A Writer's Tale

Unless you’ve got income from another source, you’ll run into extremely bad times if you try prematurely to make a living from your writing alone.

I don’t know much about inherited money. If you’ve got so much that you don’t need a job, you can write full time without any problems. Whether or not you’d be driven by a hunger to succeed might be a different matter.

If your spouse has a good job and is willing to support you and the family while you try to be a writer, that’s great. And it may be a real solution if you’re a woman and a housekeeper.

In spite of women’s liberation,” however, the man is still almost always expected (lip-service to the contrary) to be the bread winner of a family.

No matter how “liberated” your wife might be, you’d better get ready for some big-time resentment if you stay home to write fiction but don’t quickly produce some decent money.

Before you know it, your wife will almost certainly start to consider you a loser, a loafer, a freeloader. You’ll feel enormous pressure to succeed. And you don’t need that.

What you need is a job of your own.

As I realized from hard experiences, a job of your own gives you great freedom.

Without it, you’re under horrible financial stress. Even if your books are selling okay, you have to wait and wait and wait for payments to arrive. You watch your bank account dwindle away. You watch your credit card balances grow till you hit your limits. You watch bills come in… bills you can’t pay. And you watch for the mailman, praying that today, at last, he’ll bring you the check you’ve been expecting and expecting…

Maybe an on-publication payment that’s three months overdue. Maybe the check’ll arrive in time for you to pay your mortgage or your rent or your car insurance or your income tax. (It almost never does.)

With a job that pays the way, all those troubles vanish.

Don’t give it up until you’re absolutely sure you can get along just fine without it.

A good job is a lifeboat. Though the temptation might be overwhelming, don’t jump off it and start swimming at the first sign of an island. The island is probably a lot farther away than it looks.

While it is very difficult to make a living as a fiction writer, income derived from writing can be a great source of additional income. It’s like moonlighting as your own boss.

You work your own hours. Whatever you’re able to make, no matter how little, is extra income, like a bonus. And you always have a chance of hitting the jackpot.

You can’t exactly live on a $5,000 advance, but you can take a darn good vacation. Or re-roof your house. Or start saving for a rainy day or for the day you decide to go full-time as a writer. Five thousand bucks is pretty nice when it’s frosting on the cake instead of your annual income.

When is it safe to quit?

It’ll never be entirely safe. (But then, any job can go down the tubes for one reason or another.)

There may come a day, however, when it no longer makes financial sense for you to hold down a nonwriting “real job.”

Though I painted a dismal picture in the earlier portions of this piece, excellent money can be made by writing fiction.

Writers of bestselling novels earn many millions of dollars every year.

But you don’t need to write bestsellers to earn a good income. Even if your novels are being bought for $10,000 to $50,000 each, you can make a significant income.

How?

There are many ways to earn money as a fiction writer, but they only work if you produce.

You have to write and sell novel after novel after novel. (And perhaps some short stories along the way.) By producing a lot of finished pieces, you can create an overlapping of payments.

The secret is to write a lot of books.

This is how it works.

This is how you can be a successful, semiwealthy author without ever having a bestseller…

Ready?

Here is an example (but there are countless possible variations).

During the course of a year, you might receive the on-publication payment for a hardbound edition of a novel that you wrote last year, on-publication money for the paperback edition of a novel you wrote two years ago, on-sign money for a new contract for books you haven’t written yet, on-acceptance money for a novel you finished a month or two ago, film option money for a novel that was published three years ago, royalty checks for several of your older books that have sold beyond their advances, payments for a short story or two that you knocked out during the year, money for three or four of your old novels that your agent has sold to a foreign publisher.

And so on.

You may be selling your novels, one per year, to a U.S. publisher for about $20,000 each.

But due to what I’ll call the Pile-On Effect or (P.O.E.), you might very well earn an actual income of $50,000 -$100,000 (or more) over the course of a single year.

The Pile-On Effect is how a normal, non-bestselling writer can earn a good income. The more you write, the better it works.