Eighteen years ago, Kevin Kelly wrote an essay that became gospel for creators of all types. Lots of indie authors have heard of it and wondered whether it really applies to them. The answer is yes, but not the way he meant.
Boiled down, Kelly’s point was that a creator only needs 1,000 true fans because a true fan buys everything you produce. His conclusion is built on two key assumptions: you can earn $100 a year from each one and they pay you directly. In that hypothetical, 1,000 of them is $100,000—a living for a creator.
Authors with any books on the market, earning a tiny fraction of the cover price, immediately see the problem here. Kelly buried the lede for authors. His essay is fundamentally an income model, but authors need to interpret it as a distribution model. The true fans don't change; their job does. In Kelly's version they're the customers. For authors, they're the sales force. In fairness, Kelly mentions in passing that true fans are also the creator's chief marketing force, but then he quickly goes back to talking about their spending. For a novelist, his aside is the whole story.
Neither of Kelly’s two conditions is a fit for novelists: if you write one book a year, even if you sell it to a fan in every popular format, you might clear something like $25 to $35 from the most devoted reader alive; three or four books a year is what it would take to reach Kelly's number, and that's a pace most writers can't sustain without the book showing it. The other assumption, direct payment, also doesn’t fit: most authors sell through retailers, who keep their cut and, worse, keep the reader's name. There’s a loyalty problem too: "buys anything you produce" is a pretty demanding level of loyalty; mystery readers follow twenty or more authors at once and could easily skip a book if they are obsessed with a different author when it comes out. Taken literally, 1,000 true fans is at best a $30,000 business for most authors—not the kind of living Kelly had in mind.
The disconnect is that Kelly measured true fans by what they spend. For a book, the value of a true fan is what they do. For authors, true fans pre-order promptly, creating a cluster that wakes up the algorithms and earns a new book a brief moment of visibility; they leave reviews, the currency that unlocks credible promotion; they recommend, to the book club, the sister-in-law, the library; they read early and catch what an editor missed. None of that adds up to a $100 line item, but it’s equally valuable. Those things are how a book finds the readers who'll actually pay for it. The true fans aren't the audience; they're the seed of one. And for that role you might not even need a thousand. A hundred loud ones might do it.
The intention of Kelly's essay was to encourage artists by showing them it doesn’t have to be a binary choice between starvation and stardom. His message holds for authors too, just by a different route: the middle path for authors isn't a thousand people paying you directly, it's a thousand people carrying your book to the next ten thousand.
So if you’ve read any good books lately, help the authors by telling some friends.
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