R.L. Davennor published a post last month with a title that does most of the work: she made a low six figures from her books in 2024, and she is now working two day jobs, picking up Instacart shifts and starting an OnlyFans to cover the bills. She names the causes she can see, the TikTok blackout, the algorithm changes, an economy that stopped buying, and she is honest about the part that has no visible cause at all. She kept publishing three books in eleven months, she posted two reels a day, and none of it moved the number.
I read it on a morning when I was going through my own royalty history for other reasons, and the shape was familiar enough to be uncomfortable. April 2025 paid me $5,182, May paid $5,065, and nothing since has come close, with my 2026 monthly average sitting around a thousand.
The instinct is to read those two stories as the same story, where an author does well, the market turns, and the author does worse. That reading is wrong, or at least it is wrong for mine, and the difference matters more than the sympathy does.
Davennor knows what she built. She built an audience on a platform, the platform changed, and the audience stopped arriving. That is a loss with a mechanism attached to it, and a mechanism is a thing you can reason about, argue with, mourn properly and eventually replace.
I did not know what I had built, which is the whole of my problem, and it took eighteen months to see it.
