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Cake day: August 10th, 2025

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  • There is still a chance but it’s so tiny that you better leave it out of the equation. Almost nobody makes it to the top, with the top beginning at “I can focus purely on writing my books and don’t have to do side jobs like lecturing, writing bogus articles for tabloids, teaching writing at evening school, making covers and frying burgers anymore”, but you’re still sitting in a tiny broken apartment and eat cheap ramen, you’re still forced to shit out 300-page-books every 1-2 months for some niche genre and you’re still working at least 80 hours per week and you’re still only self-publishing using Amazon’s print-on-demand service and you still have to crawl all kinds of social media groups and forums to advertise your books and to remind your audience that you’re still alive. This is how it was before the AI boom. How many decades can you go like that, hoping to reach the point where you get an actual contract with a publishing house? Twenty? Thirty? And even then you’re still far from that point when there’s a demand to translate your books into another language (which would be the point where you can actually rent a small house and earn enough money to feed a pet like a cat or dog too). Do not fall for the apex fallacy. This is hard work. Ask yourself how much shit you can eat and if shit cakes are your favorite thing in the world. Because this would be your life then. Most authors give up because they want to live at some point.

    So ask yourself: How much are you willing to sacrifice? If the answer is “Everything!” without any doubt or hesitation, then you might get somewhere in a few decades. If you’re talented enough, insane enough and very lucky. And if the AI bubble bursts too of course. This is the hard truth.