You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke: Slate article

[polly_mer]

If they are novelists (or—God forbid!—poets), they almost always rely on teaching for steady income. What they teach, for the most part, is writing; that is, as none of the contributors has quite the nerve to state baldly, in order to support themselves, they train others to do the work that isn't providing them with a viable living.

https://slate.com/culture/2017/01/scratch-writers-money-and-the-art-of-making-a-living-reviewed.html

[Hegemony]

Slate doesn't let me behind their paywall at the moment. But I think few writers who take the job seriously are under the illusion that it is easy to make a career purely out of creative writing, without any teaching involved — particularly literary writing. I don't think masses of people are thinking they're going to live high on the hog from their writing alone. That's part of why they get MFAs — it helps them get the teaching jobs that give them a salary to support their writing.

That said, I do know four people who support themselves solely from their fiction.

[marshwiggle]

From the article:

Strayed most definitely did make money on Wild, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film with Reese Witherspoon, but she didn't get her first royalty check for it until 2013, "so it was almost a year before my life actually changed." Yes, there was that $400,000 advance—an amount to make any aspiring memoirist's eyes go dreamily unfocused—but Strayed and her husband had run up so much credit card debt that almost all of the money went to paying it off and supporting her family while she finished writing the book.

How do people run up anything remotely in the neighborhood of $400k in credit card debt????? Not mortgages, not student loans, but credit card debt???

[ergative]

Slate doesn't let me behind their paywall at the moment. But I think few writers who take the job seriously are under the illusion that it is easy to make a career purely out of creative writing, without any teaching involved — particularly literary writing. I don't think masses of people are thinking they're going to live high on the hog from their writing alone. That's part of why they get MFAs — it helps them get the teaching jobs that give them a salary to support their writing.

That said, I do know four people who support themselves solely from their fiction.

Clear your cookies from slate.com and they'll forget you ever read anything on their site before.

[fourhats]

Writers use their advances to support themselves while they are writing a book. It can take several years, and it doesn't come all at once but is spread out. They use it to pay rent or mortgages, child care, food, travel (if needed for the book) and so forth.

[apl68]

Writers use their advances to support themselves while they are writing a book. It can take several years, and it doesn't come all at once but is spread out. They use it to pay rent or mortgages, child care, food, travel (if needed for the book) and so forth.

They also frequently live in crazily expensive places, and/or travel a lot gathering material.  That said, you do kind of wonder where a $400,000 advance could go.  That's more money than I've taken home in fifteen years of working as a public librarian, providing readers with access to Strayed's and other bestselling authors' work.  Was her husband not producing any income?  Did they have ruinous medical or student loan bills? 

BTW, the book the article is reviewing sounds kind of interesting.  Hope it's a less depressing look at the business of writing than George Gissing's The New Grub Street.

Nice quote from the review:

What they teach, for the most part, is writing; that is, as none of the contributors has quite the nerve to state baldly, in order to support themselves, they train others to do the work that isn't providing them with a viable living.

[marshwiggle]

Writers use their advances to support themselves while they are writing a book. It can take several years, and it doesn't come all at once but is spread out. They use it to pay rent or mortgages, child care, food, travel (if needed for the book) and so forth.

They also frequently live in crazily expensive places, and/or travel a lot gathering material.  That said, you do kind of wonder where a $400,000 advance could go.  That's more money than I've taken home in fifteen years of working as a public librarian, providing readers with access to Strayed's and other bestselling authors' work.  Was her husband not producing any income?  Did they have ruinous medical or student loan bills? 

As I pointed out, the article indicated that "almost all of the money went to paying" "credit card debt". So that doesn't sound like student loans or anything like that. Also, you'd think the very fact that advances are doled out over years should encourage people to live within their means while they're receiving it, rather than blowing it all which they might do if they got it in a lump sum.

(On a side note, how does one rack up 100's of thousands on credit cards? Without a ridiculously high income, it seems one would have to posses a bazillion different cards.)

[polly_mer]

Slate doesn't let me behind their paywall at the moment. But I think few writers who take the job seriously are under the illusion that it is easy to make a career purely out of creative writing, without any teaching involved — particularly literary writing. I don't think masses of people are thinking they're going to live high on the hog from their writing alone. That's part of why they get MFAs — it helps them get the teaching jobs that give them a salary to support their writing.

That said, I do know four people who support themselves solely from their fiction.

Clear your cookies from slate.com and they'll forget you ever read anything on their site before.

Or browse in private mode.

I know multiple people who work as professional scientists and engineers to allow them the time and money to write.  One guy explained it as how much easier having a regular paycheck helped with getting a mortgage or other forms of credit other than credit cards.

I make enough that $400k is only a few years of salary.  There's still no way that I could get approved for that much in credit cards, although we are carrying more than that in mortgages on multiple houses.

[fourhats]

I suspect that they'd been putting all their expenses on credit cards, including health care, mortgage, and so forth, for quite a while in order to make ends meet while writing the book. And then had to use the advance to pay off that debt. I don't want to ask what the partner was doing, or how they managed their finances, or why they were living where they they, but depending on where they were living I can see this happening.

[marshwiggle]

I suspect that they'd been putting all their expenses on credit cards, including health care, mortgage, and so forth, for quite a while in order to make ends meet while writing the book. And then had to use the advance to pay off that debt. I don't want to ask what the partner was doing, or how they managed their finances, or why they were living where they they, but depending on where they were living I can see this happening.

It makes no sense whatsoever to put a mortgage on a credit card, since the interest rate on the former is vastly lower than on the latter. (Even without considering how one could get that amount of money on a credit card.)

[fourhats]

It could be rent. I was just guessing.

[writingprof]

Clear your cookies from slate.com and they'll forget you ever read anything on their site before.

Finally, some useful content on these fora!

[Parasaurolophus]

Since my job doesn't require publishing (and I have a ton anyway), there may well be a time in my future when I stop sinking free time into publishing articles nobody will ever read for zero remuneration and start trying to write bestsellers which someone might read for some complementary remuneration.

I'm not short of ideas, and it's probably a better use of my time. It's just that I've gamified academic publishing for myself and it's hard to give up on the points and high score.

[jerseyjay]

Another is Roxane Gay—author, columnist, editor, publisher, professor, public speaker—who reports that she made approximately $150,000 in 2014. That's a good income by almost any standard, but does it match your sense of Gay's prominence and productivity? (Surely there are plenty of professors who make that much, or more, from their academic work alone.)

Leaving aside the question of how famous Gay is, I actually don't know that many professors you make more than $150,000. I would actually be quite happy making $150,000--which is not to say that Gay does not deserve more.

Many don't, or at least not from writing alone. If they are novelists (or—God forbid!—poets), they almost always rely on teaching for steady income. What they teach, for the most part, is writing; that is, as none of the contributors has quite the nerve to state baldly, in order to support themselves, they train others to do the work that isn't providing them with a viable living. At times, the entire fiction-writing profession resembles a pyramid scheme swathed in a dewy mist of romantic yearning

I actually think this is true for academia as a whole. I am a historian. I train people to research and write history. If my school had a grade program, I would train PhD students to do this. But of course, almost no historian makes enough money from writing monographs to live. Instead, the real money comes from teaching. The writing is important, of course, because without it people would not get hired, tenured, or promoted. But this is true with fiction writing, too. I doubt somebody would get hired to teach in an MFA program without having published books.

Personally, my advice to either a historian or a poet is, the best set-up is to do some decent paying job 9-5 and then write on the side. In terms of pure productivity, I think I published more when I was not teaching than I do now that I am. However, I also like teaching and I find the academic ambience a nice place to work--or at least compared to a corporate office.

[Ruralguy]

I know one person who is a professional writer (in that its all he does and what he lives on, in addition to his wife's job). He's been writing consistently for about 25 years, and often multiple books per year.  He says they all still sell, with some of his best in the thousands per year for decades, but some only selling hundreds for a few years and then dying off. Its mostly pop culture non-fiction, but he also writes some fiction. As you can probably guess, in a good year, he probably doesn't make more than 10K. But, he does consult on documentaries, and lectures and such, and some of that gest 5-10K a pop. So, with everything together, he can scrape up 50K+ from writing and lecturing on stuff related to his writing in a decent year. I imagine there are "bad years" that can bring in less. He's not an academic, so probably couldn't get that kind of job, and any case, would severely effect his productivity. I think he'd rather just write more in the lean years, and just hope things pick up, which at least as far as I know, they eventually have.

So, if your hope is to make lots on 1 or 2 academic books, forget it. Won't happen.
If you aim for more popular consumption the main problem is that your productivity will be limited from an academic job, and the books may not "count" for your promotions. If you hit it big, you might be able to make some significant additional income, perhaps even "forever", but most likely you'll hit it small and have some pizza money for a decade.  So, if you are more in the mean, you'll have to come out with more books to make anything from books.

In another category, there are a handful of physicists who have been able to doube their income or more, due to successful textbooks. I have the feeling though that we've hit the peak with textbooks.