Just want to mention as well… Sera is still keeping her day job even though she have 2.5k monthly Patreon support. If you think about it, Patreon is not a stable source of income since anyone supporting you could cancel anytime.
Just keep that in mind.
Sounds about right, I predict the most popular authors of tomorrow will probably have published dozens of books. J.A. Cipriano has made a living but he has also published over 80 books. I watch the romance author Derek Murphy’s channel on Youtube for advice and he has made a living off of being an indie author, he has published over 35 books.
I think the day when a person published a couple novels and made a living may be over. Even if one is friends with someone in one of those five places in New York. Indie authors are taking a bigger market share than ever before and it is only increasing.
I guess one other thing to consider is the initial lag time between setting yourself up as a full time author and when you may have significant income coming in. Hopefully your book on Amazon will sell very well/patreon will take off so you get immediate funds, but if it takes a while to get interest or if you’re relying on sales through HG or a traditional publisher, it could take months between when you submit something for review and when you first start to get any income from what you finish writing. Just make sure there’s enough base income coming in to cover things like rent and food initially at least until you see how it’s all going.to pan out.
I really hope it does work out for you, it’s just I’ve spoken to a few authors about writing as a job (some of which have multiple traditionally published works, and for some it was their only job, but for many they keep at least a part time job going) and their advice to me was always be careful about considering being a writer as your main source of income as generally it doesn’t pay well. (It can if something becomes very popular, but the pay generally can be low per hour work/ intermittent or variable in nature which makes it hard to live on solely in some cases.)
For sure. I’m only going to go for it if MMM and A Wretched Heart turn out to have more successful initial releases than any of my previous books. They’re better and I’ll be getting 4x the royalties per sale, but the big question is, will I be able to actually make people aware that the stories even exist?
Seems like everyone is interested in speculating and vagueries but not interested in my actual plan of action. 
I think the question is how much of that lifting you expect the new stories to do. By now you should have a very good idea how much the four existing HG titles will earn. With MMM and the novelization being very much unknowns, where you can’t even really guess what you will make.
I still think you’re fine to try it, but you would be best served finding a non-writing income source to help pad it out.
If you haven’t seen it yet, author Jim C. Hines puts out a yearly accounting of his wages each year, and shows how it compares to previous years. I’ve found it very enlightening. http://www.jimchines.com/2019/01/2018-writing-income/
He also links to a 2016 survey he conducted of nearly 400 novelists and their yearly income: http://www.jimchines.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2016-Novelist-Income-Results.pdf
There’s too much variance to do it comfortably. I wish it were a simple calculation. I’d love to live on writing alone, but not only do you need to produce a lot of writing, but it has to sell well, and sales are often completely out of your control.
Let’s take the Google Play store for example: Google’s algorithms are mercurial beasts, fickle and prone to temper tantrums. They highlight reviews seemingly at random, and can keep a random negative review topside for months for no reason, even when it’s getting a small fraction of the thumbs up that better reviews get. How do they choose where your game shows up in general searches, or even on the sidebar when displaying other CoG/HGs? No one really knows outside of Google’s engineers. You could write the best game in the history of mankind, but if a troll writes a bad review and Google chooses to highlight it, it can cost you thousands of dollars. If Google just chooses not to rank it high in their searches, you’re screwed. And it’s completely out of your control.
I feel like I got very lucky with ‘Werewolves: Haven Rising.’ My Google Play sales have been through the roof (not so much Steam/iOS, but such is life) but I have no idea why it’s done so well there. I monitor its position obsessively, and I’ve watched it in comparison to other CoGs in terms of placement, downloads, and reviews. I’m sure I had an unfair edge simply because of the subject matter (werewolves sell) but that can’t be the be-all and end-all of it, since there are plenty of werewolf apps that have failed miserably.
TL/DR: This is too unpredictable a business to count on as your only source of income in my opinion. For all we know Google could pull an Apple next month and remove all CoG/HGs because they are ‘template apps.’ I’m sorry if that seems like negative thinking, I just have a tendency to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Hmmm, well, you could always try getting another job and put yourself through trade school for programming. While choicescript is very user friendly, it IS basic coding. It’s still the same principles.
Programming is also a very booming field, so getting jobs shouldn’t be as challenging as if you were say, a nurse? That’s just my take on it.
From what I understand, full time writing and using Patreon is a very iffy, if not risky move. Without saved money, on less than min wage, doesn’t seem like good quality of life. Not very lucrative from what I’ve read.
It seems trade school is by far cheaper than college, and a good alternative to working a shitty min wage job while part time writing.
But that’s just me. Do what makes you happy man. I’ll buy your books/games whether you’re dirt poor or not so. 
I’ve kept up with Jim’s income reports for like 4 year now (although I’ve never read one of his books; I need to change that).
And his wife is very ill (cancer). He talks about it on Twitter. Can you imagine how scary that is? And even though he’s published 13 books with New York publishers, he still just earned $39,000 last year, BEFORE taxes and other expenses (but after the agent cut). I doubt he netted more than $30,000.
Me, go to school? Pfft. And I’ll have you know my job isn’t a shitty minimum wage job, it’s a shitty low paying job. 
Hey!
Thought I’d chime in, as a UK student with an interest in programming, from all the research I’ve found most programmers with a BSc in Computer Science in the UK get roughly average salaries, between 25-30 grand, and towards the lower end if you have little experience or are in the public sector (although pretty good benefits and retirement salary!)
(Although with experience and willingness to move around and learn some new languages, and if you get lucky, you could earn between 60 and 80k!)
I was going to recommend some jobs which need less time and experience but I cant think of many
Me.