Could the creator economy work for fiction authors?

Hi, Nathan here! Have you ever wondered why the paid newsletter model is so much more popular for non-fiction than fiction? Kinda strange, given that fiction has a long and proud tradition of serialized content, and fiction book sales typically are equal to or larger than non-fiction book sales. Today we have a superb guest essay by Elle Griffin that dives into the reasons why, and asks whether things might change soon. Elle is a fiction writer herself, with a gothic novel coming out on her Substack soon. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

Ok, enough intro! Here’s Elle.

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In an article about pandemic book sales, The New York Times disclosed recently that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.” And according to Bookstat, a website that aggregates data around book sales, of the 2.7M books sold online in 2020, only 268 sold more than 100,000 copies—that’s 0.01 percent of books. 

Meanwhile, 96 percent of those 2.7M sold between 0 and 1,000 copies.