On the writing side, it concerns me when potential readers’ expectations on word count seem to be rising.
Because at some point, it becomes woefully economically inefficient to write these titles, especially as there’s usually a huge increase in workload when you go from a 100k word story to a 200k word story. One may think, “Well, it’s probably double the work, right?”
And I would say, “Bare minimum. But first of all, ‘double the work’ is a helluva lot of work. 500 hours of your life just became 1000 hours. And honestly, it’s likely much more than double the work, since generally longer games result in more paths, more variables to track and account for, etc. So 500 hours probably became 1200 hours or even 1500 hours.”
And these games just don’t make enough money for the authors to have workcount expectations to rise any further. We have to look at what we earn, and divide it into an hourly wage to see if we’re really undervaluing our time.
An author of a 300,000-word game, who may have spent at least 1500 hours, and possibly more on it, will net like $1.25 per copy, even with a $7 sales price. Let’s say it sells strongly, 10,000 units in the first year, so the author nets $12,500. That same author would have need to write at least 2 more of those 300,000-word epics (in the same year!) to earn just $37,500, which in the US isn’t a high standard of living at all.
I just don’t see how these expectations are sustainable for authors. The numbers don’t work. It’s math. That author who worked 1500 hours to write that 300,000-word epic worked for $8 per hour. Let that sink in. Now that rate will increase as sales continue over the next couple of years, but will the rate ever get above $20 per hour or so?