenue as 4 smaller games, and receive much more appraisal. And yeah I’d like to make a living off of writing choicescript games…I think that as I release more books, it’ll become more realistic because I’d be getting royalties from all the books released.
@FairyGodfeather
Yeah and I think that’s why they made the Hosted Games section. Most publishers are extremely strict and have no foresight…like the people who rejected Harry Potter. Because of this, I was really excited when there were only a few minimal requirements for CoG to publish your book under Hosted Games. They’re basically saying that if you can complete a project in our coding language, you deserve to have it published, and we will almost certainly do so. So instead of searching for years to get your book published, it’d probably only take about a month through CoG, which is another pro of writing for them.
@DJ_Cuty How many words do you write a day? How many words do you write an hour?
I’m about to make a few insane claims. 
You know that NaNoWriMo involves writing a 50K novel in a month. If you were to write 2K words a day, that’s a 60K novel a month. Your 300K novel, would take 5 months to write at that sort of pace. You could feasibly write 2 of those in a year. However, it does mean sitting down each day and writing 2K words.
2,000 words isn’t all that much. It shouldn’t take that long to write.
What if you can write more than 2,000 words a day?
Imagine spending 8 hours a day writing, just as you would spend that time on a full time job. How many words could you write?
It requires a level of discipline though.
I wish I had a brain that works so I could do it.
@DJ_CUTY, I found Jason’s thesis statement for CoG that I was looking for earlier. So hope that’s encouraging.
Less encouragingly, he talks elsewhere about “the reason our games are priced so low. We think they should really be closer to the price of a book (like, $8-$10), but the higher the price, the more likely it will be pirated… some people will just pirate because that’s who they are. But I think there’s a middle ground of people who will pirate if they view it as too expensive, or, conversely, if the amount of money saved by pirating is negligible compared to the time spent torrenting, then they’ll just pay.”
So I’m not sure the price will scale in the way you want it to. To make money off a long work, you might want to think about whether your 300k words can break down into 2 or 3 volumes (as Tolkien had to with his 480,000 word behemoth).
A few months ago, I was sure that Choice of Rebels Part 1 was going to be a six chapter work, just because the arc I had in mind didn’t end until you’d had the chance to take on the nobles in the capital city… but I then figured out a way to make the arcs end in a semi-satisfying way (I hope) in Ch 3, which should make it both more manageable and in the end more lucrative.
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@FairyGodfeather
Yeah that’s crazy! Well I’d say I write about 10,000 words a day but that’s if I’m just writing, not coding. I can only write about 5,000 words a day if I’m coding. I try to work on my book full time but I think I average about 30 hours a week. I think I could do that, but a lot of my time is also spent working with my illustrator and formulating ideas:P it’d be amazing if I could pump two 300k word gamebooks out a year, though. We’ll see!
@Havenstone
I read Jason’s post and I think that since my book is 300k words with like 10 good illustrations, it may actually fetch a $4.5 price (hopefully!) and I thought about splitting it up into smaller parts, but the series is already a 4 book series so I wouldn’t want to make it like an 8book series that seems too spaced out. But what Jason was really inspiring- he basically pointed out how one CAN make this a career, and how generous CoG is as a company. Plus, one of the things I fear most is getting bad reviews because of the length. Hence, I’m striving to release the longest CoG yet xD
@AlexClifford94
Yeah I heard about the situation with JK Rowling’s new book. The thing about this, though, is that I think my book will be seen. Choice of Games is now about 4 years old, with net sales of like 6 million gamebooks sold. Plus I’m going to advertise it a lot. But I hope your book gets better sales than you think it will:P
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I think JK Rowling is not the author whose success should be attempted to emulate. I think she had a great degree of luck in getting to where she is now. If more achievable goals are set then if the luck comes along then that’s brilliant, and if not then there’s still a chance of success.
I know a few people who make their livings off of making games. They’re my heroes, although I doubt that anyone has heard of them. They’re indie developers, who make the sorts of games which they love, often on their own, and they’re successful enough to make a career out of it. Those are the people I’d love to emulate.
They all seem to have got where they are from sheer hard work and perseverance. I don’t think any of them have had the sort of block-buster hit caused by luck, but they still seem to get by. Of course I could be completely wrong.
@AlexClifford94 Thank you for those UK tax figures. I didn’t realise it was that much which you could make before being taxed.
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