Keep your day job.
Accept that you will not be able to quit your day job.
Regardless how much weeping and wailing and gnashing of the teeth goes on around the web about monetizing art, if you’re a writer not already pulling income that allows writing to be your day job, just deal with the fact that you probably aren’t going to.
In my mind, making peace with the fact that you have to keep your day job is a lot easier than spending all your creative energy to resent it. Ask me how I know.
Today, right now, as I look over the fiction writer landscape on the web, I see lots of writers I can slot into roughly five categories:
- The unpublished authors seeking publication via the normal route (query/reject/revise/repeat). They’re hustling to get an agent’s attention, and possibly spending money on ink/toner, paper, envelopes, and postage to do so. They aren’t earning any money.
- The midlist authors having to prove their numbers in order to get their next book contract, which means they have to hustle and market and fight to make sure people know their books exist (especially if they aren’t in Wal-Mart or Target). They probably aren’t earning enough to write full time.
- The self-published authors having to fight just to let people know they and their work exists. They probably aren’t earning enough to pay the cost of producing their book(s), much less earn a living.
- The career category authors (Harlequin/Silhouette) and e-published romance authors (Samhain, LooseId, Ellora’s Cave), a good portion of whom can earn a fairly decent living cranking out the books, but there’s a catch: Putting out enough books to make that kind of living has to be grueling. At least, it would be for me. YMMV. The advantage to e-publishing over career category publishing, though, is that your titles never go out of print and you have A) time to build a backlist and B) your backlist is forever available to any late-night shoppers with a credit card.
- The A- and B-list authors who have pressures of their own, I’m sure, to which I am not privy. This includes anyone who may (if they choose to) write only one book per year or fewer and earn a comfortable living doing so.
Now, I’m obviously #3, except that I’m doing okay: Not enough to quit doing my day job, but enough to bear out the investment of time and money. (See my Six-Year Plan.) However, my goal is the same as the e-published authors: Build the backlist and invest in the future.
I hate my day job. I really do. Yeah, it’s my own business but I hate the work, mostly because I’ve been doing it or something similar for years. It’s easier now that I have a couple of decent clients, but the work remains. I fight an uphill battle every day to Just Do It, but do it I must. Some days I’m more successful than others.
But the explosion of free versus paid writing that has kind of ballooned lately with Chris Anderson’s book Free, and Malcolm Gladwell’s review of that book in the New Yorker only reinforces the necessity of resigning myself to the fact that I must have a day job.
For now.
The fact of the matter is that I have better odds of doing so than unpublished authors who hold out hope that they’ll hit the lottery.
I also believe that I have better odds than those authors who have to prove every book via sales, even if all the stars are aligned against them (bad cover art, little marketing support, not being in Wal-Mart or Target); perhaps that myopic of me, but I’m hustling for 100% profit, while they’re hustling for 10% royalties and they’re locked into questionable digital contracts (amongst other things).
As for career category writing, I couldn’t do it (as stated above), especially within the restrictions of category. I know, because I tried, and missed the bullseye by half a hair every single time.
I also couldn’t do e-publishing because there isn’t one that would contract what I write, and I know that; I’d rather not waste their time or mine. Also, see above for the grind in order to make money.
Basically, what I have on my side is control and time. I’m going to write no matter what, and I’m going to write what the stories I have to tell. I’d rather put it out there for the opportunity to earn a little money than let it languish in the inboxes of agents who are also feeling the pinch.
Yeah, I think I’m in a really good position. I just can’t quit my day job.
Yet.
I’m slowly coming to terms with that.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t go past this:
>>>Regardless how much weeping and wailing and gnashing of the teeth goes on around the web about monetizing art, if you’re a writer not already pulling income that allows writing to be your day job, just deal with the fact that you probably aren’t going to.
Because I was laughing too much.
Stop it already. Do you really believe in the “I wrote ONE book and made a MEEEEEEELYUN Dollars!!!!” BS? It rarely, rarely, rarely, rarely happens that way. What you fail to see — because apparently you’ve never read *in your own alleged field* — writing — is what happens with writers. They work their asses off! Ken Bruen, to take one example, wrote for twenty years before he could quit his day job. Charles Bukowski took *ten years off* from trying to get published! And yet both *were* able to quit their days jobs.
When I see a paragraph like the above, it really means, “Oh, shit, why can’t Teh Whirled Recognize My Jeenyus And Just Let Me Wryte?” Too damned bad. There are *no* shortcuts. And all that crap you have to go through *before* you can quit the day job? It’s raw material for the years of writing ahead! Nothing is *wasted*.
Now don’t quit.
You make me curse.
You think I don’t already have seven manuscripts on my hard drive that won’t ever see the printers of Lightning Source?
What I see around MY OWN GENRE is the IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU cheerleading and the DON’T EVER QUIT and the weeping/wailing/gnashing that comes when a three-book contract is canceled after two books and the writer is left unsaleable after that.
I’m saying that I’m one up on all that because I knew the odds going on. I’m just frustrated with the Day Job Grind.
.
This has been becoming clearer and clearer to me as well of late.
I’m advocating channeling the Zen of one’s life.
Dude regularly reminds MoJo to have patience and that it will take time. Dude believes in Mojo cuz she is extremely talented.
that’s the right attitude.
now tell people what they need to do
so they will be able to quit the day job
as soon as possible, which is simply to
_cumulate_your_audience_.
put in a nutshell, you need to collect the
e-mail address of every one of your fans,
voluntarily given by them simply because
they want to be a part of your community,
and they want information on your product.
godin calls this “permission marketing”, but
you would be do much better to think of it
as “a list of my friends who support my art”.
know who all your fans are, and collect them
into a community that interacts with each other.
-bowerbird
Believe in yourself, positive thinking, yeah um hmm, keep working, buddy, it’ll happen because it happened to Danny Dooright. I swear, I can’t stand to hear it. The truth is, we don’t know. What keeps me going is the sheer joy of writing.
I’ve been in the music industry for over twenty years and a person can do all the positive thinking they want. One is either lucky, have friends and family in high places or they play dirty. I know great musicians and songwriters who, like me, just couldn’t get any momentum. Me, it was like I was born under a bad star. I tell people if they want to know what happened to me, just listen to that Dr. John song.
Outside of music, over the years I have had a number of friends who felt because they believed in God, Spirit, played nice with others, thought positive, etc., they believed they’d find success once they took a chance and started their own ventures, and I have watched all of those ventures go down and they were back at their day jobs. Times are different now and to become self-made is more difficult. I remember, a long time ago, it was hard work to be a musician or writer. There was no computer, no Internet. You had to sit there at a typewriter and pound it out, sheet by sheet and then mail it in and wait. As a musician, there was no Internet and it was way too expensive to put out your own music, so you were forced to go through the record companies, and if you didn’t make it, you were stuck playing with a covers band. Once you hit 40, you could forget it. What people don’t understand, they say so and so made it when they were 35 and 40, most of them were already in the business as songwriters or session musicians. Not that writing and making music still isn’t hard work, it is if that person knows what they’re doing.
Success is this, it’s 2 + 2 = 5. There is that missing element we can’t calculate. It has nothing to do with how talented we are. There are countless of super geniuses out there, very talented people who the world will never see the likes of because they didn’t have that missing element. Just because an artist didn’t make it doesn’t mean they aren’t any good. My close friend, who was a singer finally got her dream. She got a recording contract in Germany and was signed to a generous endorsement deal by Coca Cola. Two days before her album was due to be released, she was killed in a plane crash. What’s ironic, is the name of her CD was “Ready to Fly.”
I no longer whine, I no longer cry or gnash my teeth about WHEN it’s gonna happen. It’s happening. I think very positive, but only with no expectations. If success by my standards does find me, I will enjoy the surprise.
Bowerbird, I’ve been advised several times to have a newsletter and (to?) gather people’s email addresses and I’ve thus far balked. Permission or not, I feel intrusive sending people what might amount to advertising spam. On the other hand, I understand the concept of “permission marketing,” so I stall.
Welcome Chaeya! I liked your 2+2=5 analogy. I guess the other “1” would be luck or networking or a relative . . .
I try to look at it like this: I’m really no different than any other upstart entrepreneur with an idea who’s trying to make it work. He works long, long hours for many years in the singular pursuit of making it turn a profit until he does or . . . doesn’t.
It looks like you publish POD and I have a question—- How will anyone ever make any money with POD, considering printing and other costs? I know it’s considered the way to go now with self- and/or small publishers, but I don’t get it. Seems to me that the only one making any money on it is the POD companies, and Lightning Source since it’s associated with Ingram…ooooh, Ingram…..! The holy grail of the small publisher….is just raking in the bucks as we speak. Another million every second. But the authors? Can a POD author really make anything? I’m serious, I want to know! I’m not just being sarcastic, I really do want to know if any POD authors out there have seen any real money to speak of.
If there were no profit margin, I wouldn’t publish POD. I’d go entirely electronic. But since I DO make a profit, I offer that option to customers.
My motto is: Give it to the customer the way s/he wants it.
I’m my own publisher and I go directly through Lightning Source and yes, being in the Ingram catalog helps a lot. It lets bookstores and libraries have a convenient way to order from you. All they have to know is the ISBN, and I’ve had quite a few library sales.
So, yes, a POD author can make money; s/he just has to be patient and, being self-published, s/he has the luxury of time.
Karen, I went over to your site and saw one of your blog posts that say:
So I’m a little confused as to why you’re asking about my profit motives now when you’ve already written off POD.
I’m curious: If I designed a widget and paid a manufacturing company to build it, then went out and hawked the hell out of it, would you still think I’m a cop-out?
Also, I see that you are publishing with WiDo. Tell me, do they have an electronic book option for customers? No?
No sale from me, then, no matter how much I want the book.
I get the feeling you tend to equate ebook publishers with romance/erotica. There are, in fact, more than a few that would have given The Proviso a second look, all of which is the proverbial water under.
The current statistics regarding income for writers, I understand, puts the average at $10K/year. Consider that this includes Stephen King, Danielle Steele et al., so it’s not difficult to guess just how much the majority of the millions of the rest of us are doing. I suspect that, especially for novelists, writing will always be moonlighting.
As for the ignorance of frightened people like Karen, who know nothing about digital publishing except what they’ve seen in the media or heard on the gossip tree, they aren’t any worse than those who utilize the subsidy press or PublishAmerica firmly convinced they’ve found the Holy Grail. Ignorance abounds on all sides, and sadly a lot of people will end up with broken hearts because they put too much reliance on hype and not enough on common sense and knowledge.
Yeah, I do.
I come from genre romance, obviously, and I thought that was what I was writing, and so that’s where I went when I got into the online romance communities. This is where I saw e-books in action, being evangelized, being broken down and explained, where the money was.
I stopped querying and submitting somewhere around 100 rejections, when one kind editor told me she’d read it and two other editors had read it, and the consensus was, “We like it, but we don’t know where to put it.” After spending the early ’90s with walls of rejections, I just couldn’t keep going anymore.
I understand a lot of it was my fault in not understanding what The Proviso actually IS (still don’t), and in probably not writing a decent synopsis, and you know, the fact that it’s 300,000 words long, but you’re right, I didn’t know where to look. I was coming back into querying after a 10-year hiatus and things had changed so much it really overwhelmed me.
That said, and hindsight etc, when I look into the future and where I’m going with the world I built, I don’t regret doing it myself.
As for Karen’s comment, I find it ironic that:
1) I can’t comment on her blog without becoming a member of Vox (not going to),
2) Her publisher pays no advance and only 10% royalties, which is shameful for a “traditional” independent publisher,
3) Her publisher doesn’t have a catalog of its books on its site (which means I had to go hunting high and low for Karen’s title), so I’m not sure what marketing her publisher is doing for her, and
4) Her publisher has no e-book option.
Thus, I am not impressed with her cynicism that my business model is somehow inferior to her publisher’s.
Mojo, you wrote: “Also, I see that you are publishing with WiDo. Tell me, do they have an electronic book option for customers? No?
No sale from me, then, no matter how much I want the book.”
I’m not sure how you got that idea. Amazon and all its online affiliates are an electronic book option, right?
And Elizabeth, what makes you think I haven’t researched POD? Just because I can’t see the benefits, financially, and I’m putting it out there to ask the question– so tell me what is the financial benefit, don’t just mock me.
Not for me. I don’t own a Kindle. A Kindle e-book is specific to the Kindle device. I will not own a Kindle EVER.
I have an eBookWise. I will soon have a BlackBerry. I put my books out in the following formats: EPUB, HTML, IMP, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, and PDF.
All of those are associated with or can be read on multiple devices and downloaded freely without the limitations of Amazon.
That you don’t know that tells me that you don’t understand the e-book market.
I suspect it’s because you’re equating POD (print-on-demand), which is a TECHNOLOGY, not a business model, with self-publishing/author service companies and vanity presses. The two are entirely different.
And Karen, your book is not available on Kindle. If you thought it was, I’m sorry to be the bearer of the news.
However, mine is.
The effectiveness of e-newsletters is decreasing. I think choose to follow (pull rather than push) methods of communication such as Twitter (or to lesser extent Facebook pages) are a better place to put efforts. The exception to this (and this exception always holds true) is if your audience is holding on to a particular form of communication (e.g. with some communities a listserv is still the most effective thing).
> Bowerbird, I’ve been advised several times
> to have a newsletter and
> (to?) gather people’s email addresses
> and I’ve thus far balked.
> Permission or not, I feel intrusive sending people
> what might amount to advertising spam.
you need to rearrange your thinking.
for instance, i never said “newsletter”.
and if that’s how you’d think about it,
then that’s the wrong way to proceed.
the very word “newsletter” implies a
one-way communication, not two-way.
further, if you will look back once again,
you’ll see that i was talking explicitly about
“a community that interacts with each other”.
in other words, they amuse themselves by
talking to each other, not necessarily to you.
so think in terms of web-based forums,
and wikis, and listserves, not “newsletter”…
yes, you will talk with them too, to a degree,
but that’s not their _expectation_ coming in,
simply because they know there are more
of them than there are of you, and they know
that the bulk of your time must be spent writing,
in order for them to get what they want from you.
(of course, that means you have to stop wasting
so much time on twitter, but you knew that, eh?)
> Permission or not, I feel intrusive sending people
> what might amount to advertising spam.
it’s not “spam” because they’ve _asked_ for it…
they gave their e-mail address to you voluntarily,
precisely so that you _would_ send them the info.
you are doing them a favor, not bothering them…
you have to improve your self-confidence about it.
(you also have to make sure that stuff you send
_is_ honest communication, and not just an ad,
and you have to search your soul deeply so that
your assessment there is accurate and rigorous.
but once you understand that your fans are your
_friends_, that attitude is much easier to develop.)
-bowerbird
p.s. i don’t think karen is challenging you… she’s
honestly trying to see how to escape her present lot.
I can quantify in dollars and cents the effectiveness of my presence on Twitter.
As for your not having suggested a newsletter, I don’t know what other way I could use an email list. Perhaps you could elaborate.
*chuckle*
Yes, I feel much more comfortable there, where people can get to know me, and then figure if they like that and what’s here on the blog, they might also like my fiction and take a chance.
Also, tons of people on Twitter are e-book readers and they don’t mind dropping $6 to see if the book is worth the money.
oh, i see now: mikey no likey.
ok, no problem, just hold it…
i wouldn’t want to alienate
you from your friend there.
-bowerbird
Karen,
Attacked by bloggers? Is that how you see it?
If you go to a blog and your first post there seems hostile (even though it wasn’t taken that way at first), and said blogger goes to your blog to find you maniacal about the issue, don’t say you’ve been attacked when the blogger calls you on it.
You came here with an agenda, a chip on your shoulder, and looking for a fight.
I did not attack you.
I followed you back to your blog and saw your nearly incoherent and uninformed rantings.
I called your motives into question.
I refused to sign up for a worthless journal platform just to correct your assumptions. If you have to hide behind a gated community then no, you shouldn’t wander elsewhere.
Yes, you should have apologized. Publicly. I do. That’s the gracious thing to do, and I see bloggers everywhere doing it. Saying that you don’t want to apologize because any comment that stirs discussion is good is a cop-out because you’re afraid to come back here and eat crow or at least apologize for being hateful to begin with.
I could’ve said a lot more, honey.
I didn’t.
You should be very grateful for that.
>>>POD is a cop-out in my opinion. It allows the publisher to put out a book with very little investment or risk. If no one bothers to market, or if it’s not that good in the first place and flops, then the publisher hasn’t lost anything. But the author has lost time, and has lost the rights to their work so they can’t even take it elsewhere.
Two things are beings mixed up here.
1) *Writers* who go the POD route. Why make the same mistake as conventional print publishing and have boxes of pre-printed books in a room? POD makes sense for that. And POD will make sense when Espresso machines are all over the place.
2) Print publishers using POD as an escape clause to refuse reverting rights to the writer. Yes, this happens. And will continue to happen. Which is why untimed contracts should be outlawed. All publishing contracts should have a 5-7 year expiration date on them, from time of signing.
Pingback: Those LDS Ladies of Indie Publishing | A Motley Vision