How Much Does Twisted Actually Make?
29 August 2025 · 3 min read
I get asked this question from time to time and it’s usually a shock. I got this email from a write this morning so I decided to pull some actual figures.
They wrote…
‘As a published horror writer, I noted with interest the latest Twisted50 horror project and submission cost of £15.
Can you tell me, what royalties will be paid to writers whose stories are selected for publication, please?
Also you have a typo on your website’
I can do a deep dive into costs if anyone REALLY wants it, but off the top of my head, we get around 150 submissions for each Twisted50 project. That’s around £2,250 income. We have to pay 20% VAT off the top, plus another 5%ish for PayPal, so a quarter is gone right away. That leaves about £1,687.
From that we need to pay for the site build, hosting, upkeep, additional tools for submissions, share of annual accounting, Midjourney for the images, we also use Elfsight and POWr for handling submissions and contracts (many of which are damned monthly payments). All the site is managed manually by our team (that usually means me, but we have an intern starting soon who can help with he load). Then there’s the book editing and production, along with reading, selection and overall management. It’s a petty huge task. I am also pretty sure I have forgotten some stuff too.
Now for sales.
In the month of July we made about $8 across all five Twisted books. This is both direct sales and also page reads via Kindle Unlimited. According to Google, this is what we get from pages reads… ‘608 pages in Kindle Unlimited would earn you between approximately $2.43 and $3.04, as the payout rate varies monthly but typically falls between $0.004 and $0.005 per page.’
Looking at the KENP chart too it looks like 7 or so people downloaded the book, and 4 read a large part of it.
In August so far, we have tripled that page read so may earn an extra $6.
Of course we do better in the months of release, but so far we have never passed $100 in any month of release. On average, and this is without getting deep into spreadsheets, I suspect each book has brought in around $700 over its lifetime. It may be less. It’s definitely not more.
No-one is getting rich. Well actually, yes one person is. All of this really should focus the attention on the one person who is making a killing. Jeff Bezos.
It also begs the question. What on earth am I doing this for?
Well I wish I had an answer that made sense.
But at the deepest level, it’s because I enjoy it. It’s kind of that simple. Very few people who volunteer to help come back for a second book, the workload is so enormous. Those who do, are the AMAZING ones. And mad as hatters too.
Write a Twisted50 story, or don’t write a Twisted50 story.
The choice is, as ever, entirely yours.
Right. Let’s get back to being demented creatives!
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
