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Comment by sltkr | Hacker News Reader

> There are thousands of paid fiction authors on Patreon but only 25 earn more than $1,000/month, only six earn more than $2,000/month, and only one earns more than the $5,000/month (and she’s already a bestselling author).

I think she missed a few authors in other categories. Examples:

  - https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow (over $6,000/month)
  - https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3814558 ($8,203 per chapter, roughly 1 chapter/month)
  - https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba (no dollar amount, but 4,345 patrons and a $1/month minimum tier should translate to roughly $8000/month)

etc. None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.

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The author of The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound $5262/month: https://www.patreon.com/puddles4263

The author of Azarinth Healer has 3317 patrons at $2 minimum: https://www.patreon.com/RhaegarRRL

Basically, you can look through RoyalRoad, Scribblehub, WebNovel, and various other places where quite a few people seem to find success. And that's not even mentioning the people who write novels and publish them on Amazon.

>None of these are conventionally established authors as far as I can tell.

They're not. Or at least were not. They wrote web novels and acquired success because people liked their stories.

These are amazing! Thank you so much for sharing. I will look into these as case studies.

One more thing to consider is that some (many?) of these authors are from poorer countries. $1500 a month for them might go a lot further.

There's also the path of the "Kindle Unlimited" after-the-fact self-publisher.

I've seen several times now where an author does this:

1. Publish their novel serially on a site like Royal Road. Build up a subscriber base, get on the leaderboards, try to grow. 2. Publish it to Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited requires that no other copies be available online, so remove it all from the original site. 3. Continue writing new content as "book 2" on the original sites to try and stay discoverable and on top of the leaderboards. Hope new readers will read the first few books on Amazon, thereby finally earning some money.

Some more:

  https://www.patreon.com/user?u=48733767 Casualfarmer 2.8K
  https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth 10K / month
  https://www.patreon.com/C_Mantis c.mantis / 4.2 K
  https://www.patreon.com/SelkieMyth 5.3K
  https://www.patreon.com/InadvisablyCompelled 2.8K
  https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon 14 K 
  https://www.patreon.com/DefianceNovels 1395 patreons

Some of those are also on Kindle Unlimited & Kindle.

These are great, thank you! They didn't show up in the fiction category, but makes sense since they are using other terminology. I'll definitely look into these as case studies!

Wildbow is amazing. Her "Worm" series is literally 20 full novels sized, and works like this are (or was? read it many years ago) free competition to any would-be writer who would want to require - as the article suggests - $5 per chapter of an unfinished novel. I mean, all these Patreon examples illustrate that it definitely can work, but IMHO it's more accurate to treat it as "patron" sponsorship/charity/support out of goodwill, instead of as actual economic sales of scarce product.

I love that Wildbow writes the female point of view that you assumed he was a she (assuming that wasn't a typo). He's still going strong--current work is Pale (https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/) which I can highly recommend.

Proud patron of Wildbow here, I admire his work ethic so much, he has been writing 10000+ words per week for at least 7(?) years without interruption and the stuff is high quality too, great world building all around.

https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/about/ is what he has been writing for the past year and I still look forward to the chapters on Tuesday and Saturday every week. There is also a whole community of readers who gathers in the comments section or the subreddit to theorize and speculate, it is a lot of fun.

Yes, I was wondering where the author got those numbers, There's also https://www.patreon.com/senescentsoul who probably gets more than 5k a month since the minimum tier is $2.5/month

Ursula Vernon, Author of Harriet the Hamster Princess - https://www.patreon.com/ursulav (1,165 patrons, $2,709/mo)

Harriet is a great kids' series (as is Dragonbreath). Just to include it here, most of Vernon's writing for adults (which is what her Patreon focuses on) is under the pen name T. Kingfisher. "Jackalope Wives"; Clockwork Boys (fantasy novel); Swordheart; The Twisted Ones; A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking... fun, quirky, interesting stories! (Her grown-up webcomic Digger was under her own name, though.)

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