You are not alone.

I have for you a little hard truth and hopefully a lot of encouragement. Unfortunately, I tend to be long-winded, but I hope you'll read until the end.

With regard to Substack, it's a great place for community, but it's not yet a great place to sell books. I am very grateful for the folks here who bought something from me, but I also understand that a lot of folks here are indie authors on a tight budget who may not be able to afford to buy all the books they want. They probably also have to spend enough time on writing that their reading time is much less than what they would like.

What Substack ideally needs to do is find more people whose primary interest is reading to join the platform. Writers are readers and will buy books from other writers. But having an audience composed mostly of other writers is problematic and not very scalable, whether we're talking about book sales or subscriptions.

On publishing in general, most aspiring fiction writers make nothing. Either they languish at the closed gates of trad publishing, or they self publish and don't get much visibility. There are large groups of both. However, I do know a few who have been successful, even successful enough to make a living at it. I've interacted with a self pubber who makes over two million a year. There are a handful who make more than that.

Yeah, they are outliers. BUT, there are ways to make self-publishing work better for you.

FIRST, be patient. Most successful indie writers are successful not because their first book was a bestseller but because they kept writing and kept publishing. That isn't easy. Most of the indie writers I met when I first started (September of 2012), are long gone. A few left because their non-publishing lives got complicated, but more left because they became discouraged. I'm still here, though.

Am I a bestseller? Only in my dreams. But over the last twelve years, I have sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 24,000 books. Spread across more then twelve years, that doesn't make me Stephen King or JK Rowling. It doesn't mean I made much money, either. As you know, there are lots of expenses. But I will say that it has given me a degree of satisfaction I wouldn't have had if I had quit after the first book (which sold very few copies initially but is well into the thousands now).

Therefore, SECOND, set reasonable expectations. For most people who become successful fiction writers, it's a slow build rather than an overnight miracle. People used to think of self-publishing as a get-rich-quick scheme. It's really more like a get-middle class-slow scheme, if that.

THIRD, think about what your goals are. If making money is the primary one, you may want to look elsewhere. (Or as someone who I interact with on a writer's forum put it, go work part-time at McDonalds.) But if a major goal is to find an audience and bring joy to that audience, a writer of your caliber can certainly accomplish that. Try to budget in such a way that you can afford the produce a decent quality product even if the book doesn't earn out. Then see what happens.

I used to think I could use writing as at least an income supplement. But if I'm being honest, I write now mostly because I want my words to reach an audience. I know two people who write only for themselves. They're happy with that, but I'm sure I wouldn't be.

You might even be able to achieve a higher level of success than I have. People do, after all. One of my former students hit #1 on Amazon. So far, he's only had that one brief stint up in the stratosphere, and I don't think even he knows how he did it. But perhaps it does show that sometimes miracles happen. He's not the only one who hit success in a way that sort of defies logic.

So be patient, be realistic, and if you writing is what you really want, budget enough to sustain your craft without getting yourself in financial trouble. (As I've heard people say about being in Las Vegas, gamble only as much as you can afford to lose.)