Writing for a Living
Many aspiring writers hope to quit their day jobs so they can pursue writing for a living, but is this a realistic goal? Here's an overview of what to expect if you want to pay the bills with your writing.
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Transcription for Writing for a Living
Hi, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company and today's video is all about writing for a living.
I'm an editor. I was within the traditional publishing world for years and then when I left New York City, I decided to become a freelance editor because I didn't want to be an agent if I couldn't be in New York, you know, having meetings, fabulous lunch dates with editors, and all of that. So I became a freelance editor and that's what I've been doing since 2013. And I've recently instituted a questionnaire and the questionnaire goes out to you. If you fill up my contact form, you receive this questionnaire. It helps me get to know my potential clients better and better be able to sort of recognize their needs and serve them in a way that addresses their needs. And I've loved it. People have loved it, too. People have like really, really responded to the questionnaire. It's very rare that somebody doesn't fill it out. And the questions that I included there was, you know, "If you were allowed to dream...” because a lot of the time our self-doubt gets in our way and we sort of pessimistically regard our chances in the industry “...if we allowed ourselves to dream, what would success look like for you in your career, with this project?" That sort of thing. And a lot of the answers that I see, I would say, probably... This is completely unscientific. I haven't tallied or anything. But I would say probably 80% of people want to make a living writing.
Now, the percentage of people who actually make a living writing is, I would guess, a little bit less than that. Of course, there are writing jobs in the industry. They're very difficult to get. A lot more of them exist in film and television where you have writers' rooms and you have sort of an ongoing season of television that has writers. You know, one of my friends out in L.A. used to be a writer for The Daily Show and so that is an ongoing writing need that is running for a long time. And that's a writing job, but it's very, very specific. TV writing, especially comedy writing, very, very specific voices are necessary there, very, very specific skill sets. You can also get a regular writing gig as a journalist, whether freelance or engaged at a specific publication or an editorial. A lot of the time, editorial does fill the need of the editorial calendar and steps into a writing world sometimes. But, again, that's a certain type of writing, whether it's magazine writing, whether it's newspaper writing or web writing for an online news source. You know, that's a very specific voice. There's not a lot of fiction writing that goes with those opportunities.
And so, then, a lot of people who want to be fiction writers, who want to make a living writing, it's like well, you're kind of on your own. You can submit to literary magazines. You can sort of get stories published individually. You can write books and get them published. But the money it pays doesn't always follow because a literary magazine, unless it's the New Yorker or the Paris Review, the paycheck is not gonna be necessarily anything that can sustain you or is a regular thing. Same with a book advance. A book takes many years to write. And in order to sell your first book, especially a fiction book, some nonfiction is sold on proposal and so, again, if your brain works in the nonfiction direction, that could be a way to sort of speed up the process of making a living writing. But with fiction, especially for your first time out, you're gonna need to write the entire manuscript, which can often take years, sometimes even decades, in order to achieve at the level that is going to be publishable. And so, it's a big-time investment and a lot of writers, even when they are multi-published, still work day jobs in order to support themselves and keep up with their regular obligations, like their mortgage, their rent, while they're writing. And it's usually not until you have a few books, few advances, some of the books are earning royalties, you can count on royalty payments twice a year, that you start to sort of maybe feel like you have a leg to stand on in terms of financial health.
Now, a lot of writers take the position that "I'll write anything. Just let me at it." And so, they do a little bit of both. They do some magazine writing because it's a skill that they can dust off and keep going. And they'll pitch a few pieces. Maybe they'll get hired for a couple of them. They'll develop relationships at magazines and maybe, keep getting commissions to do more pieces for those magazines. That can become a regular source of income, and work, it's paid by the word. It's usually pretty well paid but if you only do like a 600-word piece here and there, it can be tough to sort of build up that momentum. I have a friend, also out in L.A., who's a magazine freelancer and she's been at it for about seven years, and only now is seeing sort of this regular pattern of commissions, jobs, gigs that are pitched to her, rather than her pitching gigs out to magazine editors. But there are blogs, there are magazines, there are all sorts of platforms out there who need content constantly and some of them are willing to pay for it. And so, there is a lot of opportunity to sort of furnish content as long as you can write really well about any number of topics.
Again, going back to fiction, you're sort of coming up with ideas, you're executing a short story or a novel, and then it sort of goes out to agents, it goes out to publishers, and it sorts of leaves your hands in terms of "Will it sell? Will it get an advance? Will my next book sell? Will my next book get an advance? Will this book sell enough to earn out its advance and start paying royalties?" I see a lot of modern writers take very much a mishmash approach to how they get their income rolling. Whether they keep a full-time job or a part-time job, whether they supplement their income with magazine and blog contributions, whether they plan or try to write a book a year, if they're flexible about categories, maybe it's faster for them to write a picture book or a children's book, some other kind of shorter book, a novella, a short story for an anthology, an essay for a magazine. They sort of just keep themselves going in between their big book projects, and any books that they sell usually tend to have advances that are higher, not a lot when you're getting started. I mean, sometimes, a run-of-the-mill novel that doesn't go to auction is about $15,000, $20,000. And so, that's not necessarily going to be a life-changing amount of money, especially when you consider that you will be paid in increment contractually: upon signing of your publishing agreement, you will be paid some upon manuscript delivery, a publisher will ask you to make some revisions, you will be paid on hardcover publication, you may be paid on softcover publication. It's not just going to be a big Publishers Clearing House check one time that shows up at your doorstep. The money will be meted out with a little bit more irregularity and so, there's this idea of security. And I would be lying if I said that publishing was a very secure, stable way to make a living. A lot of the times, the writers who do make it, they either are very comfortable with freelancing over here, writing a book in the meantime, doing this, doing that, or they also have a job that provides their security, at least while they're getting up and running.
When I was an agent at Andrea Brown, Andrea would tell us if you can agent for five years, five or six years, and really sort of get your sales underneath you, get your contacts underneath you, build your lists and start selling regularly, you may start to see the kind of security that a lot of people look for, which is regular payments coming in from publishers. You take your commission. It's a commission-based sales job basically. And so, you take your commission. And the commissions become regular enough where you can pretty much kind of count on what you may get from month to month. And I really do see publishing and making a career as a writer in a similar vein, in which you have to do it for quite a while, you have to persevere for quite a while, you have to have some kind of other financial support for quite a while before you're able to make that transition. And to be honest, a lot of writers, they don't make the transition to writing full-time or making a living writing because people have varying needs and sort of varying tolerances of insecurity.
Now, publishing is not a recession-proof industry. If there's just even a stiff breeze, with the word recession in it, publishing will contract. They will stop giving out...they will kind of tighten their belts on advances. You know, they are very, very vulnerable to any fluctuations in the marketplace. And so, if you're anything like me, I'm completely projecting here, but I want a steady living. And if I can't sort of roll with the punches of an industry that is not a thriving industry, that has very high overhead and very razor-thin profit margins, kind of like restaurants. I mean, we had the COVID lockdown that closed a lot of restaurants for good because restaurants really have a 2% or 3% profit margin if they're doing well. And any kind of upheaval in the marketplace was enough to shut down a lot of small businesses, a lot of restaurants, and publishing also. Publishing is pretty sprawling and they sell books through third parties, through booksellers. Their margins are razor-thin. Amazon is a huge bookseller but the royalties that they pay are very, very small because they have mass-market discounts and all of this other stuff that it goes into a very complicated business model on publishing side of things, and that does get passed down to the writer.
And so, a lot of writers that I've talked to, they keep a part-time job. For example, something that dovetails with their work, whether they're a part-time bookseller, or part-time librarian, or full-time librarian, even a teacher. Something that allows them to write but also gives them the security and the peace of mind financially, where they are not necessarily living and dying by their next book. Because sometimes, that can put pressure on the creative process and sort of really makes the next booking, the next job, this kind of scramble which is, I would imagine, not very good for your mental health at the end of the day. So there are people who sell book after book. They sell a book a year. They get a great advance for their books. Their books sell at a rapid clip. They do a lot of marketing support for their books, both the writer and the publisher. It can be a really, really nice living but I think the reality is that a lot more writers end up cobbling together their living as an author with maybe more traditional work, part-time or full-time, as well as freelance work, as well as the work of their heart, which is maybe their one novel a year or one novel every few years.
So, it's definitely possible to make an income writing. It's possible to make your only income as a writer but I think some flexibility and some open-mindedness is required. And definitely some patience before you can say like, "I am a full-time writer. This is what I do." Some people don't achieve that. Some people do and it's all about kind of being informed, keeping your expectations in check, keeping your mind open, and forging on because that's the only thing that we can do if we're driven to write, if we're driven to participate in this industry, then we have to have that passion because it will carry us through a lot of the ups and downs.
My name is Mary Kole for Good Story Company. Here's to a good story.
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