Can you write for love AND money?

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Many artists think you can’t. And not simply because they envy those who are selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

The reason they think this is for the simple fact that the creative process is fueled by following the zing. It’s ruled by passion. You have to care about AND believe in what you’re writing. You have to because if you think it’s boring or unbelivable, then it’s likely everyone else will as well. 

For example, let’s say you are deeply bored by vampires, but see that vampire love stories are making piles of cash and decide to write about one with smoldering eyes and a bad habit of chewing tobacco even though it leads to dental problems with the fangs (hey, why would her man-toy care?), then you’re substituting passion (that which springs up from within) for graphs and plots about marektability (stuff that’s imposed from without).

And so many folks think that there’s a continuum. On one end is writing for passion. On the other is writing for money. And the two don’t cross. But this is a false dichotomy. The truth is that money and passion are independent factors.

Lon Prater, a writer friend, recently expressed it this way.

Not a dichotomy, but rather an X and Y axis, the way I see it.

There’s:

low love, low money (SEO writing?)

low love, high money (For me, this would be tech writing, or media tie-in to a universe I didn’t care about)

high love, low money (unfortunately too much of my writing!)

high love, high money. (Loftiest of goals) 🙂

You can find datapoints for every quadrant, and of course “love” is highly subjective and individualized, as are what counts as low and high for each writer.

If we put labels to the quadrants, we get something like this, along with common emotions they tend to evoke in other writers. (Although I will say that envy seems to want to run amok in the author quadrant as well.) 

writer-love-and-money-quadrants2

Can authors make a living?

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A lot of folks hear I’m going to be published and automatically classify me with J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, or Dan Brown. Heck, I at least ought to be categorized with Joe Schmo who was featured on Oprah.

And why shouldn’t they think that? Those are the authors they see. That’s what it means to them to be published.

For those of us who have actually gotten a peek behind the curtain, we realize it just ain’t so. Those are best-selling authors. See my post on best sellers to understand the quantities that have to move to make a best seller. Those are huge numbers, but very few authors sell that many books.

So what do you need to sell to make a living?  Let’s do some math.

Let’s say you want to make $50,000, the median household income in the US at this time. I know, I know, that’s nothing in some places, but if you’re a writer you don’t have to live in San Francisco. So you want to take home $50k after taxes. That means you’ll probably need to make $62,000 before taxes. That’s our goal.  

So here are some numbers with conservative royalties.

What authors make on a paperback
8% royalty (authors usually make 8 – 12 % on paperbacks)
15% agent fee
6.8% net royalty rate

To net $50k with only PAPERBACK sales would you need:
$911,765 in sales required in the year
$7.99 per book
114,113 books sold

What authors make on a hardback
10% royalty (it’s common to make 10-15%)
15% agent fee
8.5% net royalty rate

To net $50k with only HARDBACK sales would you need:
$729,412 in sales in the year
$25.00 per book
29,176 books sold

If you have previous books that are still selling, they all count. Make foreign sales, they count. Can produce two books per year, maybe one in a different genre, they count. Of course, this doesn’t factor in discounts and the corresponding reduced royalty rates. Nor does it factor in costs of being in business for yourself, including taxes, insurance, etc. But this is enough to get a rough idea of numbers.

100,000 paperbacks is a BIG number. However, you usually mix and match.

Let’s say you sell 5,000 hardbacks. 5,000 x $25.00 = $125,000. $125,000 x .085 net royalty = $10,625. $62,000 – $10,625 = $51,375 to be made by the paperbacks when they come out the next year. At a 6.8% net royalty rate you have to make $755,515 or sell about 94,558 paperback copies.

Here it is in an easy to read list. Given the hardback sales shown below, you’d have to make up the rest of the $62,000 with the paperback sales on the right.

5,000 HB: 94,558 PB
10,000 HB: 75,002 PB
15,000 HB: 55,446 PB
20,000 HB: 35,890 PB

I know those seem like small numbers compared to the Publisher’s Weekly 2007 numbers I link to above. But most authors don’t sell that many books. Most authors are happy to sell 5,000 hardbacks.

But it’s not all bad news. I looked at a few authors on the PW list comparing hardback and paperback numbers. It seems any given author will sell twice the number of paperbacks that they do hardbacks.  So perhaps selling somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 hardbacks is the magic number.

20,000 hardbacks is a lot. But it seems doable for a writer who has been publishing for a few years. It’s not the 700,000 of  a James Patterson. But it just might be enough to make, hold your breath, what the average household in America makes in a year.

“The Only Law of Literature” by James Maxey

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james-maxey

You already know how I feel about writerly rules. So when I read James Maxey’s “The Only Law of Literature,” I had to share it.

I want to quote the whole thing here. But I’ll resist and quote only the conclusion.

[In response to critiquing stories that don’t work for you] All the literary analysis of writing techniques, of style, of world building, of creating characters–it all has it’s place, but it’s almost completely useless as a guide to writing a good book. You are never going to be able to think or study or analyze your way into writing a book that people love.

There is only one law of good literature: Write what you’d love to read.

Not what you have read and loved. What you love, but haven’t yet read.

To quote myself from the Impish Idea thread:

Every thing you write should be a love story. Not a romance. But a story written because you loved it.

Follow your passion. Don’t worry about pleasing everyone. Fill your book with the stuff that makes your heart race and leave out the stuff that bores you. If you don’t make it into print, at least you’ll have a book you can look at with pride as being truly your own.

Once you’ve learned this secret, everything else falls into place.

Go read the whole post.

It’s important to learn craft. You cannot get away from it. But craft is only useful as a tool to tell this cool, wonderful, poignant, amazing thing we’ve invented and discovered.

Some lessons from Tom Clancy’s first novel

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tom-clancy-the-hunt-for-red-octoberTom Clancy is one of the biggest authors of our time. How did he break in? It’s an interesting story that Deborah Grosvenor, the editor who acquired The Hunt for Red October (Clancy’s first book), tells here.

And this early interview provides more insights.

So what conclusions can you draw from this? Here’s what I picked up.

1. Writing a good book is one thing. That book finding success is quite another.

2. Endorsements from the right people make a huge difference. More here in my blog Is Product Popularity Random?

3. Know what you write. And if you don’t know it, do the research. And then invent what you have to.

4. It’s not always a bad thing to start with a small press, especially if they’re going to put as much $$ into marketing and PR as this one did.

5. To finish your novel, you’re going to have to set aside time and get it done.

6. Finally, follow the zing. Clancy loved this stuff. Notice how his book was fed by the stories he heard and read.