Comment by vidarh

Fiction writers also have to hustle a lot to be successful. The average full time writer in the UK would've made more at McDonalds in the UK, and I doubt it's much better elsewhere.

It's both an extremely competitive field, and it's incredibly hard to convince people to read your book even for those near the top of their field in terms of quality.

But non-fiction writers have an additional problem, that I think the article glosses over:

If I like, say, romance novels, I'm not looking for new books to be dramatically different to what I read before. A lot of genre readers - the by far largest genres are romance and thrillers - expect books that stick closely to expected conventions. Romance readers will form a mob with pitchforks if there isn't a happily ever after, for example.

Non-fiction, on the other hand, must set itself apart. Why should I read your How to Win Friends and Influence People look-alike when I can read Dale Carnegie's original?

It needs to be very different or clearly better and I have to find it in between the many hundreds of thousands (not an exaggeration; might even under-estimate the number at this point) of new non-fiction titles every year, where fiction titles are not:

You don't need 50 books on meditation, or 50 books on repairing your washing machine, but you might have 50 books in the same narrow sub-genre of fiction because it's what you like to read, and so the opportunity cost of picking up an unknown name feels very different.

A whole lot of the non-fiction market is also being cannibalised by blogs, tiktok, youtube videos and the like - and LLMs -, whereas a video is more likely to tease the fiction book rather than replace the need for it.