I’ve been writing and publishing books professionally since 2010.

A lot has changed in the publishing world since I started sharing my work and authoring at a level that allowed me to earn an income from my efforts.

Waves of consolidation and bankruptcies have left us with fewer, larger entities that control more bookstore shelves (physical and digital), and while they still publish a lot of books—tens of thousands each year—the majority of those books sell fewer than 1,000 copies in their first 52 weeks, while a spare few (about 0.4%) sell more than 100,000 copies annually.

Consequently, big publishers are more likely to prioritize working with people who have large social media followings, and those who have proven track-records of selling just a silly number of books (this is similar to what’s happening in the film industry, where studios are less likely to take bets on unknowns, and more likely to focus on sequels and reboots of existing, proven intellectual property).

That dynamic shapes a lot of what happens in the book publishing and adjacent industries, but it’s also amplified a sort of counter-trend elsewhere in the publishing ecosystem.

More people from more backgrounds who have had a larger diversity of experiences, and who thus bring a lot more perspectives to the culture-wide, conversational table, are suddenly adding their voices to the cacophony. This has resulted in an impressive uptick in variety and novelty throughout every conceivable medium.

That said, this same tide of (often quite valuable and enriching) linguistic and positional transmission has amplified another disseminatory trend: that of consumption overwhelm by folks on the receiving end of the deluge.

The tools that have made publishing and distributing one’s work so easy, today (compared to how things worked back when I started writing books), have smoothed so many frictions and removed so many gatekeepers that we’re now living through a moment of crushing abundance.

There are so many options, so many products and platforms and people competing for our finite time and attention and resources, that breaking through in any meaningful way has arguably replaced all those previous (mostly technical and industry-implemented) barriers as the primary challenge a nascent author faces.

There’s always a chance you’ll write a book and someone, somewhere, will discover it, share it with others, and a grassroots groundswell will carry the hard-grown fruits of your labor to the pop cultural and economic altitudes it deserves.

Far more likely, though—and this is more likely in the same way it’s more likely you won’t win a billion dollars playing the lottery than the opposite—your wonderful book will languish in relative obscurity.

As I mentioned before, even the majority of the books produced and pushed by big-name publishers that wield large marketing budgets and a vast rolodex of sales-channel relationships sell relatively few copies; far short of what they require to cover the monetary investments made by the publisher, not to mention all the time and effort plowed into the book by the author.

The tools available to indie and small-press publishers, today, are miraculous compared to what came before, and the access to markets and distribution options we now enjoy are likewise astonishing.

Writing and selling a book is still an uphill slog in many ways, though, and that’s true whether you’re going through a publisher or approaching it solo.

When people ask me about how to get started writing a book, one of the first things I tell them is to make sure they set their expectations appropriately, and to ensure they’re doing it for reasons beyond the potential for monetary profit.

That’s not because I think people should work for free, but rather because book-writing and publishing is an unwieldy, at times quite brutal and tedious process, and the likely economic outcomes, alone, won’t be worth the time and energy invested for most people.

I do think writing a book is an exercise that can be valuable unto itself, though, as it can help us flesh-out our thinking, explore worlds and concepts that would be difficult to consider at that granularity in any other fashion, and it can help us connect with other people who already share our passions, and those who might feel compelled to cultivate similar enthusiasms after engaging with our (arduously produced) work.