AFAICT there are five types of successful writers:
- Those who never did anything else and just kept plugging along (most of them have a wealthy SO or family that supports them, and they often also work as journalists or do copywriting and side gigs - or wrote back in the day when there were Patrons of the Arts who would fund artists of all sorts).
- Those who wandered from job to job over the years, writing on the side, who finally got something to sell and kept working until they had multiple sales, then finally stopped working to write full time. This is traditionally the most common.
- Those who got INSANELY lucky and kept at it (Chris ... probably spelling this wrong Paolini, the guy who wrote the Eragon novels, is of this sort, as is comic book legend Jim Shooter, both who started in their mid-teens; heck, Mary Shelley also fell into this camp; ironically, her best writing is virtually unknown today but her first effort, Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus is one of the best known novels in the English-speaking world). This is the least common.
- Those who had a comfortable living, lost it or retired from it and now write full time (there are a LOT of people who wound up in this bracket during COVID). These are the people behind Substack AFAICT.
- Those who get into a "stable" like those Tom Clancy and a few other "mega-successful" authors have used over the years.
It is worth to mention that the (serialized) web novels are subscription services which rely on the constant stream of the
daily content released over the long periods of time, usually months, even years, without the end in sight. This is not only extremely time consuming, but it is also heavily reliant on the Internet clout you have, where one person with too many accounts could send you to do the pits of obscurity anytime they wish and your only way to prevent this is to outgrow the constant attrition. This simply isn't sustainable, and both the Royal Road and the Webnovel know this.
The non-serialized works are usually the pulp fiction, also released electronically in this time and age (as opposed to paperback in the days past). This is often erotica or romance (for women), and action and erotica (for men). The authors often reiterate on the same thing again and again, with one book overly similar to another, just with the little re-skin in each variant, as writers are forced to release a
new book every one or two months, depending on competition. Any slower and you are falling behind, so three months between books and you are on the verge of heading to oblivion, as new and new novels are being released. You are less dependent on the whims of the random people with too many accounts, but you still need to do advertising, marketing and so on. This at least go through actual publishers most of the time, but often the small, pulp fiction one.
Third option are professional writers which release book every few years with traditional publishing houses, but those are extremely popular big name writers - Martin, King, Sanderson, this kind of names - and it is incredibly difficult to get there, regardless of the genre. This is only option for the traditional fiction ...
In the first and second option, you don't necessarily need to write erotica or LitRPG, it's your choice, but your work would still be considered within the same brackets as the novels which are either of those.
