The Day Job: Quitting It

Keep telling yourself, it’s not about the money.

When I first got it into my head that I wanted to be a writer, I had a pretty specific (if contradictory) vision of what that would be like. On one hand, the life looked incredibly romantic. You know, that sensitive Byronic picture of the writer sitting on the end of the dock at sunset, striking an inspirational image of the artist as one with the universe. It was the kind of pose that I imagined would spark love into the hearts of women who would see me enraptured with the muse, and they would do their best to get close to my pure and privileged heart.

On the other hand, I saw a sort of Hemingwayesque life of Bohemian excess, partying, hunting, and maybe leading 3^rd world rebellions, all in the evening, so that I could write about them in the morning. My manuscripts would arrive at the publishing houses slathered with foreign stamps and the miasma of exotic adventure. This vision fit my Indiana Jones fantasy.

The reality is that I’m a high school English teacher with way more debt than I can pay off in this lifetime and an only partly-funded Roth IRA. What happened?

It was the money, of course. I wrote short stories.

The depressing adage of “don’t quit your day job” has an unfortunate tie to reality for most writers. A short story author, of course, doesn’t have much chance to make a living. I blogged about this lately, where I said, imagine an outstanding year for a short story writer: she sells a story each to Analog, Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Jim Baen’s Universe, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (this would be both the culmination of the best dream possible and an entire career for some writers I talk to). For argument’s sake, let’s say the average sale was $400 for a total of $2,400 for those six sales. (Although I’ve sold regularly to several of those magazines, any instruction that starts with “sell a story” sounds a little bit like the recipe for grizzly bear soup: “First, kill a grizzly bear”). Sprinkle in another six small press sales at $100 each for $600 more. One of the stories is picked up for a year’s best reprint for another $100. The short story collection, out a year ago, earned $500 in royalties this year and might earn a tenth of that next year.

Total fiction income for the year: $3,600. Right away you should notice that a short story writer, isn’t doing as well as a novelist. If a novelist sells a book for $10,000, and can do one a year, the money is better (remember, just like saying “sell a story,” the phrase, “sell a novel” means “first, kill a grizzly bear”).

Novel income seems incredibly flaky to me, by the way. A first time novelist might get a smaller advance at a major publisher, say $6,000. But novel advances have huge discrepancies. A friend of mine just signed a multiple book contract for way more than $10,000 a book, and another started small, but her first book sales were good enough that the next contracts came in bigger. Plus, she’s earning royalties.

Just like short stories, though, a novelist has to continue to produce novels to continue to produce income. An out of print book generates no income. I know at least three novelists who are doing kick-butt successes in the novel world right now, but none of them feel they have the income to depend on the books for their living.

So, that gets us to other incomes. If a writer is really interested in making money from the writing (along with making art), then she ought to look at other opportunities. There is money out there beyond selling the work. Here are four that immediately suggest themselves: teaching, speaking, writing non-fiction, and selling film rights.

Those four possibilities, however, generally are built on establishing a name through writing first, although I have seen some folks set themselves up (somehow) as writing experts and making money as writers even though their publishing resumes are embarrassingly thin. Maybe they’re blessed with a touch of blarney (and what writer isn’t?), or they talk a better game than they play.

I had a chance to speak at the Black Hills Writing Conference a couple of years ago about what it would take for a writer to quit the day job. I interviewed a lot of working writers, and I was a little surprised at the most consistently offered piece of advice, which was, “Have good credit cards.” What those writers pointed out was that writing income is undependable. You might have an accurate idea of what is coming in for the year, but you can’t say for sure when it’s coming in month by month. Publishers don’t always send checks in a timely manner.

A couple of the writers I talked to, though, were horrified by that advice. They said the key is to sock away enough money during writing’s rich times to make it through writing’s poor times. They argued that credit cards are the writer’s enemy. Your mileage may vary.

The next most common advice the writers gave included, “Marry well,” “Win a lottery,” or “Inherit a fortune.” The “marry well” suggestion wasn’t just so the spouse would bring in an income big enough for two, but also to have a robust health plan that encompassed the writer.

Of course, you say, what about J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, or any of a dozen or so other big names? They made it; why can’t I? Well, there is no answer for that. Over the top success happens to some. If your books sell with their kind of numbers, then the money will flow like a river, and you and your accountant will smile all the way to the bank. In fact, if you make that kind of money, remember how much you liked my articles in The Fix and pick up the tab when we go out to dinner.

However, if you’re not among those fortunate few, and you don’t hit it big with best-selling titles, you may still be able to quit your day job. You’ll have to do what most of the working writers in the world do. It’s a fairly simple list:

• Work hard at being a competent writer
• Make sure you build a good reputation in the industry
• Be dependable
• Make deadlines
• Take all writing jobs that pay (and some that don’t if they help you in other ways) unless they offend your sensibilities
• Be patient enough to recognize your income will probably build slowly
• Be a good business person
• Remember you are your own best promoter
• Don’t quit the day job until you can guarantee (as best as possible) an income that will match your needs
• Have a plan B

For me, unless luck strikes my persistent efforts, I will probably not quit my day job for writing. After all, as I remind myself, it’s not about the money. It’s about the work.

Still, out there somewhere is a lonely dock at sunset, waiting for me to strike my pose. And out there too is a third world country that needs me to lead their rebellion. I can have it all, in my dreams, and so can you. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing.