The title of this post was the title of my talk, and, in a nutshell, I wanted to encourage those present that it was possible to find readers and make non-zero amounts of money at authoring, even if they never found an agent or a traditional publisher. And while my 2026 numbers suck in comparison to the 2024 numbers I shared there, they remain > 0 by a healthy margin. I’ll be adding some updates here, though, so if you heard the original talk, keep reading!

In author terms, do “unicorns” need explaining? They’re the ones everyone has heard of, the ones who get chosen by celebrity book clubs, make bestseller lists, get carried in physical bookstores, have lines out the door for their signings, see their books made into movies/miniseries, and who make a nice living from their work. Unicorns are the ones everyone dreams of being. They absolutely exist, but they’re—well—unicorns. Vanishingly rare, numbers-wise.

Shetland ponies, on the other hand, are humdrum, small, steady, friendly, humble, and devoid of magical powers. And yet, at the fair they will tote those kids around by the hour. For every unicorn bounding above the publishing world, there are a thousand Shetland ponies quietly and anonymously plodding away, building their loyal readerships and making non-zero money.

I am 100% Shetland pony. I’ve written 24 books, but I’m pretty no-name, I write mostly historicals, which, if you hadn’t heard, are currently unfashionable. (All the cool kids are currently sitting at the romantasy or dark romance or sports romance tables.) Nor do I write spicy books, which sell way better and more vocally than non-. And trying to spot even my traditionally published book “out in the wild” at a bookstore—even at a romance bookstore—is like going to Scotland and hoping you see the Loch Ness Monster. That’s how un-unicorn I am.

And yet. Shetland ponies.

So what exactly constitutes “non-zero” income? That is, what kind of money do Shetland ponies make? The answers vary and are all self-reported, but maybe they can provide a range? (Note: remember that “median” means that half of respondents were above the line, and half below. This is more useful than “average,” which can be skewed by the unicorns.)

• Written Word Media 2025 annual survey (~1300 people, mostly self-pub): “While 44% of authors earn $100 or less, the majority—56%—are earning over $100 monthly from their writing. Authors in the $500 – $5,000 range make up 20% of respondents, while authors making over $5,000 per month account for 13% of respondents. 8% of authors who answered the survey report making over $10,000 per month. I would call authors making six and seven figures annually unicorns, so that means over 30% of authors polled fell in the non-zero Shetland-pony income range of $6000-99,000 per year. And a bigger backlist was directly tied to a higher income, with the ramp getting significant after 10 books. (Note: $6000/yr might be non-zero, but your expenses will likely make that pretty close to zero. Still, it’s hopefully in the black.)
  

• The Authors Guild, representing a more even split of trad- and self-pub authors, surveyed 5000+ members in 2023 and reported, “Full-time authors of romance and romantic suspense had the highest median gross income from their books, out-earning mystery, thriller, and suspense writers by over three times and literary fiction authors by a staggering six times. They reported a median book income of $31,725.” (This figure includes both trad- and selfpub and is not counting author-related income from things like editing, teaching, ghostwriting, etc.) For “full-time” self-published authors, by which I assume they mean people not also holding unrelated part-time or full-time jobs, they found “authors who had been publishing since at least 2018 reported a median income of $24,000.” That is, a larger catalog of books led to higher income.
  

• Finally, the Alliance of Independent Authors surveyed some number of their self-publishing members and found “median self-published author income was $13,500, growing at a healthy 6% year-on-year.”

All of which means, there are who-knows-how-many Shetland ponies out there with ten books or more under their girth making between $6000-99,000 per year, and I’m grateful to be among them.

I wasn’t always. When I first started writing, I’d say I was a hobbyist by default because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was just fortunate to have enough people in my circle of acquaintance that I could invite them to book parties, and they thought that sounded fun. Kindles were barely a thing at the time, so I sold paperbacks at first, which I paid to have printed. But selling physical books which I had to have printed, pick up, transport, and ship myself to non-local readers was a PAIN, so as soon as I could move to print-on-demand and ebooks, I did. Still, writing for a hobby, the Amazon royalty graph looked as follows:

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Fast forward to 2026. She has Book One in draft form, complete with feedback from beta readers, and the whole series mapped out, but when I saw her again this summer, I had to tell her, “Friend, I am so sorry. Since I gave you that advice, the whole landscape has changed. Now Amazon and the whole world are drowning in ‘books’ pumped out by AI, and it’s really hard to find your readers and for them to find you. Nor is there any guarantee that will ever happen. My own royalties are down by half, even though I already have an established readership.” Bravely she absorbed this and said, “Well, I really enjoyed writing it, and I’m still going to do it, even if I never make money.”

I stand by my original advice, however, if only we could all get in a time machine and return to 2022 (better yet would be 2020 because apparently I missed a gold rush while I was lying on the floor in a puddle from raising teenagers). Back in ye good old days, the standard advice to make it selling romance on Amazon was as follows:

1. Pay for an editor and the best cover you could afford.

2. Plop your book in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s all-you-can-read subscription service.

3. Write in series, including the link to the next book right at the end of the previous, so that when a reader finished one book, she moved right on to the next. That way you could…

4. Advertise/discount/give away the first book for free in a promotion, so those marketing costs would be spread across the whole series.

5. Do your darnedest to put out a book every few months or less, to keep momentum going and the Amazon algorithm interested. (Some authors could whip out 75,000 words in a few weeks over and over until they burnt out.) (AI can now spit 75,000 words out in seconds, but much more on that in later posts.) (My own sustainable writing rate has leveled out at about 1000 words per day. My books tend to be 90,000 words, so that equals three books per year under ideal conditions.)

6. Do regular social media.

7. Befriend some other authors, so you could do some joint marketing (e.g., newsletter swaps and multi-author projects).

The advice is still good and I would still hand much of it out, especially #s 1, 3, 5, & 7, but not only will your mileage vary now—honey, you may not even make it out of the garage.

Though I was late to the party (again, because teenagers), I managed to catch the tail end of this goodness, having enough books out at the right time to attract a small and loyal readership, a ride I’ll discuss in later posts. If I were starting out now, I don’t think I could replicate my journey or my numbers without changing genres, “spice” levels, or getting just dumb-lucky.

And while my numbers are down for various reasons, they remain better than what I earned in any part-time job I’ve ever held. Part-time, not full-time. What Amazon made possible was a democratization of the publishing process, as well as a means for authors to keep much more of what their works earned. By cutting out the middle men, far more authors—small-fry authors like me, whom you haven’t even heard of, for Pete’s sake—were able to make anywhere from worthwhile side hustles to modest livings out of their writing.

Not only that, but many of them, including me, parlayed Amazon success into a traditional publishing deal. That may not be every writer’s goal, but it was one of mine and a happy box to check.

So can it still be done, if you’re just getting started? Maybe? But I think the pie chart of success looks more like this now:

So join me on the journey?

I’ll end the free post with a word about the paywall. I’m hoping Substack won’t be like shorter-form social media, filled with roving misanthropes dropping criticism bombs and sharpening their pitchforks. Nevertheless, since posts about numbers and money attract those types elsewhere, I’m hoping a paywall will keep out the lazier of them, as well as people who just want to harp on Amazon. Not being a six- or seven-figure author, I don’t think I’m worth picking on, but you never know. And since $5/month is the minimum sub fee here, $5/month it is.

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